The Nostalgia Cycle Loop
the economics of being stuck in the past
nostalgia, culture, elon and zuck [Part 1]
So one thing that is nice about a newsletter is that it isn’t as concrete as a book, but it also isn’t that dynamic. It’s not editable. Once it’s out, it’s pretty much gone. I don’t love that! And my hope with this specific newsletter (and his topic) is that it’s a brick going into the wall, not a permanent structure within itself.
I’m going to walk through some theories and then some ideas, and highly encourage readers to comment what *they* think - and that will build into the next newsletter. I think the power of the collective is way more powerful, and I would love to use this as a brainstorm!
The Nostalgia Cycle Loop
Hope is the one virtue that requires imagination, in the sense that we consider the past and imagine a better future.
The nostalgic content being churned out via movies, books, even music(!) requires less imagination on our part because it comes from already-established world building. It’s easier to imagine the context around a new Star Wars or Marvel sequel when we’ve already seen what Tatooine looks like or know what Loki thinks of Thor. It’s easy.
Just like it’s easier to not go to the gym or out for a run, it’s easier to not exercise our imaginations when given the option. And, like all virtues, hope requires practice - we risk our ability to hope when we let our imaginative muscles atrophy. The inability to hope is a spiritual problem, but it can extend to a very visible economic reality, too.
In short: higher saturation of nostalgia -> less imaginative capacity -> reduced ability to hope -> ?
And there are essentially three threads within this -
Hope requires imagination - and imagination requires work
Nostalgia encourages stagnancy, and we are in a culture cycle that encourages that
More nostalgia, less imagination, less hope - presumably sentiment dips, spending might get weird, people might throw all their cash into Dogecoin, nihilism becomes the forcing function for companies and investments, so on and so forth
This is sort of how I am thinking about it - I am going to revisit parts of this in later newsletters, but first, I want to talk about nostalgia.
Nostalgia
Adam Mastroianni wrote this really excellent paper (that I talked about last week too) on how people are just always feeling bad, and Derek summarized it well -
Our memory being biased toward positive information (nostalgia) + Our present-focused attention being biased toward negative information (threat) = Our general perception that everything is always getting worse
We remember the past as being better than it actually was. We treat the present moment as far worse than it actually is. In The Future of Nostalgia, Svetlana Boym explores the history of nostalgia, a study on longing and lost time. She writes -
The past has become much more unpredictable than the future. Nostalgia depends on this strange unpredictability… The ambivalent sentiment permeates twentieth-century popular culture, where technological advances and special effects are frequently used to recreate visions of the past, from the sinking Titanic to dying gladiators and extinct dinosaurs.
Somehow technology didn’t cure nostalgia but exacerbated it… Nostalgia inevitably reappears as a defense mechanism in a time of accelerated rhythms of life and upheavals.
Being reminiscent is reactive.
We reinvent the past: The idea of the past being more unpredictable than the future is a nod to the reinvention of time that we often do in our own heads.
And then we remake it: We tend to look back fondly on moments that might not warrant such warmth - but then we go on and remake those feelings with our technology and our movies and our music.
And it’s mostly because we are scared: It’s all a defense! A way to protect ourselves from the overwhelming speed towards some eventual inevitability that we are experiencing.
We are constantly seeking something beyond what we currently have - but when we reach into the past, instead of the future, that’s when things can be problematic. We get caught in a loop! And when the stories that we tell as a capital-s-Society are echoes of the graves from what once was, that’s really problematic.
Nostalgia as Culture
Boym again -
Culture is increasingly squeezed between the entertainment industry and religion.. with the waning of the role of the art and humanities, there are fewer and fewer venues for exploring nostalgia, which is compensated for with an overabundance of nostalgic readymades. The problem with prefabricated nostalgia is that it does not help us to deal with the future.
The nostalgia is a loop, requiring little to no imagination - it doesn’t prepare us for the reality that we have to deal with. It’s a form of forgetting, but it’s also escapism. Think of how many (relatively) uninspiring remakes and recycles there are of different TV shows.
Creative nostalgia reveals the fantasies of the age, and it is in those fantasies and potentialities that the future is born. One is nostalgic not for the past the way it was, but for the past the way it could have been. It is this past perfect that one strives to realize in the future.
The stories we tell on a broad scale are becoming less inspiring
They are simply iterations of the past - the way it “could have been”. We try to recreate this thematic through repetition, hoping that this past will become our future, but we just get stuck in a loop
Part of the reason for the nostalgia loop is economic uncertainty from studios and consumers
It’s because we feel like we are running out of time, running out of money, running out of space to think. How could we ever think of the future when the only thing that really feels stable and concrete (in many ways) is the past?
