Take a walk down the busiest street where you live, and make note of everything you see and hear. A pack of high school students pass you, and each one of them is brandishing a pair of colorful short shorts. You walk by the park, and two girlfriends are having a personal photoshoot on their polaroid cameras. The women's clothing store across the street has their mannequins in the display window rocking high-waisted shorts and old school aviators. Out of the window on the second floor of the building to your left you can hear Prince's "Purple Rain" being blasted on full volume from one loyal fan's record player. You might forget for a moment what time period you live in and assume it's the 1980s, but you'd be wrong. It's 2016, and everything old is new again.
Why is that? What has become our generation's fixation with past fads and trends? In an age where we have a Polaroid, vinyl player, dial-up phone, mailbox and wallet (among many other things) all packed into a box that fits inside of our pockets, it all seems a little silly, doesn't it? Why waste our money on such extraneous things? It might seem silly, and it might feel extraneous, but for many of the short-shorts wearing, polaroid-loving vinyl fiends out there, it's an incurable case of nostalgia.
The always-trusty Google defines nostalgia as "a sentimental longing or wistful affection for the past, typically for a period or place with happy personal associations." With that definition now in our minds, let's all think long and hard about our time in the 80s and all say what our favorite thing was.
Got it? Of course, you don't! The individuals participating in and loving these "new" trends are, for the most part, like you and me: youths in their early teenage years to early 20s. So where does this love come from? How did my generation of 15-25 year olds find such an intense appreciation for old-school fashion, polaroid cameras and vinyl records? Look no further than your parents!
Find any adult you know, whether they be a parent or not, and ask them about what their golden age is. Now, when they speak about their golden age to you, listen to the tone of their voice very carefully, and try to see if you can just feel the tenderness and longing with which they speak. It really truly warms you. When I speak to my father about the "good old days," I can tell how much said days mean to him. One of his favorite memories that I've always held onto is one where he spent a day at the pool with all of his buddies, and all they needed to have a good time was each other's stories and a couple of Journey records under the needle as they spent their youth together.
For myself, hearing that story sent me on a quest to find that kind of beauty in something so simple and so pure. If the 70s and the 80s could cause my father to speak of something so highly and with so much sentimentality, how could I not fall in love with these decades? For many of my fellow 90s and 2000s kids, I imagine their parents transferred these same sentiments onto them. To me, our parents' love has sent many of their children on a quest for sentimentality and love for something as unique as they loved. There is a true desire to forge the same type of memories they did, for those memories were always so innocent and wonderful.
Nostalgia is a powerful emotion! It doesn't just stop at our parents and their hobbies being transferred onto us, however, for it extends into almost all of media. Hollywood has almost copyrighted the word "nostalgia," for it's hard to find a film or TV franchise nowadays that isn't a reboot or a revival of some kind of franchise that didn't already run its course over the past few decades. "Ghostbusters" is coming back, "Mad Max" has come back, "Lethal Weapon" will be coming back, "Gilmore Girls" is coming back, "Star Trek" and "Star Wars" have both seen revivals, and most importantly "RoboCop" came back just a few years ago. Whoever made that happen, from the bottom of my heart, thank you.
Cowabunga, dudes! And remember, be excellent to each other!
