Midnight Pub

Anemoia

~milf_god

It's early morning here at the pub, the sun is already peeking over the horizon, but I sit at the bar, a glass less than half full of a fruity little alcoholic beverage sits in front of me, with my head in my hands anyways. Lost in deep thought.

For as long as I can remember I had always wished I was born earlier. Even when I was young as 7/8 years old, I found myself wishing that I could've experienced, the 70s, 80s, and 90s. I was born in the late 90s, but I don't think spending the years 1997-2000 crying, shitting, and pissing in your diaper really counts for much of anything. I listen to A LOT, of older music and watch older music videos...I hate most modern music because for some reason they just strike a nerve that irritates me to no end. That droning, flat, dull music...MAKE IT STOP. I watch 70s and 80s films too and I don't know what it is, but everyone looked like they were having so much fun back then. Their smiles...the glam, the way they bonded with one another. I know people like to call those films "cheesy", but I feel like there's a sincerity to it and they genuinely had fun making the films that they did back then.

It's nothing like what we do today (it feels like people are more hostile than ever in 2022 and everything is done for clout/to get the internet talking). I don't know if I'm just looking at these time through rose tinted glasses, but it's like no one these days knows how to have fun anymore...or even be kind. Like, even with remakes today, they're always made to be all "dark & gritty" compared to their original counterpart from years ago and make the characters meaner? (I'm looking @ you Fresh Prince remake.) I watch those films and TV shows from decades ago and feel such a strange and sad longing for something I have never or will ever experience. It's just something I can't help, but it's not necessarily something I want to suppress either?

I find myself almost being jealous of older people and only one or two of my friends kinda feel that same longing for those times as I do. It makes me feel out of place a lot of times. I just discovered the word "Anemoia" recently (which means being nostalgic for a time you have never known), and it just stuck with me. I finally have a word for this feeling I feel all the time. I don't just have anemoia, I have EXTREME anemoia. Would that make me an anemoiac? Anemoniac? I don't know if reincarnation is real, but maybe I'm missing those times so desperately because of a past life? Because current times seem to be so horrible and stressful all the time? Or maybe I just got it from my dad. He's a pretty nostalgic guy. He reminisces about being a teenager in the 70s all the time and if I were his age, I truly think I would be the exact same way. I just don't know what I'm supposed to do with all these feelings I feel when watch or listen to something older. I always feel like I just missed out on some truly great and fun times that will never come back...and sometimes that keeps me up at night.

Yeah. I'm gonna need another refill, bartender.

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~contrarian wrote (thread):

I'm an old soul, but if I was bound to live through this time period I would have preferred to be born just a few years earlier. I think I enjoy old media that isn't the classics more than most but don't think it's good to get caught up in the cobwebs of history. The past is a different world, and it's expensive to live anywhere but the present. I love retro-style artifacts, but you have to accept when a movement is a spent cultural force and has become camp. I think there are always people born outside of their time. Growing up with a father for whom military service was the defining moment of his life didn't help. I think you miss 90s optimism the most.

~inquiry wrote (thread):

The times I grew up seemed magical beyond subsequent comparison.

But, then, it's hard to say whether it was the times, or my being a child/teen with a mind too ignorant to know any better, to be aware of underlying social rot/duplicity, etc.

I will say I get miffed from time to time for being roped in with "boomers". My year of birth "makes the cut" per whatever the arbitrary cutoff point was last time I checked (I want to say it was 1964...?).

But I'll never forget awakening the day after I got my driver's license (latter 1970's) to learn gasoline prices had DOUBLED overnight, and I was hardly nonchalant about it for being in anything but some buoyant income stream.

I'll also never forget the company I joined out of college announcing they were changing their pension situation such that had I been there a year sooner, I'd have gotten the full/legacy pension/benefits, but instead wound up with a "cash out" (into a 401k-ish situation), with no medical/dental benefits.

There've been similar things I'm not remembering specifically in this moment. I'm mostly remembering a sense of having "just missed out" on a stereotypically amazing boomer life.

A few years back I got a bit tipsy, and rather laid into my wife's older sister and her husband, who are five or six years older than us, ranting a la "What's it like to be a REAL boomer - as opposed to being one essentially by arbitrary definition alone without the goods/benefits to show for it?"

They just smiled. They knew. They're easily five to ten times better off than us. I wouldn't be surprised if it were twenty.

So... I can't complain because I know I had it far easier/better than younger moderns. But to perpetually read about how bad I should feel about it (I'm NOT saying that's what I found in your yet again thoughtful, enjoyable read), well... "it ain't me... it ain't me... I ain't no senator's son, no...."

