Everyone is bringing back old favorites.

"Fuller House" happened, for better or for worse.

"Gilmore Girls" is returning, minus Sookie.

" High School Musical 4" is a thing apparently?!

So anyway, yeah. There's a lot happening or re-happening in pop culture these days. It's turning into this weird phenomenon where, given a good GoFundMe and enough adoring fans, any show can be brought back to life. Nostalgia is ruling the roost at this point, and it just keeps on growing. We're changing it up a little as we go, but the fact stands that we're recycling the things we loved from a couple decades ago.

So why are we doing this over and over again?

It could be chalked up to the power of social media. We're reaching out to one another more easily than ever. Fans can reach out and make contact with artists that would have never even known they existed before.

There are other potential reasons though, and they're a little less positive. To explain one theory, we'll have to go back to the period after the Civil War.

America was in upheaval. We had never suffered that level of internal damage together as a country before. There was so much loss that we didn't know how to move on, and our efforts showed that struggle. We lost our sense of creation and literature because we were trying to deal with our issues. We needed to grieve, and so we turned to consolation. American writing took a repetitive turn and churned out sentimental prose about bravery and strife. We made romance of the hurt so that it would at least make sense to us later. It was our new form of bravery.

Now think about the recent history of the United States. We went through 9/11. We're constantly in some state of war or armed readiness. The current political climate is aggressive, and many citizens are scared of the November election's outcome.

A lot of countries have it worse than we do. We are, for the most part, safe here. However, given that we have become so acclimated to safety and security, when it is removed even in small ways we tend to grab onto whatever we can.

And so we go back to consolation.

We go to nostalgia. We revisit the Tanner family, and we laugh at Rory and Lorelai's hijinks, and we cover up our fear with the safe things from before. We reuse old stories because they remind us of the times that we were happy. We're becoming greedy for the things we used to have, as if we can hoard good memories with which we can protect ourselves.

I think that it's better to make new things. Art shouldn't be stuck in a repetitive cycle. It should be daring us to move past our barriers and understand the things that hurt us rather than to patch over them and wait for healing.

Consolation isn't bad, but it shouldn't be all that there is.