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March 29, 2024, 09:50:41 AM

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False nostalgia

Started by canadagoose, July 16, 2018, 09:27:44 PM

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canadagoose

Does anyone else get this? You know, you'll be consuming some sort of media from the past, and you'll feel a bit wistful and emotional, and you'll wish you were there, even though it was before your time. I get this with the old TOTP episodes, and I got it when I saw those photos of the Black Mirror set they were building in Croydon, set circa 1984. What causes it? What causes you to feel that way?

Zetetic

This set it off quite strongly for me:



This pamphlet has a tale of rapid advance and development to unfold. It may not be easy for us to realise how far we have advanced even in a few decades; but let anyone who uncertain about the point compare modern photographs of children at work or at play with the corresponding photographs of fifty years ago ; there is in today's children a liveliness and sense of radiance which in the old days were too often missing. The child of today is taller and heavier than his predecessors ; he is probably better adjusted and his school and his family relations are likely to be happier and more natural than they used to be. None of this need make the modern reader complacent ; we too shall be left behind. We can point to progress, but it is progress on a long slope which leads far beyond the present day.
...
Closely associated with the physical and emotional situation in which boys and girls in their teens find themselves is the economic and social background to their lives. Virtual full employment means not only full-time work for fathers and for many mothers but for the school-leaver the easy acquisition of a job, the ability to move from post to post at will, and the acquisition of comparatively high wages at an early age.
...
They have money for cash payment and for hire-purchase and they embark on marriage confident - perhaps overconfident - that means will always be available to pay for their commitments. State medical and dental services abolish the need to save for periods of sickness, and state pensions and government aid provide for old age.
...
This is the atmosphere of the adult world all around them, an atmosphere that reveals not only a greater facility for acquiring and spending money, but a greater permissiveness in moral attitudes. The breakdown of taboos and organised religion has leader to greater freedom of behaviour. ... Young people are aware of their value to the national economy. It is not, therefore, to be wondered at that they take certain things for granted. They expect to have money to buy the things they want ; they no longer look for parental control ; they reject many of the scruples and taboos that acted as restraints on the behaviour of their parents and elders. In short they see no reason why they cannot cope with life on their own terms.

A Handbook for Health Education (1968)




QuoteWhat causes you to feel that way?
Probably ignorance of what the '60s were actually like. Whatever we have lost, I'm not yearning for a real time.


canadagoose

Quote from: Zetetic on July 16, 2018, 09:34:14 PM
This set it off quite strongly for me:
It's interesting; the writing does seem strongly "of the past", from a time when a formal register seemed even more... formal. I don't usually get the feeling about the '60s, but sometimes it happens. Do you miss it at all (even though you weren't there - I'm 99% sure you're younger than me)?

For me, it's usually 1980 to 1993, when my "proper" memory starts (so it starts being "real" nostalgia after that, unless it's for records I never heard until later).

Danger Man

When I was in Saudi I went into a shop that only sold Japanese stuff.

I felt homesick.

Beat that.

Zetetic

Quote from: canadagoose on July 16, 2018, 09:52:21 PM
Do you miss it at all (even though you weren't there - I'm 99% sure you're younger than me)?
(I thought we were pretty much the same age.)

Perhaps it's not quite nostalgia or missing it - it's usually more like there's a something absent, something dreadfully wrong about the link between then and now. The sort of thing that bad sci-fi writers put in 'wrong timeline' stories.

Lemming

Old J-Pop seems to set this off in a lot of people if YouTube comments are to be believed, which is twice as weird because not only does it cause a yearning for a time you never experienced, but also a place you've probably never been to.

It'll be interesting in a couple of decades, when kids start having false nostalgia for the 2000s and 2010s. It should be fun to see how amazingly wrong their second-hand image of the whole period is, in the same way that ours probably is for the 80s (or 60s, or whenever else).

bgmnts

Yeah I feel the same when I hear any kind of video game or anime or Jpop kind of music.

Bizarre. Something unique abouy Japanese culture possibly.

