Let's talk nostalgia
Greeting everyone, first time actually posting on tildes so try and forgive me for any shortcomings as it's hard to tap out paragraphs on a mobile device.
So I wanted to ask you all, when you think nostalgia what specific idea or memory comes up for you?
When i give it some thought my specific memories of nostalgia are of the late 90s early 2000s. I picture a freshly constructed suburban neighborhood where there are no fences built yet, no trees planted or grown, and just grass everywhere - giving it a very liminal feeling. I reflect back on the hours spent outside until after dusk where the amber glow of the street lamps brought a feeling of warmth and coziness on a warm spring evening.
I also think about the technology, or lack thereof, at the time and how we used it. Beige computers transitioning to black ones as the 2000s crept up, using your big toe to turn them on, playing runescape or Sims Deluxe Edition mindlessly for an unhealthy amount of time etc. I think about the connectivity we had to each other, no smart phones, a wild west internet, and in my case a house phone with a kilometer long cord so that grandma can call europe with calling cards for hours on end while she tangles us all up with the cobweb of wires.
The list of memories can go on forever, but now I turn it over to you guys/gals.
In a general sense, nostalgia stirs for me memories of a time when rules were less present, society was less defined, and it was easier to try new things, to make mistakes, and just shrug it off. We drank from the garden hose and rode in the back of a pickup truck. No one had nearly enough money to pull off the look of the people in magazines and on tv, so we cobbled together outfits in our own creative ways without fear of judgement. The eyes of the world were not always upon us. Punk bands could be wild, rappers could take over dance floors, artists could graffiti walls and writers could handout xeroxed zines, and then everyone could go back to their families in privacy. The world felt full of imagination and potential running for the sake of some mysterious wanderlust within. It was a messy rough dangerous playground without photo ops or followers.
My biggest ones? They all involve my late brother.
Watching The Simpsons and Futurama as kids / teenagers
Being out on my motorbike with him when we both passed our test
Spending hours being angry at a crank we didn't realise was the wrong one for our BMXs
Spending hours travelling to the other side of the country to see Offspring in 2003/2004
They bring a nostalgic feeling of "Man, those were such easy times" to me. Warm, Fuzzy and loving.
Guy's been gone four years next month. Life has not been right since.
I appreciate you posting here on a deeper level - you guys sound like you really had alot of fun and good memories together. Though I cannot relate to the loss of a sibling nor the devastation behind such a loss, you still have my condolences Pioneer.
The times definitely felt easier back then, as you said warm, fuzzy and loving. Oh how I miss being young again with not many worries in my mind.
Thanks buddy, Appreciate it.
It's just one of those things we work through day to day, some are good, some are awful. But use either one to feel how you feel and keep moving forwards when you can :)
Nostalgia is a great motivator to create new good memories.
Sorry for you loss. Just lost my oldest brother recently and it hurts.
I'm almost 37 and nostalgia has been hitting hard these last few years. Time seems to be accelerating these days.
I am in a happy period of my life. Moved to a bigger city (exactly where my late brother lived, he died months after I moved to his city), living with my SO, two dogs, flexible job.
But as you said, the feeling of it being not right is constantly there. There is always that void.
You get it man, it's like a hole you can't quite fill and really don't want to even try. It's tough.
But it's a day at a time, and celebrating the times we would have had that keeps me going.
Sorry about your bro buddy, I shall raise a non-alcoholic beer in celebration of lives lost.
Using Tildes feels very nostalgic for me because it looks very web 1.0, I love it and I feel right at home!
I love the simplicity of it as I try and remove stressor and constant bombardment of negative information from my life, Tildes is perfect for me.
Same here. Love the simplicity and the fact that people are all nice to each other! Every conversation I've been a part of or those I've only read, have all been very civil!
This is a good one, I hadn't really thought about why Tildes felt so familiar. I do miss "old" internet. Message boards, messengers, Yahoo groups, web rings. I spent an unhealthy amount of time on role playing message boards and groups, and they looked simple and clean like tildes does!
