The world is too caught up in the past, and it might be time to acknowledge it.
To be frank, I don’t think it’s necessarily a crime to reminisce on things that happened in the past. I do this all the time, and if I said it was a crime, I’d be a massive hypocrite. What I mean is that we as a collective tend to get too caught up in the past without having a clear vision for moving forward with our lives.
This is a trend that I have noticed all over the realms of social media, as it seems like the only things that get advertised and put in users’ faces are references to the past. Different media ventures and corporations have noticed this trend too. Take a look at what types of movies and television shows get released now – they’re mostly reboots of things that came out 20 years ago or more, and are usually terrible and get canceled with a quickness (i.e., the awful “Gossip Girl” reboot, the “Pretty Little Liars” reboot, etc).
Some studios are even bold enough to reboot or revive things that ended rather recently such as the “On My Block” sequel show which released two years after the ending of the original “On My Block,” and I don’t see the logic in that at all, there has to be at least a period where it feels like the show ended and got room to breathe.
This isn’t an isolated case in the film industry; the music industry gets hit with this all the time. Much of music production is sampling, which is to take an already recorded work – legally – and place it into a new track, giving it a new life. But where the line gets crossed for me is when musicians just sample songs without adding anything new, making their new songs soulless. There isn’t any substance to the new song because the artist is relying on the familiarity of the previous track to carry over, without doing the work to make it their own.
To me, this is the best way to describe how nostalgia can have its downsides. People can take this element of the past that is familiar to them, and strip it of its substance with a quickness if not handled properly. Whether that is in entertainment or not, I have seen where this applies. The best example of this would be the obsession with trend hopping.
Like most things, trends are cyclical, so they will always come and go, but the reason they’re so short-lived is that after a while, people tend to get bored with the trend, because everyone is doing the same thing. There is no substance to what is actually happening in that short-lived time. Everyone is doing it, only because everyone else is doing it. It’s easier to just go along with the trend, as it seems rather harmless.
In that way, nostalgia too seems rather harmless. There isn’t anything wrong with wanting to escape to a time where things seemed easier. But there should also be a plan for moving forward and seeing how you can grow as an individual.
Coming up with new ideas can actually enhance older ones, as you get to have a different look at what you are experiencing, and have a fresher end product as a result. Some of the best creations were a result of this middle ground: the best fashions, the best inventions, the best movies, books, you name it. We should be more willing to use nostalgia as a tool, not the foundation of what drives us as people.
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