My Blog

Nostalgia is a farse

Jun 24 2024


In the last 20, 30 or so years, it's been common in our modern culture to see the past as a "better place" than our present and to try making our future as similar to it as possible, even if it's just in a superficial level without any solid foundation on WHY was the past so good.

There are various possible reasons for why this is happening. I'm not an psychoanalyst, but I belive it has a lot to do with our modern parenting practices which started with Millenials around the late 80s and 90s, and continue to perish to this day with Gen Z and Alpha, unfortunately. Parents before that, by the most part, would try to follow the 'Atomic Family Model', which is the stereotypical american family with a father who rules the whole house and works to sustain it, a mother as a housewife to keep everything in order, and the children who are indoctrinated to follow this model at all costs, and also to follow the Industrial Life Process of going to school to get a diploma, and then you will work for the rest of your life in a factory or something (OR, if you're a woman, to mary a rich man and become his housewife for the rest of your life). Of course, the Atomic Family is terribly flawed, some may argue that it's the "traditional model for the family that worked during the whole course of human history" or something like that, but actually, this is a model that originated shortly after the Industrial Revolution to keep the system flowing through extreme alienation. Before that, the truly natural family model was the medieval one, which in today's standards, goes against most of the modern Human Rights Laws.

Anyway, this change in style was based on the idea that; kids are also people, even if they are too young and innocent to comprehend themselves or the world around them, they still can show levels of individuality and should be respected as such, so we should try to train them to rebel against this opressive system and stand for themselves and what they belive it's good for society. This kind of parenting already existed way back in the 60s and 70s, during the counter-culture Hippie Movement, but it would only gain relevance after it, and even if the parents who adopted these concepts had absolute good intentions in their minds, we would endup seeing some consequences in the next generations due to lack of comprehension regarding the hostility of the system, and of course, the waiting future of the new millenium.

You've surely heard the phrase "grow up, but don't become an adult", explaining it in more detail means "Become mature as a person, after all it is necessary for you to live in society, but don't sacrifice who you really are and always have been". This is true, the system needs the masses to be ignorant, conformist, and dependent in order for it to live on. But quickyly, this message would distort itself into the false idea that maturing in general is a form of opression, not just against yourself but against people around you. This postmodern style of parenting, alongside other factors such as, economical changes in the job market, the advent of the internet, etc, and due to lazyness and lack of competence from the parents part, made future generations convinced that it's "totally normal" for them to spend their adulthood in passive mediocrity, doing nothing other than consuming cheap entertainment and fantaticizing about things that are, either not real or too distant to become true, because in their minds everything is relative, nothing is permanent, there is no such thing as a "truth" to these people because it's all is disposable, including themselves...

Of course, as stated before, there are other factors to take into account, one of them is the internet, afterall it essentially atomized the youth and comodified their lines of thinking, the internet gave imbeciles a voice. This is actually crazy, because in case you don't remember, nerd culture pretty much was very prevalent in the internet during the 2000s until the early 2010s, stuff like flash animations, amv's, ytp's, etc. While these things on their own are completely inoffensive, just anonimous nerds on the internet celebrating the things they like, but if you see the bigger picture those things were the first big instances of young people building their personalities entirely based on the media that they consumed and refusing to leave their dictated online confort zones because they have 'Peter Pan Syndrome', which is something that it's has already become a problem today. People have not been teached how to grow, and to sacrifice their childish selfishness in order to conquer their autonomy, and yes, you can call me an hypocrite.

There's absolutely no problem in recording good moments from the past, or to celebrate old traditions and movements, or to keep your inner infantile self alive. The ACTUAL problem is to aways look backwards, to try being a mere stupid kid for as much time as possible, to deny that someday the future will hit, and it gonna be hard. This is pathetic.


Website created in 2024