Completely agreed: It feels like going back in a social sense, but not in a technological sense? There's a civility and openness here that I'm very much enjoying.
Out of all the normal triggers, smells do it for me.
Freshly cut grass always reminds me of summertime for example. Recently my wife wore a specific scent and it had a big nostalgia hit - no clue where I smelt it before now but my nose certainly remembered it!
Scents are weird. For me, the two big nostalgia triggers are house paint and hand soap.
I remember playing Creatures on my Pentium as a kid, while my parents painted a wall or something nearby. Now every time I smell house paint, it reminds me of that time I played Creatures.
Over the years, my parents used all kinds of different hand soaps, and so did the parents of my friends. Sometimes I'll go somewhere today, wash my hands and instantly recognise the scent of the soap from some distant point in my past, but I can never quite place it. It just reminds me of something long ago.
JUST after I finished talking about Creatures in the "games nobody talks about" thread...! I really wish there was still a reliable way to play the game with all the great mods that existed for it! Despite its issues, I always loved it more than The Sims.
Omg Creatures. I'd forgotten all about that.
My first creature thought its own name was "Bad" which made me feel too guilty to keep playing.
Creatures was an outstanding game. I'm very fond of the series and its ambitious simulation of genetics.
It's sad that Cyberlife/Creatures Labs folded. Nobody's done anything notable with the IP ever since, except to make the games available through digital download.
But at least it's still available!
I was thinking of smells too when I created the topic, my grandmother always used a product called nivea-cream and every once in a while I get a whiff of it at some store selling it and all the memories come flooding back.
Another smell is specific to my one friend's home. Whatever combination of potpourri or cleaning products they use always triggered memories of going over there and hanging out. Recently he gave me an old dell computer from his house and when I turned it on my garage filled the smell of his house. I'm guessing it was really impregnated with that stuff. Very strange but oddly comforting.
Some of my happiest times as a teenager were the summers I spent working at a Renaissance Faire as a pickle seller. Smells like cinnamon roasted almonds, garlic mushroom bowls or even the pickle brine always remind of it. I still go back as a patron every year or so even though it is mostly for nostalgia.
Call me crazy but I am nostalgic about the "wild west internet" before everything was search engine optimized and centralized and astroturfed out the wazoo. I miss Homestar Runner and We Love Da Moon and YTMND and AIM (or even ICQ). I miss the simple joys of playing a text based MUD or a doofy flash game. Everything felt more... pure? Not in a puritan sense (lord no, lol, the wild west internet could be hostile AF) but more in a pure, unfiltered sense.
For me, thinking of nostalgia reminds me of being a kid, getting up early in the morning and booting up my 486 to play Commander Keen. When I was young, my parents bought us a used 486 for Christmas, with MS-DOS and Windows 3.11. We had a tonne of shareware games, and a lot of free time.
The old Windows 3 UI invokes tonnes of nostalgia for me. So much so that I designed my personal website with a similar look & feel.
I think our first family pc was windows 95 based but commander keen was a staple for me and by brother. We got a disc called game empire from incredible universe which was a collection of freeware/shareware and demo games. It was endless hours of fun that probably should of been spent elsewhere, but what else are a couple suburban kids supposed to do in 1997?
Some of our favorites were catacombs 3D, secret agent, and Blake stone, and for whatever reason we insisted saving everything to the windows "my briefcase" folder which is nostalgia in itself.
Commander keen was my absolute favorite game. I never had a console growing up, just a PC. When I think platformer I don't think Mario, I think of the commander.
I also remember HATING Windows 95, and thinking it would be the end of them.
I was born in the early 90s, in that sliver of time where there was no World Wide Web but there were two Germanys and a Soviet Union. I feel nostalgic for a world I observed but was too young to participate in. Serif fonts, commercial jingles, cassette tape littering the roads, the sound of my mom talking to my aunt for hours from a spiral-corded phone, falling asleep to the sound of Dennis Richmond's voice on the 10 o'clock news. Wood paneling, thrifty's ice cream, Alphie and Teddy Ruxpin.