But setting down the economic aspect for the balance of this post:

I adored much of 1990's music. To me it seemed like new and improved 1970's music.

I also rather enjoy a lot of modern hip hop, probably because I'm fine with what I'll call "repetition with interesting/clever twists".

But the late 60's / early 70's were my child- and teen- hood, so the pop hits of those times feel as though they were a sort of "fundamental basis of reality". They're mostly what my wife and I perform out, which often feels like time-travel.

I'm full of... theories when pondering comparisons between then and now... but, again (but said differently), to me having been there and been much younger at the time constitutes some serious potting soil for bias.

All that (probably rather poorly) said, I must insist

Brandy

is the finest non-Beatles pop song of all time. :-)

(assuming the listener can get past what these days are likely considered somewhere between latent and obscene sexism, of course... ;-) )

~tatterdemalion wrote (thread):

They do say that youth is wasted on the young.

I'm one of those older people you speak of; I was a teenager in the late 80s and early 90s. Looking back, I have to say that some of your impressions are right, but also that there's a big dose of rose-colored glasses going on.

First, regarding music and movies, remember that 90% of everything is crap. There were some absolute classic movies and a ton of great music in the 80s and 90s, but there were even more stinkers. Largely no one remembers the bad ones, unless they are enthusiasts of "le cine bad", as I call it. I was waiting tables at a fast-casual family restaurant in 1992, and used to get home late and watch "USA Up All Night", a show that presented B movies with a host that mocked them, so I saw a lot of the bad ones. Social life in high schools was disastrous; the jocks and preps vs. nerds dynamic that is played for laughs in the movies was a real thing. We didn't have school shooters yet, but bullying, including violence, was generally accepted and school authorities tended to look the other way.

As for the feeling of brightness and fun, it was certainly there, but also some of it was forced. In the 80s in the US, our president was a senile ideologue who brought us to the brink of nuclear war, we had "tornado drills" in schools in a region that was not susceptible to tornadoes (actually nuclear bombing drills), and most of us expected to die in atomic fire before we could legally drink. A lot of the media showed an idealized America as a form of Cold War propaganda, though it wasn't as blatantly detached from reality as today's, possibly because income inequality, though widening, was not as high as it is now. And quite a bit of the fun and lightness were "whistling past the graveyard". As the Soviet Union fell, some of that positivity became more heartfelt, but equally delusional, as mass culture got high on it's own supply, looking at the "end of history".

There were dark visions in the 80s and 90s though, and I should know, since I spent most of my teenage years as a goth. Horror was big in the 80s, a lot of it cheesy and surface-level, like Stephen King and slasher movies. But there was also real development of the genre from people like Clive Barker and Thomas Ligotti. A lot of New Wave music, especially in the early 80s, was a reaction to the damage being done to working-class communities by Thatcherism, especially in Scotland and northern England. The 80s also brought us cyberpunk in literature, which was fairly explicitly dystopian, and it entered into mass media by the early to mid 90s, though often with the dystopian vision weakened and replaced with just a cool aesthetic. Of course, now, we are living in the future that the cyberpunk authors imagined in the 80s, with everything coming to pass *except* the cool aesthetic.

As a side note, the trend of "darker and grittier" reboots started in the early 90s in comic books, a period that's known in retrospect as the "Dork Age". It was bad. But comic book movies carried on this "take me very seriously" style up until 2011 or 2012.

Anyway, we're here now. As you probably know, there's a pretty widespread nostalgia for the 80s and 90s right now. The Synthwave music scene is thriving, and there are mainstream artists borrowing its aesthetics. And yeah, a lot of that nostalgia and anemoia is certainly because the present is pretty bad. But the 80s and 90s were not great, and the ways in which they were bad created the conditions we live in today. I probably don't go a day without thinking about the fact that the 90s were that window of time where we had both enough knowledge of global warming to act on, and enough time to avoid severe effects, but we didn't do anything.

~bartender, if you would be so kind, take my coffee cup and bring me back a Scotch, neat, if you please.

~junkman wrote (thread):

Forget the refill here's the bottle. I use to think people who thought like you were just eating up the commercialization of nostalgia. For instance I can not recall growing up how many times I would hear people say that they wished that they grew up in the 80s because the music and style was better. But then I realized I hated most of the modern music that was being produced. I feel that music prior to the 2000s was trying to sell you the music as apposed to today were the music is trying to sell you the artist. And movies today definitely lean to a more darker tone, in fact you see this high glamorization in the villains of movies to the point that the villain out shines the protagonist. hmm ya you might be right, things might be more appealing back in the day. Keep the drinks coming.