The Aesthetics of Nostalgia

[00:00:20]You can sense that something feels off in existing today.

[00:00:27]You might not be able to grasp it. Why everything feels off, but you feel it right during times of uncertainty. That's what we're craving for.

[00:00:40]Safety, comfort, warmth to ache, a place you know you loved.

[00:00:49]Home that can never be reached again.

[00:00:57]An instantly relatable and potent emotion, the perfect weapon.

[00:01:10]You see it everywhere. Fashion, film, music, design, tech, content, even politics. The aesthetics of nostalgia are more present than ever. No generation is apparently as nostalgic as Gen Z. That nostalgia pendalum or the 30-year nostalgia cycle is a phenomenon where trends tend to reemerge roughly every three decades later. So it makes sense to believe that Gen Z or millennials are currently the most nostalgic generations. But we also seem to be nostalgic for the 2010s, especially 2016.

[00:01:39]Is the gap shrinking? And if so, why?

[00:01:43]Well, yes and no. The internet made it possible to document every single second from the past and present. We have never been more autobiographical.

[00:01:53]Therefore, every time period is forever accessible whenever we want. Whether it's the '9s, ' 50s, ' 80s, or 2000s.

[00:02:01]Our sense of time passing have become shorter and shorter, even standing still. No matter where we look, everyone seemingly yearns for a time >> that is gone.

[00:02:24]Instead of being reflective of the past, we tend to want to restore it. Refusing to let go, restoring a moment, a memory, a feeling, a loved one, or a culture.

[00:02:46]a nation, a former glory.

[00:02:50]This endless reproducing of the past, where every time period exists at the same time on the same screen, isn't only a self-eing cycle in the culture industry, but also personally prevents us from reflecting on a past that might have never even happened.

[00:03:07]We are stuck in a neverending adolescence, refusing to grow up.

[00:03:13]We've become stationary and time passes through us.

[00:03:21]But can you really blame us when we have hard evidence that the world has never been more unstable since the Cold War?

[00:03:33]>> The cost of living is at an all-time high. So is the rise of fascism. The world let a live stream genocide happen.

[00:03:41]And apparently everyone forgot about the imminent climate catastrophe.

[00:03:46]In my lifetime, the future has never been more fragile and unstable. So it's logical that our brains seek safety in a time and place we associate with home.

[00:04:08]Nostalgia isn't just a coping mechanism.

[00:04:11]It is a narrative constructed in your brain that combines deep, deep melancholy with deep, deep happiness and peace.

[00:04:21]It is your brain signaling you that you're processing, growing, forgiving, moving on. Nostalgia is predominantly seen as healthy by psychologists, like a bittersweet hug from the past.

[00:04:33]>> Hi guys, it's Gar here. like I'm floating in an ocean full of memories.

[00:04:40]Yet, you need to constantly remind yourself that this romanticized version of the past is a construct of your brain protecting you from the pain you might have endured during that time.

[00:04:54]In late 2021, during the end of CO, I had one awful experience after another.

[00:05:00]My eating disorder got way worse. Lost my parent dream job. Lost my relationship for 6 years. I was really depressed.

[00:05:09]But when looking back now, I don't feel this darkness at all anymore.

[00:05:15]Instead of strange gratefulness, peace.

[00:05:22]And here is a double-edged sword.

[00:05:26]If we're not able to reflect on a past, we start to sink and drown in it. An endless yearning for a memory that never happened. And a neverending desperation of trying to revive what's already been lost forever.

[00:05:44]Fixating on a special point in time when you wished you had said or done something different.

[00:05:50]Repeating that moment over and over and over again.

[00:05:56]That warm nostalgia suddenly becomes cold.

[00:06:06]Coming home is now terribly lonely.

[00:06:11]Trapped in a maze filled with regret, guilt, shame, or even hate.

[00:06:19]A vulnerability ready to be exploited. Any type of industry knows that the consumer attaches deep emotional memories to a certain piece of media, a product, or a lifestyle.

[00:06:37]The perfume you wear during your first kiss.

[00:06:41]The song you heard over and over again during your vacation with your family 20 years ago.

[00:06:47]Fashion that reminds you of an easier, better, more analog period of the past.

[00:06:53]or a movie of your childhood that unlocked something deep inside you.