They call my generation the first digital natives, but it's more like coming to a new land as a child. Quick to adapt, but it's not where I was born. I remember being in the old world and those memories feel more substantial, in some ways that world felt more real. We didn't have the internet at home until 1999 or 2000, a little late, so that might count for something.
I also feel nostalgic for the elder generation. I cried for days when Betty White died, not because she was gone, she had a good run. I cried realizing that her time was up, all these people we shared the earth with were going to be leaving, and this was going to keep happening. I guess it never hit me before that.
I have similar suburban memories as you do, but my nostalgia is also market by many "turning points" or whatever you'd like to call them. Moving to America, my parents divorce, moving to Colorado from Illinois, moving away to college - it's the spaces in between which I'm nostalgic for, in some cases more than others.
One of my fondest periods was my time in Colorado before I sank into depression (16-18). I had so much freedom to just roam and do what I pleased. My parents (dad/stepmom) were overbearing, but I could just ride off on my bike for an entire day and be out of touch without a phone. My high school was open campus, and so with careful planning of classes I could have blocks of free time.
I especially loved my photography class. I had it first thing in the morning, followed by a free period. My teacher would give us all a camera with some film and then tell us to go out into town and take pictures. I ended up just hanging out at a local coffee shop for hours with a book in hand.
I miss those days, for sure, but I'm very happy and content with where I am now. I have a home, a decent job, a loving family, and a LOT less toxicity in my life after leaving my dad and stepmom behind.
Nostalgia is a powerful feeling, but wallowing too much in it can be dangerous as well. That depressive episode I mentioned earlier, that was brought on partially by getting far too wrapped up in the past and what I'd lost.
Instead, I wish I'd focused on what I still had and had to gain. That negative thinking led me to some of the darkest moments of my life; invaluable experiences to draw upon, but it definitely damaged me.
For me, nostalgia brings back memories of the curiosity of exploration.
From the first Atari home console and exploring all the absolutely groundbreaking games.
Exploring all the coast line and islands where I grew up (west coast of Florida).
Exploring along with the Space Shuttle program.
Exploring all the amazing things the Apple ][e could do while in school.
Exploring all the things and amazing programs like Print Shop 1.0 could do on my parents' Epson dual-floppy (no hd) computer could do.
Exploring all the things my personal XT could do with its 1200 or 2400 baud modem and a 20 MB hard drive.
Exploring everything to do with the BBS scene (from wardialing numbers hoping to find a 'hidden' BBS, trying to gain access I wasn't meant to be in, setting them up and running them, pushing the computer's limits with DESQview+QEMM)
Exploring this new thing called the "information relay network" using completely new to me things with funny names like gopher, lynx, archie, etc.
Exploring islands and the lakes around where we moved to when I was 13.
Exploring this little shareware title called "Doom" that was completely game changing (no pun intended)
While my kids can explore stuff I always wonder if they have the same sense of wonderment as my generation did. While they can explore Fortnite, it's also just shooter #5972. They were old enough that they vaguely remember Minecraft Alpha, so there's that.
I thing a person's age at introduction makes a huge difference as well. I was around 6 or 7 when the Atari became huge and it was a little over a year later when I got a Colecovision with Atari cart adapter. I was in Middle School when our school got the ][e's (and the Challenger exploded). These things were all relatively new to the world (or at least the general population). My kids grew up when people going to space is so "common" it's rarely discussed and with all this tech. Going from monochome to 16 colors to 256 colors and beyond was a huge leap but going from HD to UHD doesn't impress anyone for example.
I too wonder if the youth of today share the same wonder and sense of exploration as the youth of days past. To me, and I could be wrong, it seems that because we were not so connected back then we were forced to go out and seek things and explore, which made it more appealing. Today it seems there is information overload and due to that overload the awe and wonder of exploration died a little.
I could make up an example - going out and looking for a new store was more exciting back in the day as you were going in blind. Today you look at your phone, see the reviews, and determine whether it's worth it to leave the house and go to that store.