Kant once wrote that space is public and time is private. Now it seems the opposite is true; we might have more private space (if we are lucky) but less and less time, and with it less patience for cultural difference in understanding time… Oppressed by multitasking and managerial efficiency, we live under perpetual time pressure. The disease of this millennium will be called chronophobia or speedomania, and its treatment will be embarrassingly old-fashioned. Contemporary nostalgia is not so much about the past, as the vanishing present.
We are nostalgic because it's almost impossible to remain anchored to the moment in time that we are in. There is too much, at every second, and so in order to stabilize, we retreat to familiarity and comfort, which ends up stagnating us - and our culture.
But Who Defines Culture?
I read The Limits Of The Billionaire Imagination Are Everyone’s Problem by David Roth a few months ago, and I really haven’t been able to stop thinking about it. It’s about the incuriosity, the sheer boringness of our billionaires and what they do with the resources that they command.
It's not just about so few people having so much of everything, although that is plenty odious and offensive on its merits. The problem, as it is experienced moment by moment and day by day, is how little (the billionaires) have done with it, and how little what they have done with it has done for everyone else.
That inequality, when compounded over time and amplified by the cretinous and absolutely joyless mediocrity of the people in whose accounts that compounding gets done, winds up not just freezing the world in place, but shrinking it to the size of their own incuriosity.
This is only amplified by Zuck and Elon’s cage fight. Like! You have so much money. And sure, it’s kinda funny. But it’s also kind of annoying! The most entertaining outcome is the most likely as Elon says, but entertainment is cheap and our culture is dictated by these algorithms and this cage fight is a stony reminder of… boringness.
And of course, this goes beyond just Elon and Zuck (a cage fight is kinda cool).
Billionaires don’t set culture, but they do finance a large part of it.
And what their money goes to hasn’t meaningfully changed anything in a long time1 - they just follow herds, blow up bubbles, pump coins, and are so reflective of a lack of curiosity, a lack of imagination, and a lack of hope.
Money sets the tone, and billionaire boringness imapcts the rest of humanity in weird ways.
And because that’s weird and wealth concentration is weird, culture gets stuck. The algorithms that we are entrapped in are beautiful fountains of opportunity, but also a land of endless conflict and mind-numbing scrolling.
Life After Lifestyle by Toby Shorin explores the connection between culture and marketing and consumption and stories and consumerism and how they are all one and the same. He writes -
Today, social media has become a more perfect tool for culture than Arnold could have imagined, and its use a science of penetrating the mass mind. All communication now approaches propaganda, and language itself has become somebody else’s agenda. Little neutral ground remains outside of this “economy economy.”
The main idea is that we have “an economy where culture is made in service of brands. To be even more literal: cultural production has become a service industry for the supply chain.”
So we are stuck in a nostalgia loop because culture is branded by brands
The brands don’t have a (ton) of imagination (although some do!)
The financiers don’t really have any imagination (again, some do!)
The stories that we tell on a large scale are just repetitions of things that we have already heard because that’s the simplest and safest way to profit - and also the surest way as a consumer to know that your increasingly rare time will be valued.
There’s a lot to consider here. As Andy Clark wrote in The Experience Machine
Human minds are not elusive, ghostly inner things. They are seething, swirling oceans of prediction, continuously orchestrated by brain, body, and world. We should be careful what kinds of material, digital, and social worlds we build, because in building those worlds we are building our own minds too.
Our world is dictated by what we consume. And if that’s the past, then well, we are kinda stuck there. Forward momentum is hard. Reality is hard! As Morgan Housel wrote
A lot of times we’re not interested in truth – we’re interested in the elimination of uncertainty, and that fact alone causes us to believe things that have little relation to reality.
The nostalgia cycle loop is important - and so is imagination, something to discuss in the next newsletter!
Thanks for reading!
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It has and it hasn’t - the rate of progress on some fronts is confusing
When I was young, in university, I spent some time studying Asian Art. Much Chinese and Japanese art and painting are copies of earlier works. The assumption was that the "first" was the best, and that it was impossible to do better, and you should just attempt to make as good a copy as you could. [They also used red seals for proving authenticity]. I had a really hard time wrapping my ossified brain around the idea that the "best" art could only be copies of prior art. As I studied more history I came to see that the periods in Japan and China when this was most prevalent also seemed to coincide with periods of political stagnation and decline. I think this may be analogous to your thoughts on nostalgia weakening creativity.
While I agree that this is a bleak picture, it may not be quite as bleak as we are usually reminded, because of the selective reporting involved. If I were looking for more hopeful uses of billionaire money, I might look at what is being done by Ms. Jobs, or Ms. Bezos, people who have received money but not with the same ego investment as the "creators". I'd guess that they have done a much better job, from a societal perspective, than Musk or Zuckerberg. They just aren't seeking or receiving the same media attention.