Is nostalgia poisonous?

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Aidan said:
Nostalgia can be crippling but it's not inherently bad.
It's when you act like nothing will ever top some aspect of the past so you just give up moving forward and try to recapture something that doesn't exist that it becomes damning.

I'd argue you see this a lot with people who peaked in high school.
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But for the most part nothing will. I do think accepting shitty friends and a girlfriend who expects you to pay her bills like so many adults is worse.
 
In small doses it's fine. When you start overdoing it though it can get you into big trouble. And the end result of it is a society that worships its long-gone youth while destroying today's youth and children to pursue a delusion of immortality.
 
Its a good thing if it causes you to understand the modern decline, but its a bad thing if you stop engaging with the tasks or the people in front of you.

You need to find a spouse who understands the decline like you do, you need to find a house far enough from where you work to afford, and you need to find hobbies to keep the two of you destressed after a busy day.


After that you can do whatever you like, just don't buy re-releases or nostalgia-bait.
 
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Anything is toxic in a high enough dose. Methotrexate is used for rheumatoid arthritis. It's also used for chemotherapy and will poison you in those doses. Hell, you can even die from ODing on licorice.

Nostalgia is fine in moderation. Times now actually are pretty shitty and were better a few years back and acknowledging that isn't a bad thing. But it would be a bad thing to obsess over the past and completely write off the present.


Edited: Totally beaten to it by @Larry David's Opera Cape. My apologies.
 
It can really bring you to your knees if you aren't careful, but you also need a bit of it to keep things in perspective.
 
On one hand nostalgia can be a beautiful thing, there's something about the feeling you get when you reflect on your previous good times or revisit something from your past that brings about a feeling of joy that is unmatched by anything. On the other hand if all you do is reflect on the past you might develop a sense that everything was awesome back then and everything sucks now. I've met miserable fucks who spend all their time thinking about their glory years and don't do anything to make new experiences and connections happen that would make their lives more fruitful and give them new things to feel nostalgic about. In the words of Max Hardcore pulled from one of his Twitter posts "The past is gone, only forward for me"
 
Agent Abe Caprine said:
Mine is. I miss the good old days when I'd watch Spongebob while eating paint chips.
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Go out and get some paint, put it on a surface, let it dry, and you have yourself a perfect snack to eat when watching Spongebob. I do it all the time

I think nostalgia can poisonous if you wallow in it. Remembering fond points in your life or pieces of media you like when you were young is fine, but not moving beyond that is when it gets poisonous. Thinking these points are the absolute pinnacle of your life and nothing will ever be as good again is a really bad mentality. You need to keep having new good experiences and making new good memories. Once upon a time, you never experienced those fond moments or had those fond memories that you do. It's possible to have new experiences now that you remember fondly down the line. Remembering and enjoying the past is fine and dandy, but getting stuck in the past and being unable to move on from it is really bad. Keep moving forward and try new things and have new experiences.
 
On the other side of the coin, I'm starting to notice a backlash to nostalgia, as professing a preference for the older version of something will usually be met with the accusation that you're just blinded by nostalgia. Worst part is I think there has been a recent dip in quality for creative works and it boils down to 2 factors.

1. Changing of business models to favor something else over quality. Microtransactions in the case of gaming, pandering to overseas monkeys in the case of film.

2. Technology has advanced to the point where the barrier for entry has lowered, allowing the less intelligent or creative a bite at the apple. Architecture is a good example. If you wanna know why so many buildings look like shit nowadays, it's because they'll let any retard who knows his way around AutoCAD design them(remember, Chris almost got his degree in AutoCAD design). Before it would need to be hand drawn by an architect, which almost necessitates buildings are designed by people with at least some eye for aesthetics. If you want a more basic example, do you really think music as an artform is better off being subjected to the whims of every 15 year old with a broadband connection and a copy of Fruity Loops?

Yes, of course nostalgia is a factor when you're talking about things from your childhood, but there's plenty of objective things you could point to to indicate a decline in quality. It's very tiring to have some reddit midwit tell you "TAKE OFF YOUR NOSTALGIA GOGGLES AND GET WITH THE TIMES BUB" when you can objectively identify the processes taking place that make the subsequent entries cheaper and lazier.
 
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I tend to agree with something James Rolfe said: I'd love to go back to the past to visit it... but not to LIVE there.

There's many a day I wish I could return to a previous era, or even that said previous era never ended. But I'm realistic enough to keep the bad in mind. These days I see the 1990s as the best years of my life (I was born in the early 1980s)... those were years where I was discovering myself, essentially, and going through all sorts of transitions (not the body-mangling kind, thank god). I feel like they were the years I was most inspired to be creative and having the most joy.

And yet those were also the years I was in school, which I remember being genuine hell, and when I got dicked around by people who took advantage of my naivety and ignorance. So there's an element of "I would've done X differently" to all my time travel fantasies.

I don't think nostalgia by itself can be toxic, no. I often hear people blaming nostalgia for things (most notably if you don't like some bland consoomer remake of a classic property... it can't possibly be because the remake is bad or anything, no, its only because you can't take off those rose-colored glasses! Funny thing is I had this happen for a remake of a show I never even saw. But apparently I can have nostalgia for things I didn't even know exist).
 
I still like things that make me feel nostalgic. But it means I go back and watch or read the actual thing that gave me nostalgia in the first place, like my 90's era fantasy books, or the original Ghostbusters or animated Disney flick. "New" stuff that comes out to play on nostalgia turns me off.