That's an interesting example that hadn't crossed my mind. I know that my kids and I have fun "going in blind" as we try new comic shops and the like since we will go as soon as they open for business. I think I've been incredibly lucky to have accidently (or at least not intentionallly) made our outtings as much about the trip as the destination. Sure, we may end up at a comic ship that is the absolutely cold drizzles but we still had fun talking about the anticipation of what we hope to see/find there and laughing at how different it was from our expectations on the way home that I feel they still have a good trip even though the destination sucked.
However, you're completely spot on that we'll unintentionally check reviews when we look up hours and/or location on a place we haven't been to that's been open for a bit.
I think my kid's have that sense of exploration and nostalgia for their Oculus VR titles since they were old enough to realize how new and groundbreaking it is/was.
Your nostalgia sounds eerily similar to mine right down to where I grew up. Are you me? :)
Honestly the first thing that came to mind was reading the back of the toothpaste while on the loo. I had it memorised.
Trying to fix the antenna on the TV. Also I'm pretty sure I could replicate the noise of a dial up modem connecting to the internet.
Copying notes from a chalkboard or an overhead projector.
Reading the Sunday paper and watching the 7pm news, at a time when the only outside opinions were shared over the dinner table or in the opinions column of the newspaper.
The thing I miss most is just being in the moment without the distraction of technology. I love camping, gives me an excuse to switch off my phone and just enjoy chatting around the fire or staring into the flames. Always reminds me of good times.
Your mention of camping has reminded me once again that I need to take a step back and find time to do the activities that I always used to do. Camping being one of them - though the problem is I do not like to go camping alone (fear of being murdered), and finding camping buddies who will not flake out at the last minute is difficult.
You nailed the early 2000s. No one had phones, so we always had to be home when the streetlights came on. There was less fear as a society, in suburban neighborhoods at least. You'd get off from school, try to convince your parents that you didn't have any homework, and get on a bike, and later a skateboard and go knock on doors to see who wanted to play. Then we'd just play in the streets until dinner.
I remember a time where we found an old tent in the shed and my friends and I took it to the deep overgrown parts of the woods. We set it up and brought all sorts of decor like bits of carpet, little lamps etc. It would be our go-to meet up spot to hang out (and sometimes smoke a heroic amount of weed in our highschool years).
I'm sure it is, but we just arent there to witness it. We had a friend who was left home alone alot and in his basement he had a crawl space that was chest height, concealed behind a pile of random furniture, which opened up into a larger room for some reason. This room we called "the annex" and it was decorated with all sorts of stoner graffiti, pillows, chairs, and a small fan blowing air outside through a little grate in the wall.
He claims his parents never knew about it, but im not so sure.
I surround myself with lots of antique furniture and the like. I guess most of the aesthetic is from my pre-war grandparents stuff.
To me there’s nothing like Glen Miller playing out of a vintage standing radio while you just look out your window and catch a sunset. Feeling time pass. All the things that are gone and the old things that are still here.
I wish I could go back to that summer vacation when I read Goblet of Fire for the first time. I used to read a lot in those days.
So many things. Life before the interstates and bypasses had us traveling through many towns. Every town was different with unique stores and restaurants. In my earliest memories, even McDonalds hadn't made it to our area, although I've heard there was one some 40 miles away. I guess we never went to that area. One negative was traffic. You were stuck behind the slowest driver, sometimes with lines of cars behind them at least 30 or 40 cars deep, and passing was scary when someone tried to pass five cars at a time. There were certain popular destinations where you knew this was what the trip would be like for the better part of an hour or more. Multi-lane roads exitsed, but not necessarily in the directions you wanted to go.
