It has been less than an hour since my last reminiscion, and I fear that the retrolapses are becoming more and more frequent. It has been a difficult journey, but I have finally realized that I need to take the first step and admit that I have a problem, in the hope that one day I may be able to find a cure.
Ever since I can remember, I have had a pretty bad case of the nostalgias. For those of you lucky enough to never have been bitten by the flashback bug; a nostalgist (one who practices nostalgism) is someone who has mastered the technique of romanticizing years gone by.
I am not sure if I am a modern-day Nostalgiadamus, or if I am just a closet retrovert, but either way, my constant reference to ‘how things were’ has turned me into a bit of a contemperacist (someone who is prejudiced against modern eras). I know that the Roaring 20’s, Fab 40’s, Golden 50’s and Sweet 60’s weren’t perfect – I mean they were surrounded by war, depression and repression; but being a child of the late 80’s, who grew up in the 90’s, and is now a 'twenty something' living in the naughties - I feel almost cheated for having missed out on arguably, the best times we'll never know... I want to dance the Charleston to a band, rather than dirty dance to a DJ. I want to be courted, rather than date. I want the opportunity to refrain from having an affair with the man who delivers my milk (in glass bottles). I want to be the character in a Jane Austen novel. I want my life to be like a Frank Sinatra song. It seems as though the lifestyles they led back then, for all their faults, were at least honest. People were appreciative, unassuming and humble; but above all, they were content. Whilst technology has done so much good for society, it has also opened people's eyes to all the thinks they don't have an created a whole bunch of wants for things we don't need. Sure; I love air conditioning and Facebook just as much as the next person, but I think the world was a better place before we became expectant that we would just be able to have these things. I would take a simple and happy life, over the complacent one I am living, any day.
Think about it- the ‘good old days’ didn’t get that name for nothing – they were actually the good old days. They were wholesome and dignified, people had values, respect, decorum, morals, empathy, and they actually cared about the world they lived in. The same cannot be said for the naughties; an age of loose morals, disrespect, apathy, ingratitude, dissatisfaction, impatience, disorder, pretentiousness, greed and un-happiness. They naughties are the evil jezebels of the modern age, only in this age – there are no prophets brave enough to confront them.
You see, if I were to turn the ‘two thousands’ into a super-villain, they would be Anakin Skywalker’s illegitimate twin brother; Darth Nautilus. Nautilus to the eras is what Vader was to Star Wars – the epitome of all that is bad in the world. And even though Nautilus wants to be good, he perpetually fails to return to the light, making it ever more difficult for him to want to strive towards it. In much the same vain – the worse society gets, the less people can be bothered trying to fix it, the quicker it continues along a downward spiraling road to destruction.
I am not sure what the retrolution is, nor am I sure how it is quite possible for me to so wholeheartedly miss years that I never lived through. All I know is that I get emotional over events that haven’t even taken place, because I know that they would only happen in a lifetime that I am not a part of.
I am a prisoner of the present, living in the past, and afraid of what tomorrow holds; a futurophobe who would rather be eternally nostalgic over a life I have never lived, than unrelentingly melancholy about the life that I am yet to.
Hi, my name is Tianna, and I am a nastalgiaholic.
"The world is full of people whose notion of a satisfactory future is, in fact, a return to the idealized past." ~Robertson Davies, A Voice from the Attic
"Nostalgia for what we have lost is more bearable than nostalgia for what we have never had...." ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960
