The following three pictures are going to show you exactly what this blog is about. They are all from a box of junk that I brought home from my parents' house a few months ago.
These items are also something that we Millennials are royally screwing up.
I'm not a gamer. This is the most recent system I own. Seriously.
Before there was the iPod, Sony gave this a shot.
Be real, you know what this is...
I remember going on road trips with my family when I was a kid and stopping at random country stores and Cracker Barrel restaurants where they would find older candy brands or toys they remembered from their childhood. I always thought it was cool to find things like that when I was younger; items my parents had not seen in decades but still had a connection to. With those instances they were given time to reminisce a little bit or strike up conversations with their friends starting with "Guess what I saw in a store the other day?". Millennials are ruining this and I will tell you why.
There has been this online firestorm of a debate for the past few years raging on about what does or does not constitute being a "90's Kid". Without getting into the specifics of my own opinion of those parameters, this shows me that so-called "nostalgia" is becoming more and more extinct as time goes on. Just like I said before, my parents held fond childhood memories of specific products and left them as fun instances of the past, only to sometimes run across them at random and have a smiling moment as a result; I will never have that.
Millennials will have no sense of nostalgia when we hit our mid-life years because we are now in our twenties and early thirties but still surrounded by the past. I am fairly certain every television commercial from the nineties is now on YouTube somewhere and those videos (some in half-hour compilations) have hundreds of thousands of views as well as thousands of comments on them. Facebook is full of photo-shopped images people "like" in order to post on their newsfeed saying things like "Share this photo if you remember POGS" or any slew of other products from the time. I hate those, and the reason is because most of the items in question are less than twenty years old. As far as I am concerned, we are not ready to be nostalgic and we will not have any stories to tell our kids about toys, candy, and food they have never heard of. "Son, did you know they made clear Pepsi at one point?" "Yes, dad. I saw it on 'I Love The 90's' on VH1." With that, we have nothing because our nostalgia is being remembered a few decades too early. Some of us are so resilient that the products we knew back in the day are returning to market again; Gak, Floam, and Furby as examples.
Have you ever seen that episode of FRIENDS where Monica runs into a guy she knew in high school over a decade after graduation ("Chip") only to have the happy teenage thoughts come back? Chip asks her on a date and she says "yes", of course. After meeting up with him, she was expecting the same exact person she knew as a younger woman and that was exactly the person she found. The problem though? He was still stuck in the same charmed version of reality as in high school and had yet to really get his feet off the ground, while she was driven and moving up in the world. Her fantasy should have left him as who he was so many years before and lived on as more of a fond memory rather than figuring out he was still living with his parents and working a part-time job. Monica was caught up in a romanticized idea of who he was that nobody else could really see, but she eventually figured out.
This is the same way I feel about having tangible nostalgia relating to my nineties childhood while still in my twenties. I would like at least ten more years to go by before I hear about Beanie Babies, POGS, Surge, or JNCO's again. There has been no delay from my childhood and I fear it is being ruined by the continued exposure. The biggest part of me really wants to leave my memories in the past as something of huge importance and possibly exaggerated memories instead of having them all readily available and being disappointed that they are now not as great as I remember.
Some aspects of life, including people, should be left in the past.
Can they resurface? Sure, eventually.
Just be certain you are not setting yourself up for disappointment later.
Spoken as a true "90's Kid".
Grace and Peace,
-Drew
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/drew.silvers
YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/drewcoustic
Email: drewcoustic@gmail.com
Twitter: @JDrewSilvers
The lyrics from the title of this blog came from the song below and were written, performed, recorded, and produced by my friend, Will. Check out Cartel here: http://www.cartelrocks.com
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