I tried to watch the live action version of Beauty and the Beast on a streaming site, and couldn't make it through the first song before thinking "why am I watching a mediocre redo of a movie I loved, when I have the DVD of it in a case?" So I turned it off and put the DVD in and enjoyed that.

If anything nostalgia is poisonous to "current thing". Why read new sci-fi fantasy when it's usually bland retreads of the stuff that came before?
 
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Why the fuck would nostalgia be poisonous? Or why the fuck wouldn't it be?

It's pretty fucking simple. Look at how the nostalgia is affecting you. Is it bad? Then it's probably poisonous. Is it good? Then it probably isn't.

You can use (like the footballer Pele did) nostalgia to keep improving yourself. He used to lay down in the shower with a football under his head and just visualize and remember how much fun he had playing football on the beaches and fields of Brazil. You can use nostalgia to remember a friendship, or love, or hobby and fulfill yourself with passion and zest for life. Things aren't like they used to be? That's the truth about every single moment in time and will continue to be true in different ways at every single moment in the future.

It recalls the words of morihei ueshiba, who invented aikido. He wrote "the art of peace" as counterpoint to Sun Tzu's art of war. One of the first lines in the book is: "Heaven is where you are. Whether you are invalid or healthy, there is some way in which you can train yourself. The place to train is here. The time to train is now." *
If nostalgia has become poisonous, the most likely cause is that you're not accepting the present. So start accepting it. Grieve if it's painful. But move on. And let nostalgia be a beacon of light to inspire you.


*(paraphrased from memory. If anyone cares to ask, I'll look it up.)
 
neverendingmidi said:
If anything nostalgia is poisonous to "current thing".
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Whether it's trying to restrict physical travel with BS like "white flight bad", trying to keep people stuck in Clown World "culture" with BS of "cultural appropriation", or any attempt to "memory hole" the world before Current Year or 2020, it seems the woke cult wants to keep people imprisoned in the here and now - even mentally.

So like I said, nostalgia isn't bad if it's not to unhealthy excess.

George Orwell said:
Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.
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I might drop a longer autistic essay on my complete thoughts, but i'll keep it digestible for this post.
2020 pandemic increased the time between i saw some close friends. Many retreated into excessive video gaming or streaming video to pass the time and it was clear that even to the music they were listening to they wanted to go back.
To when in particular, depended on the person, some high school, some their early years of playing playstation and watching cartoons. This combined with a massive downgrade in all media popular or not since 2020, and everything old is new again.

I think nostalgia is a drug, and it certainly doesn't hit as hard the second time. If you hear the opening theme to some TV show that escaped your memory, entire associated memories can come rushing back, but revisit it again and its certainly not as strong. This is especially true if its something that did not escape your memory (ie still popular), but its just been a few years since you've consoomed / listened to it. Some beautiful potential customers don't seem to notice the diminishing returns, i don't want to call out any particular group of people but let's just say Pokemon fans. That warm fuzzy feeling recreating the joys of the past isn't enough, and suddenly the desire to revisit the past becomes a desire to live in the past I'm guilty of this in some aspects, I started to listen to popular music (slightly) before my childhood of artists that i loathed their fans growing up, or somehow escaped the zeitgeist of having to listen to it at all (immediate friends/family weren't big into top 40/radio). In all honesty, most of it is pretty good, some even great, but it can hurt because the enjoyment is always layered in similar production style / lyrical style to whatever period i'm nostalgic for. I think the K-hole part of the addiction is when one formally swears off discovery of new experiences, only to relive the same memories experienced, I was only able to get out (still a cope by me) because i'm seeking new experiences in the world of yesterday, new artists, tv shows i disliked as a kid for no reason, etc (what the hell Malcom in the Middle is actually funny).

The problem that i will face, and the real magic melancholy of nostalgia is that in a high enough dose, you can either use it or abuse it to rewrite your own memories. Suddenly x band was "part of my childhood" in my mind despite me never owning a CD by them, enough of the aforementioned Malcom in the Middle and i might tell my kids i grew up watching it. If this got too media intensive, take it as a general front and you can kind of see a new age of the baby boomer mythos for my generation (remember the initial pushback of those 90s kids posts?) So over time we can see how a myriad of different experiences of growing up in the 1960s became reduced to a series of products and media (Fleetwood mac records, Ford Mustang convertible, The Graduate/Star Wars depending on early or later in that generation).

So really, despite these random observations, the high of nostalgia is really great, especially with a critical voice in your held occasionally calling out the bullshit, but sometimes things in the past were better, but i can't talk about schooling and such without PL, so sorry for the media focus. People taking a very impersonal approach to nostalgia tying it neatly with political currents might be missing the forest for the trees. Barring 9/11 and the associated conflict(s) after, I don't think there was a definitive turning point for when global events directly made my life worse, everything with political correctness, social standards, and technology's increasing role in forwarding both was a gradual slide into oblivion so its hard to feel nostalgic for any particular time, especially after learning those wheels were in motion far before i was born. But maybe i'm really just nostalgic for when i was naive and didn't know so much about how wrong i was then.

tl;dr thank god time travel doesn't exist, because it would consume me where i can avoid other vices. Also it can help to find IRL or online cases of arrested development in your life to remind you of how bad it can be - lots of popular youtubers are hitting 40 and not taking it too well, that big four decade anniversary turned the quirky 90s kid rambings of Regular Car Reviews into a gay therapy session about missed opportunities and he's very much wishing it was 1999.
 
It's radioactive.

Cool to see the glow for a bit, but too much of it and you start to glow into a fat coomsoomer
 
Nostalgia is a siren's song. It attracts you with the promises of better times but if you succumb to its calling, only death and loss you will find
 
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