Clownbaby

#8
Pixies/Black Francis/Frank Black's music makes me feel strangely like I miss something, particularly the songs Headache and Speedy Marie, even though I only really got interested in the music a couple years ago

Something about the slightly queasy chord changes maybe, must be triggering a questioning feeling in my tum tum

Sebastian Cobb


mothman


Cold Meat Platter


Nowhere Man

A lifetime of watching really old sitcoms, Coronation Street and listening to stuff like 'The Village Green Preservation Society' have probably left me with a weird feeling of nostalgia for 20th century Britain.

gilbertharding

There's a peculiar feeling something like this when I look at google earth images with the 'time travel' slider activated - but especially viewing Kent, where there's an option to look at the county as it was during a summer in the early 90s. When doing so, I can virtually smell the parched earth, and even though the viewpoint is from a few thousand metres above the earth, I can picture all the people in their ridiculous oversized clothes and preposterously over-coiffed hair, blissfully ignorant of the future existence of Channel 5, stupidly happy it's no longer the 80s, imbecilically cheerful about the widespread introduction of 5 gears on family cars.

Today, I put on a VR headset and looked on Baidu Maps Street View at the place I used to live and work in China. I then 'had a walk' for about an hour to visit my mate's apartments and the places we used to go out to eat, drink, sing, play sports, and any other recreational activity. Most of the city and buildings have changed, most of my old haunts have been razed to the ground with a colossal glass construction in place. The business I set up is now an Oxygen Bar.

Whats that feeling called? What's that feeling where your quest for nostalgia is raped by the passage of time, in reality.

Jumblegraws

Pretty much any of the old quirks and features of analogue television, as preserved in youtube uploads and elsewhere, give me a sense of nostalgia, even if it's things that were mostly or entirely ironed out of broadcasting in my childhood. Old idents, end-of-schedule closedowns, testcard music and the like always make me feel wistful for a TV era that was mostly gone by the time I was a viewer. When I watched the original series of Quatermass and the Pit on DVD, with its live performances and portentous title cards, it gave me a profound feeling of "those were the days".

Jumblegraws

Quote from: Jumblegraws on July 17, 2018, 03:39:28 PM
Pretty much any of the old quirks and features of analogue television, as preserved in youtube uploads and elsewhere, give me a sense of nostalgia, even if it's things that were mostly or entirely ironed out of broadcasting in my childhood. Old idents, end-of-schedule closedowns, testcard music and the like always make me feel wistful for a TV era that was mostly gone by the time I was a viewer. When I watched the original series of Quatermass and the Pit on DVD, with its live performances and portentous title cards, it gave me a profound feeling of "those were the days".
Ffs, hit "quote" instead of "modify"

Bhazor

#17
I've been bullied and/or depressed for pretty much all my life so I have no nostalgia for any period of my life. Hey remember the 90s!?! Yeah I was bullied by the kids in my year. Remember the early naughties? Yeah. I was bullied by the girls in the year above me. Remember the early teens? Yeah. I was bullied by work colleagues.

I do however feel nostalgia for the sunny beaches with rental totty crowds you'd see in 90s sitcoms like Married With Children. I wish I was on a beach surrounded by tit models and that everyone from my old schools are now dead from septic shock.

Back when people were posting those Benest's of Millbrook adverts, they made me feel really nostalgic even though I'd never seen them before, nor have I ever been to Jersey.

I often have to explain cultural references I come out with to my Latvian partner, but my "Coke Zero, three litarr!" in Home Bargains on Saturday was met with even more disdain as I explained that it was from old supermarket ads from Jersey that even I wasn't aware of until about six months ago.


I'll tell you what else is wall-to-wall false nostalgia; that neon pink/purple on black/dark blue aesthetic that video game companies in particular keep pushing as the de-facto 80s aesthetic.

I do not remember that being a genuine thing at all. Whenever I see it it only reminds me of modern video games pretending to be from the 80s, rather than genuine things from the 80s.

Jerzy Bondov

Is this part of the same phenomenon where people my age (born 1986) wax lyrical about how they used to love watching The A-Team (1983-1987)?

I suppose they might have seen repeats or something. I withdraw my comment

Quote from: Huxleys Babkins on July 17, 2018, 04:10:24 PM
Back when people were posting those Benest's of Millbrook adverts, they made me feel really nostalgic even though I'd never seen them before, nor have I ever been to Jersey.

I often have to explain cultural references I come out with to my Latvian partner, but my "Coke Zero, three litarr!" in Home Bargains on Saturday was met with even more disdain as I explained that it was from old supermarket ads from Jersey that even I wasn't aware of until about six months ago.

Last night I was watching a documentary called Mallsoft, about vapourwave, specifically the nostalgic US mall music influenced sub-genre.

https://youtu.be/mw-WxQJnU-Q

SWIM should do a Benest's of Millbrook vapourwave track/LP.

