The Cult of Nostalgia

“Remembrance of things past is not necessarily the remembrance of things as they were.” — Marcel Proust

Nostalgia is something that most people experience to one degree or another. You can be nostalgic about lots of things -your hometown, relationships that ended due to partings or death, old songs, old movies, old TV shows or a mythical, romanticized “good old days” when kids were well-mannered, the streets were safe and politicians were honest!

Nostalgia is interesting because it’s related to tradition, but as seen through an extremely personal and subjective lens. The reason nostalgia is mainly a modern phenomenon is that, until fairly recently, things didn’t change nearly as much as they do now. The rate of change in areas such as technology and culture began to drastically accelerate around the 19th century and much more rapidly in the 20th century.

Today, it’s common to draw distinct lines between generations and decades. Consider how journalists and sociologists commonly contrast the Baby Boomers, Generation X, Generation Y and the World War II generation. In a traditional tribal society or during the Middle Ages, changes certainly occurred, but you didn’t have a situation where one generation dressed differently, listened to different kinds of music or held substantially different values from the previous ones.