My 30th high school class reunion is this weekend. That’s right, I graduated before a single president had the last name of “Bush.” When mullets were cool. When the world’s very first laptops weighed nearly 20 pounds.
For a lot of you, the world of 1987 would seem as unfamiliar as a foreign planet, as archaic as the Holy Roman Empire. No smartphones? No internet? You actually had to roll down car windows? Crazy, right?
But for oldsters like me, the ’80s are funny for a different reason: It feels like yesterday.
I may look old(ish), but a big chunk of me still feels like an 18-year-old. Music from Prince and Bruce Springsteen, David Bowie and (forgive me) Cyndi Lauper don’t feel like oldies: They feel like real music, man. And if a DJ happens to be on hand to spin some of those classics during my reunion, I might be tempted to dance the night away … or until maybe I pull a muscle.
Maybe you’re not that different from me. You might be 29. Or 67. But I bet that there are moments where you still feel like you’re 17 or 18, wondering just when you’ll actually feel wise and understanding like adults are supposed to feel. (And if you really are 18 or younger, well, just bookmark this page and read it again in another 10 years on your holographic implants or whatever.)
In 1984, Alphaville came out with a song called “Forever Young.” Back then, I read it as a sort of fatalistic ballad about the inevitability of getting old and decrepit. “I want to be forever young,” the song tells us.
But when I hit 40, I realized—a bit to my own horror—that I didn’t feel that much different than I did when I was in high school. There I was, with a wife and two kids and a job that paid my mortgage, and I still felt like a kid. A more responsible kid, sure, but still a kid.
In our minds, perhaps we always do feel forever young. Too bad our bodies don’t buy into the lie.
I think that’s why nostalgia is such a powerful force in the culture today. It allows us to live in the past to some extent—to make our external reality match up a bit more closely with our forever-young hearts. Well, sort of.
Consider last year’s top-grossing concert tours: Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band topped Beyoncé as 2016’s biggest moneymaker—more than 30 years after their Top 40 heyday. Other acts in the top 10 included Guns N’ Roses, Paul McCartney, Garth Brooks and the Rolling Stones.
The year’s highest-grossing movie is Beauty and the Beast—its popularity at the box office no doubt spurred by young moms who, as children, watched the classic animated film a bazillion times on their old VHS machines. And a bunch of big-budget releases scheduled for release this fall are remakes or reboots, including Blade Runner 2049, Jumanji, Friday the 13th and the Six Billion Dollar Man.
Television seems particularly prone to tap into our culture’s collective keening for nostalgia. In the last seven months, I’ve reviewed MacGyver, Lethal Weapon, Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life, Twin Peaks, Fargo and Castlevania—all shows pinned to either movies or television shows or, in the last case, a video game from days gone by. Why, Netflix, what with its reboots (Fuller House) and nostalgia-centric shows (Stranger Things), seems to be pinning its entire business philosophy on our unquenchable thirst for yesteryear.
“We now live in a world where TV shows never die,” David Nevins, the chief executive of Showtime, told The New York Times. And these shows allow us to recall, in a way, our own past and youth, too.
Consider the passion that, say, a show like Friends still engenders. Whenever two of the old cast members end up in the same room, it apparently merits several fevered news stories, and the show’s legion of fans still pine for a reunion or reboot or something—despite the fact that the cast members themselves have said that a reunion will never happen. We even served up some thoughts from Matt LeBlanc, who played Joey in the old sitcom, in last week’s Culture Clips.
“What story are we telling?” LeBlanc asked The Daily Beast. “Those characters have all gone their separate ways, they’ve all grown up. … That show was about a finite period in people’s lives, after school and before you get married. That time where your friends are your support system. And once that time’s over, that time’s over.”
Ain’t that the truth? A hard truth, perhaps, but a truth nevertheless.
We are finite creatures. We pass through the seasons of our lives like road-trippers in a car that never stops, making note of the landmarks we see along the way but unable to make a home there. We see our high school selves change and move on. We watch our kids grow and leave. Sometimes, we miss the times that came before. And 10 years from now, we’ll miss where we are—were—today.
But our God is an infinite God, and He gifted us a hint of the eternal. And so even as we change and grow and age, part of us takes the past with us. Not just the detritus we come across … the movies or music we loved back then. We remember, keenly, what it felt to be 8 years old. Or 18. Or 28. In a very real way, we’re still all those things … even if we don’t look it. Nostalgia doesn’t just help us tap into our old selves, but our infinite selves.
I don’t think nostalgia is bad. I’m as susceptible to its charms as anyone I know. But I also think it’s healthy to accept change, too. To understand that we are tourists through time, and as such to not just appreciate what we’ve seen, but embrace what’s to come. And to realize that, eventually, we’ll someday reach a land where clocks and calendars have no place, where past and future are one and the same. Where we’ll be forever young, forever old and, most importantly, forever home.
Recent Comments