[00:07:00]Whatever it may be, they aren't selling the product, but the warmth, safety, and memory you associate with it. This gets particularly obvious when looking at the culture industry.

[00:07:16]The culture industry is generating old content that's endlessly accessible and cheap to produce. This reproduction of existing IPs or rich story formulas isn't mostly just boring cashg grabbing slop, but also brings the danger of occupying a brain with sedative ideas like a parasitic tumor eating your brain alive, replacing real ideas.

[00:07:40]You know what's fascinating? No one really asked for any of this. We didn't actively yearn for another Star Wars movie, yet we still love to consume it.

[00:07:52]Well, looks like the tide is shifting.

[00:07:54]Fortunately, nostalgia sells, even if it's a fake one, because it still scratches that itchy yearning of our souls for home. In the market's logic, it of course makes sense to keep producing this fake nostalgia. The insidious consequences is that our real attached nostalgia for something begins to fade away when consuming this revived hollow corpse. How can we be truly nostalgic for Star Wars if a new Star Wars product comes out every year?

[00:08:23]If we keep going in this direction, real nostalgia, that real melancholic, deep, happy, complex, messy feeling of your past begins to fade, like a reverse Polaroid, and is being replaced by a corporate gray, hollow, and flat illusion of nostalgia, a disfigured memory of your past.

[00:08:46]that should have stayed in a grave for us to mourn.

[00:08:51]Time stuck forever in the present.

[00:08:56]No one produces that fake nostalgia better than online culture, though. If a piece of content triggers a powerful emotional response, then it produces more engagement. It really doesn't matter what type of content it is.

[00:09:08]compilations, lifestyle content, essays, commentary, movie reviews, vlogs, tech, musicians, even YouTube filmmakers love it.

[00:09:16]Everything is a remix of what already exists.

[00:09:21]All creators I've mentioned are fortunately using the nostalgic aesthetic to rethink and repurpose it for something innovative. And that's how I think we should utilize nostalgia in creative work, a reflective perspective on a path to innovate something new and exciting. But that's of course not the majority how people are using it. Any cheap attempt to trigger that unavoidable emotion in us works. The cheaper and faster can be produced, the better.

[00:09:50]In its logic, AI or any large language model is the continuation of the process, reusing and reproducing material that already exists over and over again until the substance of the original piece is gone. It is the ultimate fake nostalgia machine filling us up with familiar slop that feels hollow yet still satisfies our appetite for our desperate yearning of home enough.

[00:10:19]So we completely ignore the darkest implication of this industrial produced fake nostalgia.

[00:10:27]While real nostalgia is a retelling of your personal past, fake nostalgia is a retelling of the past. History is being reshaped.

[00:10:40]And all of this works because even the aesthetics of nostalgia alone is enough to emotionally manipulate your audience.

[00:10:50]A weakness to which we're all exposed to.

[00:10:55]the perfect tool of propaganda.

[00:11:02]In fascist Italy, it was the Roman Empire. Init mythical German past. Today's Russia uses Soviet nostalgia to justify its war crimes and invasion of Ukraine. In Israel, it is the nostalgic vision of a greater Israel, a mythologized biblical past to justify eradicating Palestinians.

[00:11:23]in Britain, United Kingdoms, or even Brexit, in the US, to make America great again. Nostalgia is a lazy yet effective way of creating national mythical narratives, a return to glory a nation supposedly had, reviving that very glory, a lost culture, a lost nation.

[00:11:45]You suddenly begin to mix your own identity with the identity of a nation, creating one, a symbiosis of state and its people.

[00:11:59]When subjected to nostalgia propaganda, like the classic nuclear family 1950s cliche, you start to identify with that fake past as if it was actually you who lived through the 50s. Almost like the state planted a fake memory you're nostalgic of.

[00:12:19]Once that symbiosis of state and individual happen, we see the nostalgic memories of a nation as a personal nostalgic memory of yourself.

[00:12:29]Suddenly, without even realizing it, we begin to serve the interests of the state, ignoring our own, even sacrificing them. The state wants to restore the past, our home, as much as I do. So why wouldn't I want to serve my nation?

[00:12:51]We're not completely exposed to weaponized nostalgia. Instead of communicating concrete policies of how we could return to the supposed past utopia, we're being told to trust their shallow aestheticized vibes based politics.

