Millennial Nostalgia

 At some point in the mid-2000s—whenever it was they first allowed high schoolers onto Facebook—the first group I signed up for on the newly-unveiled social media preserve was called "You might be a Nineties kid if...." Its opening posts included a number of references to specific cultural ephemera from our childhoods. "Wait a minute—you half-remember Rugrats? I half-remember Rugrats!" I was enchanted. I had discovered the joys of nostalgia. 

Of course, by the "Nineties," we really meant the three years from 1997 to 1999, which was the only part of the decade for which we were remotely conscious. Our ages likewise guaranteed that the only cultural products we remembered from that era were media aimed at young children. So, what we were really talking about were not "the Nineties" writ large, so much as Nickelodeon cartoons from the tail end of the 'Nineties. 

It seems odd to me now that we were all "nostalgic" for something that had actually occurred at most only about six years previously. But such was the compressed time scale of our young lives that, by 2005, 1999 already seemed like an ancient memory. 

Nor was I the only one suddenly realizing that he was "nostalgic" for this bygone era. The Facebook group was just the tip of the spear. There was in fact a whole generational turn toward this only-recently-lost past. Millennials quickly became known as the nostalgia generation. A thousand thinks pieces were launched on the premise that my generation was uniquely obsessed with its own past—and in particular, its own childhood. 

Most of the pundits attributed this phenomenon to a moral failing on the part of Millennials. We were the generation that refused to grow up. We were the young adults who remained mired in childhood. Or, more charitably, they attributed it to the fact that we had launched into adulthood in uniquely difficult times: our high school graduations coincided with the start of the Great Recession—how, sociologically, could we not be expected to look back with fondness on the boom years that came before?

But it took a friend of mine to finally offer a simpler explanation. He suggested, in a conversation some time ago, that the Millennial Nostalgia Craze might be due much more simply to the distinct moment of technological change we lived through. Uniquely among all the generations—after all—we are the only ones to have feet firmly planted on both sides of the digital divide. And it was precisely across this epoch-making change that we peered, when we looked back yearningly at 1997.

We spent our childhoods, after all, in a pre-internet world. Not that the internet did not exist in some form, during those years—but it had not been widely adopted. Our adolescence, by contrast, was spent in a world that had easy access to dial-up, and—shortly thereafter—to the earliest forms of social media (MySpace, anyone?). More important still, our childhoods did not have streaming video or YouTube; but our high school years did. 

Why was this such an important dividing line for the future course of Millennial nostalgia? My friend explained: it was only after YouTube came along that it became possible to go back and revisit TV shows we remembered from our childhood. No other generation then or since has experienced the magic of this newfound ability in quite the way we did. 

Previous generations, after all, had possessed no easy ability to go back and look up episodes of shows they had seen the year before—let alone the decade before. They weren't about to hike to one of the handful of TV archives in the country; and the selection of old shows at video rental stores was always patchy at best. So they mostly had to accept that once something had been broadcast, it was lost forever. There was no going back. 

The generations younger than us, meanwhile, have access to all the same content we do—but they fail to see why it is such a big deal. They grew up in a world where everything was always immediately available to be rewatched as many times as they wanted. Any nostalgic impulse they might have formed could therefore be gratified so quickly that it scarcely had time to ripen into a desire. They had experienced "the fullness of satiety" (Byron) and had no need to demand more. 

Only Millennials, then, both remember with vividness the pre-internet world of pop cultural scarcity, when something once seen was lost forever, while also having lived through—in their most emotionally formative years—the transformation brought about in our cultural life by having old media suddenly available on demand. 

My friend's theory, then—if true—posits that nostalgia itself is not a uniquely Millennial impulse. Rather, it is a widely-shared human yearning. Everyone can appreciate it. But Millennials are distinguished from other generations by the fact that they both remember an era in which it was simply not an option to gratify this universal impulse to revisit the past—and lived through a time when it suddenly became possible to glut this impulse beyond anyone's previous imagining. 

We were like a village of peasants who grew up in a time of famine, but whose teenage years coincided with the biggest harvest the community had ever brought in. Would anyone be surprised if such a village then feasted to excess—if they struggled to develop a healthy sense of proportionality about food, when it had been denied to them so long? 

In support of my friend's theory, I offer the fact that most other generations in the past have always seemed to gratify their own nostalgia for childhood media as much as they could—it's just that they had far more limited means at their disposal to do so. It took a while for generations to even have enough shared cultural touchstones to wax nostalgic about, after all; it wasn't until the twentieth century that shared TV and radio serials were even available. 

Take, for example, the growth of "trivia" culture at mid-century. As Ken Jennings once explained on his podcast with John Roderick, the emergence of "trivia" as a shared activity came about in part because the generation of students who entered college in the 'Sixties—their numbers swollen by postwar prosperity—met there for the first time other young people from all over the country, and discovered that they had all seen the same shows when they were kids. 

"Wait a minute—You half-remember Howdy Doody? I half-remember Howdy Doody!" they would say to each other. They were, after all, the first generation to have been children when national broadcasting would even have given them memories in common. It became an easy thing to bond over, a ready-made lingua franca, when meeting people who otherwise had wildly different life experiences. They soon made a game of it. Trivia culture was born. 

Even the people who grew up before the widespread availability of TV did something similar, to the extent they were able. In Richard Yates's novel Revolutionary Road, the main character is a young adult in the early 'Sixties. He therefore presumably was a child in the '30s or '40s—too old, that is, to have grown up with Howdy Doody. So, when he is introduced to another young man his own age, and forced to make conversation, they turn to their own generation's equivalent. 

The people who have introduced them, in the novel, consider them both to be thoughtful "intellectuals." But, to their surprise, when the two young men get together, they do not discuss politics, literature, or history. Instead, they are found on a walk together "reminiscing about the children's radio-programs of the nineteen-thirties."

One can easily imagine that if they had had Facebook in 1962, Yates's characters would have all signed up for a group that called itself "You Might be a 'Thirties Kid If..."

And so, the desire to relive the past is universal. It's not Millennials' fault. They did not invent it; and they may not be any more prone to it than any other demographic. But they had the power to gratify this shared desire beyond what any previous generation could have imagined. 

Meanwhile the generations that come after us have been able to gratify theirs for so long, and to such a copious extent, that they fail to see why Millennials do the same with so much fuss.