Jumblegraws

Quote from: Jerzy Bondov on July 17, 2018, 04:21:40 PM
Is this part of the same phenomenon where people my age (born 1986) wax lyrical about how they used to love watching The A-Team (1983-1987)?

I suppose they might have seen repeats or something. I withdraw my comment
A-Team was on the Bravo channel (no idea what remains of that station now) when we were youngsters so it may be from that.

Pseudopath

Quote from: Huxleys Babkins on July 17, 2018, 04:14:51 PM
I'll tell you what else is wall-to-wall false nostalgia; that neon pink/purple on black/dark blue aesthetic that video game companies in particular keep pushing as the de-facto 80s aesthetic.

I do not remember that being a genuine thing at all. Whenever I see it it only reminds me of modern video games pretending to be from the 80s, rather than genuine things from the 80s.

I definitely remember women wearing a lot of hot pink and black back in the 80s:



That cyan and pink aesthetic definitely came from these cunts:


Icehaven

#25
The really clichéd Spielbergian/High School 70s-80s America of E.T., The Burbs, Flight of the Navigator, The Goonies, Weird Science etc. which is now being revisited by Stranger Things. I remember watching a lot of those films first when they were more or less contemporary and wishing my life in late 80s/early 90s Coventry was like that, then rewatching them later in my older teens/20s and it feeling very personally nostalgic, as if it actually had been, although of course it wasn't (and nor was it really for the actual kids in America (Woah-oah). 
Although I suppose as I watched them when they were quite new then the nostalgia is probably for my own childhood a bit, as even though it wasn't like the films the films are from my childhood so it's not entirely a false nostalgia, just misdirected.

I had a real thing for the late Victorian-interwar period for ages too, read a lot of the major writers from Wilde to Waugh, loved any films and TV set in that era, but since kind of going off it a bit when it does turn up now I feel again a sort of personal nostalgia for it which conflates with my own memories of my teens/early 20s and can almost feel like I was there. Looking at an aged photo of a group of people standing outside a country house in 1910 or thereabouts still feels more 'familiar' and evocative to me than my own secondary school photos.

I reckon all this kind of stuff is possibly one reason why some people feel they're reincarnated. They're just underestimating the evocative power of art and escapism, man.   

checkoutgirl

Quote from: Cold Meat Platter on July 17, 2018, 03:14:00 PM
Notstalgia.

No-stalgia.

I get real nostalgia quite a lot. The other day I woke up and as the sea air drifted in my window I could actually smell 1986. Like the smell of the air  coming in my window smelt exactly like the air in my garden on a moist Autumn dusk, like your mate had gone home and now you have to go in and do your homework or deal with your parents or have dinner or whatever, and Knightmare or Simon and the Witch might be on telly. All that from just lying in bed with the window open as a 39 year old man. Strange.

I often watch old TV shows from the 1980s or like the other day 1980s adverts from ITV on youtube. What am I looking for? I'm not sure but I'll know it when I see it. Anyone who is prepared to watch old episodes of 3-2-1 with Ted Rogers on youtube like me probably is getting into problem territory with his nostalgia.

A few weeks ago I was tempted to buy old Batman chewing gum cards that were released when the film came out in 1989.

It's not normal.

I get fake nostalgia too. Mainly for the 1960s which were probably largely rubbish but mainly the good stuff hangs around decades later and makes you believe it was all great. It was probably full of sexism, racism and bad hair and clothes but you listen to Forever Changes and wistfully pine for a youth you could never have. Even though Ireland in the 1960s was probably like America in the late 1800s.

Also the 1970s, like imagine when Rocky Horror first came out, it would have been great to be there enjoying the midnight screenings and that. Or seeing the premier of Star Wars in the cinema in 1977. But I wasn't born until 1978.

mothman

There are many reasons to loathe James Blunt (though I submit to you his Twitter activity is a source of joy), but one in particular is his song all about 1973, which is several years before he was born.

I'm pretty sure most of the people who watch Stranger Things are too young to remember the 80s.

Anyway, where's the Britpop-era This is England? Should be right on cue.

Books, films and photos from the 1920-1960 period to me: love the whole vibe of cricket on the village green, coppers who clip kids round the ears, short haircuts, grey suits, hats and cloth caps, roast beef for Sunday lunch, royalism, and 'Jolly good show, old chap.'  I was born in 1969.