JAMES LILEKS: What Are We Nostalgic For?

We have a nagging feeling that our urge for reinvention makes us lose something we’ll regret when it’s gone. The newspapers of the ’20s, an era of astonishing energy and sophistication, are full of laments for the loss of the old ways. The ads of the ’30s had amused affection for the Gay ’90s. Simon and Garfunkel wondered where Joe DiMaggio had gone. Tony Soprano was haunted by the fact that he’d come in at the end of something. Every American era will be reviled as it unfolds and admired when it is over.

The difference now is that we’ve stopped evolving and entered a remix culture, where the vast past is just a thrift store of costumes and artifacts, consumed in solitude through glowing glass rectangles, shared in an incorporeal community where avatars speak in unpunctuated text, memes and algorithmically selected TikTok moments. It’s a level of hell Dante never named, the one populated entirely by willing volunteers.

But don’t despair. There’s a lot that’s grand about our current age. People will, one day, have nostalgia for 2023. The reasons may vary. I hope it’s because the seeds of a better world—more or less, overall, all things considered—are growing today, and we don’t notice them for all the brambles and thistles. I fear the nostalgia may be due to how free and prosperous our era seems in retrospect. They might wonder if we knew how good we had it. Ice machines, gas stoves, private cars, home ownership, no social credit, hot showers without timers, actual hamburgers made from meat instead of crickets…

A golden age!

Well yes. If some can look back on the 1970s in a nostalgic fog as an earlier example of a golden age, many likely have similarly rosy memories decades from now about 2023.