are you trying to escape the present?

on nostalgia and change

It was like the least subtle exhibit in a museum criticizing the present: a woman with a comically arched neck angled toward her phone, which was just inches from her face as her fingers incessantly swiped through TikTok. Over the course of the two-hour flight, this woman across the aisle never shifted from this position, only looking up to receive drinks and snacks. Holding my e-reader, I felt my head inflating.

My row featured two other people who had joined me in the morally superior approach to entertainment — reading books. I imagined us as a coalition in a battle against illiteracy. And even as my comrades in literary consumption fell asleep, I mentally commended them for their thoughtful consideration of their bodies’ needs, that they would be able to spar with the written word more effectively once they were rested. In contrast, it felt impossible to be similarly charitable to our adversary on her phone.

Why did I react like this? For no real reason, I saw and judged a stranger with an unrelenting ire. I went against all of my stated values of empathy and openness, creating a tribalist “us vs. her” narrative in my mind, based solely on our choices of media consumption. The viscerality of this emotion, of these thoughts, arose from my growing distaste for modern technology.

To me, the technological advances of the last few decades have all been tainted with the stink of the attention economy, of the promotion of polarization, anxiety, sleeplessness, and fear. In these devices I see sin and apparently ascribe that sin to those who let themselves disappear into them.

In contrast, I ascribe nobility to flip phones, CD players, Blu-ray discs, and paper notebooks. In these slower means of consumption, one must think more, be more intentional, and thus see the world in a better way. By these standards, what would be considered a completely dull and uninspired life of someone in the ’90s — sitting around doing nothing, reading the newspaper, going to the movies, reading mass-market paperbacks — would be worthy of immense praise.

I really do believe that these forms of engaging with the world are richer and deeper, but I feel uneasy giving myself up to this sort of nostalgic obsession. I can (far too easily) envision a version of myself that leans into this lifestyle, feeling superior as I listen to an iPod and read a well-worn paperback of The Old Man and the Sea, pointing my nose up at any new films, music, media, or technology. I can hear myself saying, the world peaked in 2005, and attempting to ignore modern life through artifacts.

The impulse is strong; the call of nostalgia is inescapable. With every news story about a present crisis or recollection of another time or moment of reflection, a voice seems to whisper things used to be so much better. And if things used to be better, why not attempt to re-create the past through the last remnants of those times? Why not reject the present and cling to the old? Won’t time pass a bit slower — won’t I be insulated from whatever comes next?

But I must refuse. To become so rigid and divorce myself from the current moment would be a form of self-betrayal, as someone who has been shaped by my embrace of the new throughout my life. Have I not been so deeply shaped by all of these technologies? Did I not meet some of the most important people in my life through Instagram, find jobs through Twitter? Would I have this life today without them?

So where does this leave me when it comes to nostalgia? The novelist Michael Chabon once tried to define the true meaning of nostalgia. What he wasn’t interested in was the more common form of nostalgia, the one his critics ascribed to his work — nostalgia that is “predicated on some imagined greatness of the past or inability to accept the present.” This was the type of nostalgia that I found myself wrapped up in, an inability to accept the present that led to cruel judgment.

What I aspire toward instead is the type of nostalgia that Chabon describes: “the emotional experience — always momentary, always fragile — of having what you lost or never had, of seeing what you missed seeing, of meeting the people you missed knowing, of sipping coffee in the storied cafés that are now hot-yoga studios.”

There’s beauty in nostalgia that can make the chaos of the present more digestible, but it is ultimately just an emotion to experience. It won’t change the world, it shouldn’t guide one’s judgments, and it won’t stop the flow of time. Because as James Baldwin said, “The world will change, because it has to change.”

---

---

💧 Drops of the Week 💧

• PLAYLIST - “FUSION JAZZ” by Findout Records - it’s fusion jazz

• POEM - “The Silver Lily” by Louise Glück - Will / speech disturb you? We’re / alone now; we have no reason for silence.