Last night, after bathing Molly and putting her to bed, I got stuck into one of my favourite pastimes: taking the bins out.
What was once a grubby chore has become a rare moment of solace. It’s just me and the night sky… and the bins. I pause for a moment after I’ve delivered the last one to the end of the driveway. I breathe in the fresh cold night and the slight whiff of rubbish. I look up at the stars, and whenever I do, especially on a cold night, I am 10 years old again.
I am stood in the Post-it-Note backyard we had at the rear of our terraced house in Bolton, a football at my feet, my Mum at the back door with a cigarette and a can of lager. I have a vivid memory of looking up at the sky one of those nights, and thinking that whatever happened to me, whatever I became, it would all play out under this same sky. As I stand at the end of the driveway, me and my younger self have a brief chat. We check in on how we’re doing, what we think of each other, what we’d do next.
As I turn back towards the house, I always walk away with the same, odd feeling of… jealousy. I feel jealous of that 10-year-old and the world he inhabits. The simplicity of his life, the uncomplex nature of that era. Pens and paper, CDs and video tapes, Saturday morning at Woolworths, knowing the neighbours, and most of all, I now realise, being disconnected. No ping of a notification, no breaking news alerts, no infinite scroll. The bombardment of information hadn’t yet begun. Solitude came easily. If you wanted to know something, you’d go in search of it, rather than it coming in search of you. With that, things seemed less overwhelming. You couldn’t follow every twist and turn of a news story. Not everything felt like an existential threat. You felt… safer.
I know I was only 10 years old, but this experience of the late 1990s and early 2000s is common, even amongst those who were much older, and carrying the pressures of adulthood. It was a better place.
Yet was it, really?
Sure, the technological revolution hadn’t yet hooked us to a mainline of information and news, but by many metrics the world was objectively worse. You were more likely to be the victim of a violent crime, more likely to be burgled, more likely to have your car stolen. Those crimes have plummeted in the 30 years since their peak in the mid-1990s. You were, simply, less safe than you are now.
And beyond crime, the residual anxieties still existed too: there was still pressure to earn money, sickness, grief, heartbreak. Listen to any song, watch any TV programme or film from that time, all the complexities and pains of being human are as vivid then as they are now.
This isn’t to say things aren’t tough now. Technology has upended the way we live and interact, the information ecosystem is bombarding us with bad news, our towns and cities look and feel different, work is increasingly insecure, economic inequalities have hardened since the financial crash of 2008, the pay check isn’t going as far as it did a few years ago and we’re still working through the emotional and social debris of the pandemic. Even still, logically, this remains the best time to be alive.
In the last few weeks, a new generation have entered their era of nostalgia. Younger millennials and older Gen Z have made the year 2016 one of the most searched terms on TikTok, and as of the second week of January more than 55 million videos have been uploaded using the 2016 filter. Whatever that is.
Longing for 2016 is especially curious, given how recent it is, and how similar the storylines of that year are to the ones we live today. It was a year defined by political upheaval, where the main characters were Donald Trump and Nigel Farage. Social media had become performative and toxic, and our favourite cultural influences seemed to be dropping like flies. Everything felt unsteady and uncertain, and it’s never quite recovered. It feels like we have been living in 2016… since 2016.
The most likely to indulge in this reminiscent content would have been in their late teens and early 20s around the year 2016. Unsurprisingly, that is a common time of life to feel nostalgic about.
“There are people in this age group who are looking to the future with a lot of anxiety, and they are looking backwards to help stabilise themselves,” says Clay Routledge.
Clay is an existential psychologist and an expert in nostalgia and meaning, and I spoke to him on my Times Radio show last week. While everything up to now has been unsurprising, the next bit caught me off guard.
It’s easy to think of nostalgia as both inaccurate and unhelpful. Our visions of the past are skewed. It can’t do us any good to long for something that we never really had. In fact, I’d go as far as to assume it is harmful. It blinds us to where we really are, stops us making progress, and gets exploited by political and cultural leaders who want to sell us a version of the world that never existed.
But, Clay tells me, that isn’t why we feel nostalgic.
“It’s not really the case that people want to go back to the past. If you ask people, would you give up all the advances in science and medicine and conveniences that you have now, to go back to the past, would you? Most people say no, of course not. So, what are they doing when they say the past was better? Well, in the present, there’s all sorts of information coming at us, and it’s hard to make sense of it. Over time, you’ve been able to weave all sorts of different life experiences into a coherent narrative about yourself. And so, when we look back, we’ve had time to make sense of the positives and the negatives, and to tell a story about how they’ve helped us grow, how they’ve made us who we are today. And so, people are pulling from the strength of that story…”
The past is more satisfying because it services our need for a clear beginning, middle and end. In this moment right now, your brain is processing reams of random footage, but when you reminisce, all that footage has been put through post-production, edited to its highlights, and you know how it ends. Going on holiday, says Clay, is full of stresses and difficulties, but you don’t look back on the chore that was packing, or getting the taxi to the airport, or the mountain of washing you had when you came home. The theatre of your brain plays you a highlights reel of sandy beaches and glasses of wine.
“That story we’re telling ourselves is helping us today. It’s helping energise and motivate us…” Clay tells me. Because being able to view our past as a complete story leaves us restless in the present.
“Humans by nature are never satisfied. Why can’t we appreciate the progress we enjoy right now? We can if we take some time to be intentional and… do it purposefully. But oftentimes we’re just not satisfied. And that’s part of our survival story. Because if we were totally satisfied, we wouldn’t feel any reason to tinker, to innovate, to try something different, to experiment. Why take risks if we think everything is fine? So, it seemed built into our nature to never be totally satisfied.”
Nostalgia keeps us discontent enough to innovate. But it also lets us draw on it for inspiration.
“Right now, we’re seeing that a lot of young people are dissatisfied with social media. Young people do not want to give up technology. They love technology. They’re really worried about what AI is going to do to their jobs in the future but are also some of the quickest to adopt new technologies. So, they have this ambivalent relationship with technology. But young people are also becoming extremely nostalgic for an age before their own. They’re buying vinyl records. They’re buying physical books. They’re doing all these things that are part of an analogue economy, even simultaneously while they’re buying the latest iPhone. There are things that they’re struggling with technologically, and they’re saying maybe there’s some lessons from the past, some ways that people used to do things that can help us get a hold of our relationship with technology and feel a greater sense of control over it. And so it’s very much a story of agency, not a story of rejecting progress or rejecting technology, but a story of how we improve our relationship with it.”
Nostalgia keeps us moving in our present and gives us inspiration to draw on as we do. And all of this is a primal instinct, which could be linked to our very survival.
Michaela and I have decided we probably don’t want another child. So, right now, as I type, 16 months after having our daughter Molly, we are working hard to hold on to the traumatic memory of her arrival: the exhausting four days she spent in labour, the anxiety of having a caesarean-section, the brutal, sleepless, weeks and months that followed. When I look to the stars at the end of my driveway, it’s the conversation I often have with my 10-year-old self. ‘You have the most beautiful daughter, you wouldn’t believe. But, my God, was it a rough ride.’ My brain, though, is working against me. It’s cleaning up the story, cutting it together into a less chaotic narrative, and chiselling out some of the worst bits. Every time I tell my 10-year-old self about it, it feels a little duller, a little less traumatic. It wants us to forget how bad it was so that we do it again. Maybe, I tell him, we will have another one day.
We need to feel nostalgic… the survival of humanity may depend on it.