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.