Why Do We Enjoy Nostalgia?

I was at a restaurant with a 50s diner theme the other day when I came to an odd realization. People like nostalgia and I really don't understand why. Even I enjoy certain types of nostalgia, though not much. When a style or trend from a time in my past resurfaces, I find myself enjoying that thing, but only momentarily. I’m not about to go out and buy a 1983 Delorean and drive it around town wearing a grey Members Only jacket while snorting coke off the brick sized handset of my “car phone,” but when I see a Delorean, that sort of stuff runs through my head with Duran Duran playing background music. Hungry like a wolf. Hungry like a wolf…

But why do we care so much about old shit, especially when the new stuff is so much better? I’m sitting by the pool at this resort and I see twenty-two year old kids reading books, actual paper books. You know I read books in the era when books were the only way to read, but now we have e-readers that can store more books than most humans can read in a life time. Why carry a book around? A Kindle weighs less and is smaller than most books. Its just as easy to read from an e-reader and you can even use your finger to flip pages just like a book. Before e-readers, I would have to bring a separate bag on vacation to hold all of the books I brought to read on the beach. And if I finished reading my books while on vacation, I had to go to a fucking book store to buy more. I never read books because I enjoy holding paper or toting fifteen pounds of paper around the beach or like interrupting my vacation to find another fucking book to read. I read books because I wanted to enjoy the story, the words on the page, not the page itself.

Same for fucking music. I had a record player, an 8-track, a tape deck, a CD player and when I heard about portable MP3 players, I nearly found god even though I am an atheist. Seriously I have thousands of songs on my phone. ON MY PHONE! My phone is smaller than a cassette tape and it holds thousands of songs. Cassette tapes suck. You can have maybe two hours of music on a tape. If you want to hear the song again, you have to rewind it. Want to skip the shitty songs? Fast forward it. Don’t let the word fast fool you into thinking that you will skip several songs a second, you are skipping one song in maybe thirty seconds. Have fun guessing when to stop stupid. Records, err, sorry vinyl is just as dumb, yet people like them for stupid reasons. You cant even play records in your car. Oh, but it just sounds better. Sure it does. You cant even tell the difference. You don’t have super hearing. Records scratch, they skip, they warp and you cant fucking let them out in the sun. Records and tapes and CDs are so fucking fragile, they are like Mogwais. Dont get them wet, don’t let them out in the sun and don’t tempt fate by touching anything you shouldn’t touch. But they seem more real than an MP3 file in the cloud. Hey dummy, its just fucking music, you don’t need to have the fucking pressed platter to enjoy it, you just need to be able to hear the sounds.

Cameras too! Have you ever had to have film developed? Its not fun. You go to the camera aisle of the Walmart and hand your prescious memories over to a fifteen year old “trainee” who will probably have a laugh at your pathetic vacation. Then you get your prints and it only cost you a fucking lunch, so now you have paper photos that you can stick in a box in the closet for the next thirty years only to be discovered while you are looking for your old CD player so you can get all nostalgic about your awesome CD collection you found. Yay, I get to listen to Bel Biv Devoe on my Sony with ten seconds of anti-skip so I can probably walk across the kitchen with the Discman and have zero musical interruptions assuming I didn’t put a fingerprint on the shiny side before putting it in the player. And now, my phone can hold more HD photos than I could ever afford to take with a 35mm camera. I can look at them any time I want and I can send them to friends and family instantly and there wont be a fifteen year old trainee looking at them as they come out of the developer.

Some of you kids probably never had these things, or you only remember them from your early youth. Trust me, modern technology allows you to enjoy things with more freedom and lest frustration, just get the fucking e-reader and stop trying so hard to “be real”.