Summertime felt like forever. When school got out, life was ours. We'd bring buckets to pick blackberries that grew wild less then a mile from our home. We invented our games, or at least as one of the youngest in the neighborhood group it felt that way. Water fights were one of my favorite. We could stay out late playing flashlight tag. When we got bored, someone would come up with something to do. From putting on silly plays, to climbing on someone's roof without a ladder (never did that again), to impromtu ballgames, to just hanging around talking. We were outside and moving most of the day. Inside there was no air-conditioning, so remembering the sound of the big floor fan brings me right back to those days.
Your mention of roads, towns and traffic reminded me of my memory of 90s early 2000s Poland. When I was a child I'd go there every year for months at a time and the driving conditions were much the same. A single 2 lane road from Warsaw to the town I went to was about a 4 hour drive and you'd make the trip an event by stopping by in specific towns to buy things. Alot of times people would peddle fruits and mushrooms and smoked cheese on the side of the road and we would buy those.
Today however it's a highway, the trip takes 2 hours, and all those little villages and roadside peddlers are now inaccessible. It saddens me a little but I'm glad I could see Poland rebuild itself after the iron curtain went down - infrastructure everywhere increased in quality and now it's a very modern country.
I very specifically think of just having moved and spending a majority of my time on my little powder blue transparent GameBoy Advance playing Pokémon Sapphire. Moving always triggers this for me now so every time my life is upheaved I’ll usually end up burying myself in the same old thing again.
In this same vein: that whole era of transparent tech is very nostalgic. Beige computers do it for me too, but not quite to the same level, as these transparent ones were something to envy. Same goes for the candy-colored Macs that lived in the computer lab, reserved for Kid Pix and a handful of games (what was that bug one called? or the dinosaur one?)
Roller blading. Going to thrift stores and getting bagels afterward. Any anime that was on Toonami. Geocities. Furbys and Garfield and the Taco Bell chihuahua. Those little Taco Bell nachos. Watching South Park with my mom when I should be sleeping. Daniel Radcliffe’s existence.
So many things, and they are all tied to being 8 years old again. Probably something to explore there next time I’m able to do therapy but for now? I’ll just try to enjoy it.
Toonami had no right to be as good as it was, but oh man did it slap hard. I loved alot of the shows on there, I remember being captivated by Gundam and DBZ.
I build Gunpla now and also built myself a Bulma model kit… so same on those. I also have a full set of Japanese Yu Yu Hakusho manga ready for when I finally know enough Japanese to tackle them haha.
I see a lot of similar vibes here that my brain went to. I think of two big things. One is the technology hobbies like my early consoles (which for me was the Atari 2600, NES, and SNES) and computers (TI 99/4a, Apple IIe, c64, IBM XT, then later 386/486) and all the games, programming, and exploration that came with them. The other is the exploring the world on bicycles, foot, or boats (FL west coast) with friends. I cannot fathom allowing my kids to just go exploring who knows where for the day and to be back before dark. That was the norm back then, we'd just go out into the local neighborhoods or less populated areas and have fun doing it.
Man, what was with the beige computer color back then? In hindsight it was pretty ugly.
The strongest feelings of nostalgia that I get are related to one particular summer vacation in elementary school. I spent most nights staying up until 1 or 2 in the morning with my sister in her room, where we'd switch off every half hour taking turns on our desktop computer playing Neopets. The person not on the computer would be on the bed reading whatever book we were sharing that night, listening to cheesy early '00s music on our portable CD player. Then during the days we'd play in the creek in front of our house and spend custody weekends with our dad running around his land.
So the things that trigger a strong sense of nostalgia for me most commonly are:
And unrelated to that, sometimes I'll remember the Laffy Taffy watermelon flavor with the seeds and I'm immediately transported back to being five or six years old and at our public swimming pool, which had a vending machine with those in it.
Oh, and the smell of the Scholastic Book Fair catalogues! I think they had a really distinct smell, didn't they? Sometimes junk mail flyers will smell like it, and it takes me back.
I must admit I prefer the beige computers over the RGB nightmares people build today. So much so that I personally made a few sleeper PCs inside old beige cases.
Made of injection molded plastic and plate steel, these things were tough!
