What’s it called when you’re nostalgic for a time you didn’t live through, like teenagers feeling nostalgic and “looking back” on i.e. the 80s or 90s?
I was born in the 2000s, but somehow I feel a sort of longing to live during the 80s. I have watched a bunch of movies produced during that time, and I realise they may not be a totally realistic depiction of the time period, but for some reason I “miss” the 80s. I don’t mean the struggles of marginalised groups or the politics, but rather the feeling of “old school” and people socialising, the shows playing on TV during that time, the diners, the discotheques, the clubs, the music and fashion and hairstyles… there’s just something cozy about the 80s, how technology wasn’t super developed, how people were still discovering things. Don’t misunderstand me though, I’m glad about the technological advancements we have achieved today, and I realise my image of the 80s may be skewed since I literally didn’t exist during that time, lol.
What’s this feeling called? Has anybody else felt the same way about a time period that isn’t the 2020s?
I was there in the 80s and 90s. You young people are definitely luckier. You are by far more beautiful, more gentle, you are more welcoming, you don’t discriminate against gays and nerds. Socializing without mobiles was as boring as you can expect.
Do not spend too much time regretting a period that was meh at most
You wrote out my thoughts almost entirely, save for one thing: the economy is garbage now compared to the 80s and 90s. Aside from that, I don’t look back at all that many things with nostalgia (classic video games aside).
I was there in the 80s and 90s. You young people are definitely luckier. You are by far more beautiful, more gentle, you are more welcoming, you don’t discriminate against gays and nerds. Socializing without mobiles was as boring as you can expect.
But you could afford a house on a single income :'(
I was in the 90s. There were some nice stuff but on the whole, I agree with you, things are better at least for kids.
Yeah we could go out and play more but it was also Lord of the Flies. Especially in places like trailer parks. Everyone I knew had been in multiple fights by the time they were ten, including girls.
I see my kids and the kids they spend time with and it is like watching my childhood with the volume low and the wealth cranked up. Every kid in is in some structured activity, sometimes multiple ones. And the bigotry is super low.
It’s like falling in love with somebody only from their social media post. The real person’s nothing like that. It’s only a curated view.
Good analogy.
That feeling is called “anemoia”. It’s apparently a recent word.
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Coined by John Koenig about 10 years ago. Upthread there are other options that have in the language for much longer. I did not expect to start my day as the grumpy-conservative-language-originalist-crank. 😄
Romanticizing might be a fitting term. As in you’re romanticizing those times.
Someone called it wistful when I looked it up and I like the word (read it here: https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/50144/is-there-a-term-that-defines-nostalgia-for-something-youve-never-experienced#50147 ) it’s nostalgia without needing to have lived it. So nostalgia is wistful but wistful also covers things you haven’t lived.
I have always wished I were around for the Cretaceous period… :(
Seriously though, it’s understandable to want to experience something you can’t. Like, the more we know we can’t do a thing sometimes, the more we want to.
Personally, having lived through the 80s and 90s, there was absolutely something unique about both. I think if you set aside the trivial stuff, fashion, etc., it comes down to what I describe as a more human pace. Life just moved slower. You had to interact directly with people more, yeah. Also, people were kind of more on the same page. For example, TV shows were aired at a specific time, movies showed at a specific time. (I’m referring a bit more to the 80s here, pre VCR.) So, you kind of always felt like you were a part of something bigger. It was kind of a cozy feeling.
On the other hand, if you didn’t fit into mainstream culture (straight, mostly white, probably Christian), things could be really rough for you. It was much harder to find groups outside of that mainstream. You could feel very lonely and isolated. Connecting with people was hard. Being a nerd was definitely not cool, it was just being a nerd. Bullying was really bad.
It was really hard to learn about things. Like, you had to go to the library or school. No internet searches. Maybe in some ways that was a good thing.
That’s more the 80s. I would describe the 90s as sort of complacently boring for the most part. Also, in the same way that people romanticize the 80s and 90s now, many in the 90s were romanticizing and imitating the 60s and 70s. It didn’t feel like there was as much of a distinctive culture to me. The 90s were when corporations really figured out how to commercialize everything too. Think… Pepsi sponsoring Woodstock 99… Things felt less organic, more engineered from above.
But, those are generalizations. People always find a way to express humanity, to be creative, to be unique, to express something new. We’ll look back on these times and see special things too. Personally I really miss when everyone was walking around with their fidget spinners dabbing…
I don’t know, but I have the opposite. I grew up in the 80s, but given that I’m a queer af trans person, I’m nostalgic for a childhood that wasn’t possible for me in that era
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I think it’s called Vicarious Nostalgia. Found a page on Wikipedia discussing the topic.
