I have a problem with nostalgia

But my Substack is going to fix it

When I started dating younger men, they weren’t even that young – the first one 27 when I was 33. I sent a message to him one foggy winter afternoon saying it was ‘very Jack the Ripper weather’. He said he didn’t know what I meant. I immediately recoiled at the implication that I’d made an older person’s reference.

😱😱😱

But hang on a minute, it wasn’t as if Jack the Ripper was at my school, or one of the presenters of Blue Peter. He was part of the cultural fabric of life. You didn’t have to be in your 30s to know who old Leather Apron was surely?

This is when I first noticed the difference between older and younger people when it comes to cultural references.

It must be to do with the internet

When I was young, around 1912, it was a given that older people had something younger people lacked: knowledge and experience. It was just accepted and there wasn’t really a way round this – you just had to sit it out, do the time, until you became as wise, relaxed and as well paid as them. 

In the meantime, you could look things up and learn stuff if you wanted, you could take a year out and go backpacking if you were really desperate, but it was quite a lot of effort to be curious.

Then the internet happened and took all that out of the equation. With the information superhighway, we could all barge to the front of the queue and access almost anything we wanted, at any time. And wear jeans while doing it.

Whoopee.

Naturally this changed the flow of information, the value of it, and I wonder if it killed off some of the curiosity factor too. Instead of having to run around and seek out knowledge like hungry cavemen looking for the next mammoth to spear, we could just sit in bed all day feeding off it all like fat little pupae.

But what we lost in curiosity surely we gained in volume and accessibility, so who cares? Well, with curiosity comes context, and I think you need that if you want to understand some things, particularly pop cultural moments, for what they really were, rather than what other people have decided to package up and sell back to you. Because that can be a bit crap.

The swinging 60s

As a child of swinging Baby Boomers, I had more than enough context when it came to the 60s and 70s. This was when the teenager was invented, sex was invented, and probably water too, and everyone loved each other because of the Beatles, George Best and being able to wear their hair long. 

It felt as if my generation would have to pull something seriously impressive out of the bag to compete with all this.

They even had death covered. I had to wade through River Phoenix and Kurt Cobain until I got anything near the stature of the JFK, Elvis and Lennon triple bill with Big Diana in 1997.

Fortunately, by then, I already had my own music and fashion movement to feel a part of too. Tony Blair and his Labour babes did their bit on the politics front and the 90s were on the map.

Phew.

What happened next?

Probably the same kind of pop culture moments as above. But with the introduction of the internet, all that New Stuff had to also compete with all that Old Stuff in a way it never had to before. 

With so many platforms to fill and so many pupae to feed, we quickly got to where we are now - where everything clashes together at the same time, jostling for attention, and bobbing around in its own cultural sludge. You can dress up as a Charlies Angel one day and Britney Spears the next and no one will bat an eyelid.

That would be fine if there was some balance to it. But it feels as if there’s more old stuff than new. There’s so much of it already out there, familiar and popular, which means it’s easy and cheap to remake and vomit back out again to an unsuspecting crowd. 

So we get the same events retold through books, podcasts, documentaries, Netflix series, films and musicals that then become made back into films again and all the way round again. 

So by the time something like the Oasis reunion – safe, nostalgic and box office – comes down the tracks, it’s had three decades of being endlessly revisited and retold, packaged up, passed down, plonked on the sofa of the One Show, remoulded into something that bears little or no resemblance to what the real thing actually was, in order to make it easier for us and our shot-to-pieces attention spans to manage. 

Fine if that’s how you like to consume things, we’re all busy, but for new people coming to this old stuff, they must wonder why these things often appear so lame.

Let me reach for a non-pop culture example of this

Strawberries.

I made a friend in the early 2000s who’d moved to the UK. She told me she didn’t like strawberries. She hadn’t tasted them before, so she had no context for them and so she thought this is what they were supposed to taste like.

But she was confused because heard the hype. She’d seen the branding and believed that they were delicious, otherwise she wouldn’t have bothered.

Of course in the 80s and 90s they were delicious, hence the wallpaper, the stationery, and the jumpers. A fruit truly worthy of such celebration. But then they got injected with chemicals and bloated with water that made them taste bitter and gross.

But she didn’t know that, so she was coming to strawberries thinking this was the taste that everyone was going on about, and she was as confused about British people even more than she needed to be.

Now I’m not here to do public relations for strawberries, I couldn’t care less if you never buy a punnet ever again (although apparently they’re back to tasting like they used to). I’m using them to try and explain why I think it must be so weird for young people when they hear about Things that Happened in the Past when they’re served up a version of it that isn’t very good, while being told it’s amazing.

Those young people who say they’re enjoying Oasis for example – what part do they actually really like? Honestly, I’m intrigued to know. If it’s only the first two albums then fine - I just hope they don’t think it’s their entire back catalogue. 

Why do I care?

Because I don’t want to be bored by my own nostalgia at the age of 48. 

Imagine if I live until 110 and how many times by then I will have heard Wham!’s Club Tropicana drinks are freeeee. How many hen dos I will have seen wearing bright pink tutus and fluorescent yellow leg warmers in 80s homage. And how many neon lit up signs in the style of Cocktail I will have sipped a cocktail under.

It will have ceased to mean anything at all.

Which is all a long way of explaining why I’m writing my Substack.

The 80s weren’t about Madonna’s bracelets or George Michael’s luminous yellow fingerless gloves. The 90s weren’t all Union Jacks and the Spice Girls. And not everything was a Watershed Moment. Those are just the shortcuts, but they miss so much of the story. Without context, these memories feel flat, one-dimensional and boring.

So yes, my Substack gives me a good excuse to talk about the past in a (hopefully) more meaningful way. I hope you’ll join me on my quest to establish some healthy nostalgia — to find meaning beyond the surface, the flesh behind the fingerless gloves. 

Either way, I’m doing it. 

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Thanks to everyone who read, liked, commented or shared my piece last week 3 marketing tips from me, aged 8. I loved hearing about other peoples’ childhood side hustles.

And a special thanks to those engaging with me in the notes this week - it’s true that the community side of Substack is what really makes it!