The Scholastic Book Fair, oh how I miss thee.. I remember that smell well.. I was always going after iSpy and those cutout diagram books of ships/buildings.
It's been moving reading the comments in here, some sad, some happy, some bittersweet.
I recently became a father last year and it made me reflect on the previous stages of my life heavily, especially my childhood. I have a lot of fond memories of my time at high school and post-high school but those don't feel nostalgic for me yet even though I started high school 21 years ago and finished high school 15 years ago now!
I remembered being 10 and riding my bike with friends during the summer holidays to Plane Castle,we used to giggle with each other because it's original name is Cock-a-Bendy Castle (still makes me giggle to be fair). The warm sun on our arms, bottle of ice cold water in my bikes bottle holder, condensation dripping on my leg, and the quiet back roads alongside farms and cottages.
I remembered the excitement of opening my Nintendo 64 on Christmas Day 1997 with a copy of Mario 64. I'd never seen anything like it! I remember my uncle coming over for Christmas dinner and sitting with me while I played Mario on the big 32" CRT TV in the living room.
I remember my mum and dad approaching me in 1998 saying that they normally wouldn't get a game outside of Christmas and Birthdays but every newspaper is saying that this new game on the Nintendo is the best game ever made. It was of course Ocarina of Time and that started a lifelong love of the Zelda series.
I remember getting up early on Saturday mornings with my brother to watch SMTV Live or Live & Kicking while we ate huge bowls of cereal. We didn't want to miss all the games and TV shows. If my mum was feeling charitable she'd let us phone in for an entry into a competition to win prizes (we never did win anything though).
I remembered watching programmes like Duck Tales, Darkwing Duck, X-Men, Spider-Man, Johnny Quest, Freakazoid, Crystal Maze, Fun House, and Art Attack.
I have a lot of fond memories of my childhood with family and friends and even just by myself. I know it can be unhealthy to focus on the past but there's definitely some comfort in it as long as it doesn't become a problem.
I keep coming back to the word Anemoia when thinking about nostalgia. It describes the feeling I get rather frequently especially through music and could never really put into words. A kind of distraught melancholy feeling for me that on the surface seems unattractive but at the same time completely sine qua non and encapsulating.
Ah the dictionary of obscure sorrows, a great text really putting concepts together that we don't really have words for.
I agree with you on the anemoia, for some reason I get transported into the 80s quite often. I think I was exposed to so much 80s related tech and media as a child, that is where I am able to subconsciously put together false memories from.
Beautiful golden sunsets somehow always seem to incite that feeling for me. As well as the smell of grass and forests after a rainfall.
In a primarily 'memory' before 'feeling' sense , old Gameboy Colour games does it for me. Lots of good childhood memories there. :)
Pokémon yellow in a lime green Gameboy for me!
I've been thinking about this a lot lately. A couple of people have mentioned scents and the most powerful one for me is the smell of camel cigarettes. It immediately takes me back to the summers I spent with my grandmother, making bonfires and helping her TNR the neighborhood strays.
I'm approaching 30, so maybe I'm still a little young to be feeling this way. But I'm weirdly nostalgic for my time in college which was less than a decade ago. It's weird to me because college represents a decidedly very unpleasant chapter of my life. But at the same time I'm nostalgic for the relatively large amount of free time I had to tinker with electronics and just build things for the joy of it.
It's really weird how smells and particularly music can immediately take you back to a certain time and place in your life. For me, Caramelldansen (of all things) illicits a very strong feeling of melancholy.
Oh man, you unlocked a memory. I had an uncle who smoked Camels back when they came with Camel Cash, they looked like dollars and he always gave them to me to play with. Cigarettes felt more acceptable back then (I was born a few years before you)
I'm fine leaving that in the past!
There’s too many things to mention but one thing I miss was scheduled programming on TV. Sort of kept everything on a schedule, shows would end at the top or half of the hour, news at 6 and movie specials on Friday and the weekends.
Time flows differently when you’re not prompted to stop whatever you’re doing, whether that be binging shows on a streaming service or watching twitch.