I don’t know the word, but your question makes me remember how nostalgic “Stranger Things” made me for the 80s. Although I lived through that as a child and it wasn’t all that cool, with the Cold War looming over everything.
Even as a child, I was well aware we could do a whole fucking lot better in the cartoon dept than we were getting. Then Batman came along in the 90s and proved me completely right, setting a bar that people look up to to this day.
Some of the films and music were objectively excellent, admittedly. (T2 is a good example, rare sequel superior to the original) Regardless of how much someone may or may not appreciate that specific film or whatever, it was executed extremely creatively and wasn’t necessarily easy. Sometimes it wasn’t.
My fav thing about it is we weren’t 100% corporatized yet. We had the corporations, but they hadn’t all decided to act like corporations yet, some still acted more like small business. The world had not become data-driven yet.
Batman was good, but Animaniacs was peak 90s TV animation.
I hate to correct you, because T2 is indeed better than the original - but it came out in 1991.
Take heart though, Empire Strikes Back came out in 1980, Aliens came out in 1986 and Star Trek 2 Wrath of Khan came out in 1982. All of these stand the test of time and could be used for your example.
That’s so funny because Stranger Things is also what came to mind when reading this post.
I was a 90s kid and I think the show just made me nostalgic of being a kid.
The word you’re looking for is Hiraeth: longing / yearning for a time or place that does no longer exist, or never has existed.
Hiraeth isn’t a bad word for it, but Wikipedia has a better explanation of it:
I know what you mean. The difference being that I lived through the eighties… I watch shows like Stranger Things and remember how awesome (parts of) the eighties were. Staying out late with my friends, basically running around unsupervised for hours at a time? Awesome. But most of that vision of eighties never really existed.
Oh, there was definitely a time when our cars were mechanical and we played our music at 78 RPM, but there was plenty wrong with the eighties.
Among other things, we were all pretty confident the world was going to end in a nuclear holocaust with Russia. The rhetoric was incendiary and nobody thought peace was realistic. It was only when Russia’s economy suddenly imploded and the whole thing collapsed that everyone took a collective breath of relief. It’s impossible to communicate how incredible the collapse of the Soviet Union was. They were the second most powerful nation in the world - and their vision for the future was diametrically opposed to the American counterpart. There were clashes and proxy wars. Only the threat of total annihilation kept open war from being declared.
…and then one day, they just…vanished. They were more unstable than anyone knew. And when one too many little things went wrong… The whole thing crumbled.
The reason there’s so many great comedies from the eighties? Everyone was desperate for some good escapism. In hard times, comedies sell well. (In good times, we want dramas.)
The eighties were stressful as hell.
But the TV/Movie version of the eighties looks fucking awesome. I wish I’d lived there too.
Are we just spamming Koenig today? This is the third reference to him I’ve read this morning. It’s a cool art project but it’s not actual English.
It’s called Sehnsucht in German and is also used as a psychological term in English.
I’m not really sure if the 80s were necessarily better or worse in reality. On one hand it all seemed relatively simple, but without the distractions of constant communication, flexible agreements, procastinating and whatever else we have in our modern stressful information overload, the 80s were quite brutally direct. If you could time travel there, you’d probably find people to be rude and focused on actions instead of thinking. For better or worse.
Lived through both, the 90s were more fun.
Up until 85 and Gorbachev it was a pretty frightening time. Reagan sensed a new weakness in the USSR post Afghanistan, and pushed very hard, frightening pretty much everybody. In 1983 the order was actually given in the USSR to launch a first strike, and one air defense officer in the chain of command refused. Everybody was stressed as hell, on coke, money obsessed.
The 90s was when the tech boom really got going, the Internet hadn’t been ruined yet, the Cold War was over and we were riding the gravy train from here on out! We turned a surplus in the national budget! Chemical Brothers and Nine Inch Nails and Nirvana and Alice in Chains and KMFDM. SNL was actually good, not what passes for good these days. Sensi and hanging/chilling/grooving.
Funny, I was a teenager in the 90s and we felt this way about the 70s, 60s, & 50s (depending on who you asked).
70s maybe, I think we were pretty aware anything before that got sketchy quick. Even the 70s is a lot of rose tinted glasses, they weren’t great compared to the decades after.
As someone who was a teenager in the 70/80s, I am jealous of you.
