my hypothesis about nostalgia is that we're obsessed with its abstractions. conversations about nostalgia gravitate towards pop culture, not because we miss pop culture, but because pop culture is a lodestar for discussing the past. a friend i made last year didn't grow up in the same neighborhood as me. we can't orient ourselves to the past by discussing farmer brown's apple orchard. but we did both have a tv.
when the 5,067th ghostbusters movie fails for the 5,066th time to live up to a cherished memory it will certainly be blamed on some nebulous condition of the modern era. wokeness. postmodernism. maybe they just don't make them like they used to. maybe the people hired to help you relive the past are secretly conspiring to take it away from you.
but the truth is much simpler: it's not ghostbusters that you miss. you still have ghostbusters. nostalgia mourns the newness of joy that has become old. and the more you grasp at old joy, the older it becomes.
