about nostalgia, long, personal stuff/brief drug mention
This article about 90s nostalgia wasn't what I wanted. It was basically "things you idealize about the 90s were kinda crappy" and that doesn't help; nostalgia is that some of the stuff WASN'T crap and other stuff WAS sheer unmitigated crap, but there's good feelings associated with it regardless of quality.
I think what I want is something to help make peace with nostalgia, that it's okay to miss stuff in the past but to realize that my life experience is more than just those good (or at least well remembered) times, the same way it's more than just the horrible crap. That my experience has been enriched by two more decades and I can come back to the old stuff with new perspective (including "this is shit, but I enjoy the associations" or "this is actually pretty damn good"). The "life is additive, inclusive rather than subtractive and exclusive" thing I learned on psychadelics.
This runs into some personally difficult places for me. The 80s were largely this gray haze of depression and dissociation, trapped in my parents' house or at school for the most part with a few little bright spots outside. The 2000s and later have meant facing less and less prosperity, more and more hardship, and aging. And exploring the world for the first time, as much as it leads to dire regrets, is exciting; it's hard not to idealize the 90s all out of proportion. And my PTSD/CPTSD means I'm really not good at the sort of long term thinking that helps in putting the past into perspective with a future that's perceived as other than nonexistant, shortened or bleak.
about nostalgia, long, personal stuff/brief drug mention
Addendum;
One way to crack this might be separating conditions and specifics. Specifics are easy to handle; I can still listen to Nirvana and Soundgarden, arcades still exist, 90s TTRPG stuff is findable, and I can get bi bim bop. Conditions are harder but also not necessarily 90s only; I can never be young and exploring the world again, I can try to schedule OWoD games, and all I can do about rising fascism is vote, write, and hope.
about nostalgia, long, personal stuff/brief drug mention
@Leucrotta I think a lot about how the etymology of "nostalgia" being "homecoming pain" or perhaps, "pain of re-encountering to the past"
in some sense this is what is missed in the more modern sense where it's this joyful celebration of the halcyon days
because in many senses it really is not that these pieces of old media are good, especially when compared to more recent stuff, but that they evoke memories, as you point out
about nostalgia, long, personal stuff/brief drug mention
@Leucrotta and I think it really means a lot to understand that all nostalgia is subjective in a way
it's not just the good things that trigger memories, just certain things, and the memories they trigger may be negative
I don't know. I could ramble a bit about how it's like there's two extreme approaches to the past that society holds at the same time
the past as lost goodness or the past as excrement to be forgotten
about nostalgia, long, personal stuff/brief drug mention
@Leucrotta neither of these really account for the truth that it's always a mixture more in the middle
about nostalgia, long, personal stuff/brief drug mention
@Leucrotta I do very much feel there's this lack of understanding of the subjectivity of experiences and opinions but both in the sense of thinking there can be settled objective opinions on media as well as failing to fully recognize personal opinion and experience and claiming your own views as objective traits of whatever identities you have
the idea that "I'm the only correct trans person" for example
about nostalgia, long, personal stuff/brief drug mention
@chimerror and especially in this case; a lot of truly terrible stuff happened in the 90s, but I was largely *unaware* of, or remote from it. What I’m idealizing is being young and poor in Ann Arbor during a tech boom and a pause in the Cold War, which sure isn’t a universal experience of the 1990s; it’s more about me and some really big societal stuff than the 90s.
about nostalgia, long, personal stuff/brief drug mention
Last point is that I feel part of being a whole person is realizing stuff I like can be crap; it doesn’t need to be objectively good or completely unproblematic for me to like it, I gotta acknowledge both aspects.