Those were the days

Is the uptick in nostalgia holding us back, or helping us cope?

- Liesl Robertson

IT’S official – the ’90s are back. People of all ages are running around chasing Pokémon characters on their phones; Winona Ryder, Cindy Crawford and chokers are cool again; and we’re back to watching Full House and Jurassic Park – albeit slightly revamped versions. Come to think of it, the ’80s are also having a moment. Netflix hit Stranger Things is set in 1983 and recalls movie classics from the era such as ET, Close Encounters of the Third Kind and The Goonies. MacGyver is being remade, as is Police Academy. Even the early 2000s seem delightfully vintage these days – Gilmore Girls will be back on screen soon as will Prison Break, and the Spiderman film franchise is set to be rebooted in 2017 for the third time since the first one came out in 2002.

But it’s gone beyond bringing back everything that was popular 10, 20 or 30 years ago. Nostalgia is a bona fide trend. Vinyl record sales are going up. Facebook has a popular app called Timehop, which reminds users of things they posted two, three or five years ago on a particular day, and lets them repost and reminisce about it. And hashtags like #tbt (Throwback Thursday) or #fbf (Flashback Friday) are used daily on social media.

Experts believe that millennials are especially susceptible to feelings of nostalgia, because they grew up with technology and have been bombarded with information in a way that no other generation has been. ‘We call this early on set nostalgia, where there is such an information overload that it has compressed their sense of time,’ says Jamie Gutfreund, chief marketing manager at brand agency Deep Focus. ‘Initially #tbt started off as a throwback to your childhood, but now it’s a throwback to last week.’

A Peter Pan mindset