[00:13:05]The emotional response to that fake planted nostalgia is so potent that the aesthetics alone is often times enough for us to believe in it.

[00:13:16]The darker real historic facts of a romanticized time period being either completely ignored or even denied.

[00:13:24]Nostra propaganda is the perfect tool of distraction. It mythologizes a past in which class apparently never existed. a 1950s utopia that blinds out the material or oppressive realities of workers, African-Americans, queer people, or women. The nation's past is seen as a homogenized family living in solidarity until someone poisoned the nation, the culture. We knew who we were. We had one identity.

[00:14:00]Osucha propaganda produces culture war narratives and identity politics. A narrative that shifts the cause of real issues like affordability, disenfranchisement, loss of control, loneliness, stress to a cultural out group like immigrants, the poor, trans people, and so on instead of class. The solution, according to the reactionary nostalgia narrative, is to restore that homogenized national identity or culture that frankly never existed. Not to improve the material conditions.

[00:14:36]We can't fall into the trap of laughing at people calling them backwardthinking low IQ rednecks, but rather acknowledge their dissatisfaction of the system and lack of fulfilled needs because it is completely insane, naive, and dangerous to think that you are immune to propaganda.

[00:14:56]Nostalgia is an expression of loss.

[00:14:59]Helping people to understand where that feeling of loss comes from is the first possible step in dradicalization.

[00:15:06]Explaining men why they are lonely, why they feel like they're oppressed, why you can't afford a decent standard of living, why politicians won't do [ __ ] for you, why the world is corrupt. If that gap of uncertainty remains empty, it will easily be filled with an antagonistic us versus them identity, blaming an out group for the loss.

[00:15:28]You're experiencing a return to tribalism and barbarism.

[00:15:36]But that rise of longing has to come from somewhere. Disenfranchisement, uncertainty, fear, and instability is what makes exploiting our homesickness even possible.

[00:15:50]No matter where you stand politically, I think we all agree that we seem to live in a time where everything feels extremely fast-paced, alienated, empty, or destabilized. This leads to increasing loneliness, stress, torn communities, friendships, constantly changing jobs or places to live. Life is a constant hustle, a game of survival.

[00:16:12]A system in which most of us can't freely choose where to work, where to live, how you choose your time, when to go to retirement, which school you want your children to go to, what Medicare you want. A system where money determines every single aspect of your life.

[00:16:30]So, of course, we seek to escape for a place where we feel safe, free from all struggles, a place that we don't have to change.

[00:16:42]our home.

[00:16:46]That insatiable longing is a product of capitalism. And that's what's so demented. Capitalism produces nostalgia while selling us a solution. The culture industry offers us retro media reboots, remakes, vinyls, and so on. Online algorithms keep us engaged with nostalgia bait content or features like memories on Facebook or story highlights on Instagram. Companies either simply resell old products for ridiculous prices, sells you a nostalgic aestheticized identity you can consume, or politicians weaponizing nostalgia to create mythologized national identities and to distract you from class consciousness.

[00:17:25]Produced nostalgia preserves the status quo.

[00:17:31]Nostalgia is normally used to heal your wounds.

[00:17:37]Produced nostalgia under capitalism not only deepens the wound but also sends you magic heating snake oil afterwards.

[00:17:46]Keeping us thirsty by filling us up with dry nostalgia shaped dust.

[00:17:58]Homesickness that corrods your soul.

[00:18:11]>> Isn't this ironic? Something that's supposed to be healing, making us sick.

[00:18:17]This exploitation of nostalgia doesn't only trap us in a reproducing frozen decaying foreverism liinal status quo hell but also revised tribalism, nationalism and a fake identity. Do you see how perverse this emotional manipulation is attacking us during our most vulnerable time promising us to fill the void we all feel with lies?

[00:18:44]It is a fact that our present reality is objectively materially pretty [ __ ] bad. Social progress also seem to regress. Militarism is on the rise and so is fascism and the climate crisis is now inevitable.

[00:18:59]This feeling, this collective shared feeling of nostalgia isn't a longing for the past, but a haunting of a future.

[00:19:13]that never came.

[00:19:29]Remember when I said nostalgia is a double-edged sword? There is a pattern.

[00:19:35]If you look at the weaponization of nostalgia by nefarious actors, all of them promise you to restore something that is already gone. It's restorative, not reflective. Instead of demonizing an emotion that is natural and unavoidable, we should actually embrace it as what nostalgia is originally meant to be, positive.

[00:19:58]Why not use a reflective form of nostalgia that could be harnessed for revolutionary aims?

[00:20:09]When we are confronted with producers, we must always be aware that it purposely creates blind spots the audience isn't meant to see. So why not focus on what's not been told? When we consume 60s or 70s produced nostalgia, we're typically only consuming its aesthetics. A vibe, a feeling, flower power, hippies, peace and love, basically Woodstock. By losing ourselves in that aesthetic, we forget what made the 60s and 70s the 60s and 70s.

[00:20:44]>> Capitalism was built on the exploitation and suffering of black slaves.

[00:20:52]This is the actual ' 60s and '7s. Yeah, that vibe, that aesthetic is real, but that's just the shallow shell of a time period that is filled with revolutionary energy. Civil rights movement with Martin Luther King or Malcolm X not only fighting for equal rights, but also for drastic economical change for all.

[00:21:13]Massive women's rights protests, not only fighting for intersectional feminism, but also workers rights.

[00:21:18]talking about the exploitation of reproductive work, a huge anti-war, anti-militarism culture mixed with anti- capitalist sentiment, massive socialist student protest during 1968 in France and Germany. A year later, a massive firus protests in Italy, a huge energy for systemic change was in the air. It was beginning to become mainstream until it got relentlessly dismantled by neoliberalism. Thatcher and Reagan systematically destroyed unions, rolled back the welfare state, and defunded collective thinking.

[00:22:01]But just as importantly, the memory of this period got reframed. A political awakening became a naive cultural phenomenon. Flowers instead of strikes, Woodstock instead of class war. The political core got buried. What remained is purely the aesthetics of a time period that reminds us how cute and naive these people all were.

[00:22:28]Produced nostalgia is a deliberate rearration of the past. Whether to hide darker truths of a romanticized past or narratives that disrupts the status quo, those who benefit from the status quo have every interest in history being told in a way that makes it appear natural and inevitable. It is a fact that things actually were better or at least way more hopeful and optimistic.

[00:22:53]This isn't nostalgia slop. That is actual history viewed through the emotional lens of nostalgia. It can be used to remember elements of the past that are genuinely worth being nostalgic about. Personal nostalgia can help you to learn and grow from your past. So why not also use that very same mechanism on history? This isn't about denying historical events or trying to restore something, but to find hidden potentials of the past we can learn and grow from.

[00:23:24]Like archaeologists looking for lost relics that gives you radical new perspectives.

[00:23:30]A reflective nostalgia narrative might help in countering the official storytelling of capital to question the illusion of capitalism as the inevitable outcome of history.

[00:23:51]Nostalgia can be destructive or healing.

[00:23:54]We haven't tapped into the potentials and positive power of it enough.

[00:24:00]an extremely potent emotion that can inspire real positive change when coupled with reflective analysis of the past. My hope is that through the rise of nostalgia, a rise of idealism comes with it to refuse a world that tells you your ideals are unrealistic, naive, impossible.

[00:24:26]There was a time when real hope for material change was more aware, more present. The past leaves behind hidden undiscovered potential that proves change for a better future is possible.

[00:24:38]Nostalgia not as a consumable product or form of escapism, but as revolutionary hope.

[00:24:53]I'm almost 30, so of course I missed the times when everything was easier, less stressful or complex.

[00:25:03]when the biggest fear I had was being caught not doing my homework or talking to girls. No financial pressure, less responsibility, less worrying, less fear of running out of time.

[00:25:16]Less fear of running out of time with my loved ones.

[00:25:23]I don't want my mom and dad to get old yet.

[00:25:29]What am I supposed to do?

[00:25:31]I can either try to grab onto it like water in my hands or move on.

[00:25:40]The time we spend together is forever.

[00:25:46]This melancholic view of the past made me realize that without time passing, there is no worth to allow and accept change.

[00:26:00]A hard lesson I still have to learn to accept.

[00:26:06]Because if we refuse to let go of a time that is forever gone or wanting to restore it, we become blind to the true meaning of nostalgia.

[00:26:39]Heat. Heat.

[00:26:48]Heat.

[00:26:57]Heat.