The older I get, the less I feel hope for the future - or to be more accurate, the less the future gives me hope. That's a subtle difference in perspective, the former is forward looking, whereas the latter leaves open the possibility that hope might still survive but it might not lie in the future.
I turned 38 today and I suppose this is the point where it would be acceptable to have a mid-life crisis, the trouble is I'm a millennial and our entire lives have been marked by crisis after crisis, to the point where the idea of marking your progress through life with just one in particular seems ridiculous. I've lost count of how many "once-in-a-lifetime" events I have witnessed, and there doesn't seem to be any end in sight on that front.
Despite all this, I find hope in an unlikely place, where others look to the past and mourn what was lost, I look back and think to myself, this is possible, I know it is, because I witnessed it before. Some say history repeats itself, I prefer the adage that history doesn't repeat but it does often rhyme, for that is closer to my vision for the future, I hesitate to call it hope because that word doesn't feel real any more to me, and I don't think many of my generation or those that came after me would argue with that sentiment.
Nostalgia is a drug, and it can be quite effective at motivating you to make changes in your life, if you're willing to take that extra step, and go beyond reminiscing and put into practice the mentality of living in the era you want to recreate. I understand now why, when I was growing up in the 90s there were people who never gave up on their 80s fashions, never stopped listening to their 70s music, their 60s political and social ethos, and much to my chagrin their 50s and 40s pathos - it was because those decades held moments of positivity they held onto in a world they perceived as increasingly negative.
I know some will make the argument that you shouldn't live in the past, stand in the way of progress, or that you should "get with the times" to borrow an aphorism I heard a lot when I was younger, and I do acknowledge that sentiment, the trouble is that we aren't progressing, the future we're headed towards embodies everything negative about the past, whilst some see that as a price worth paying to try and recreate the world they remember, that is ultimately a fool's errand. History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme, and the reason it rhymes is because people behave in somewhat predictable ways. The desire for progress that existed in decades past was borne of exhaustion with the status quo, borne of the belief that a different future was possible. Not unlike Marty McFly we need to go back to the future, back to a world that had a vision of what the future could look like and started building it in the moment.
If I could take one piece of technology that exists today and put a silver bullet in it, my attention wouldn't immediately fall on AI, despite the fixation people have on it, I have seen technology rise, and fall, bubbles inflate, and pop, and I honestly don't think this technology will be the death of us, AI is ultimately a mirror, it reflects us, and if we don't want that reflection to be something we hate then we need to lead by example. No, the technology I would kill off, is a piece of software called Material Design - if you've never heard of it, that's not surprising, if you're not a developer you probably wouldn't have reason to, but I guarantee you've seen it. Material, designed by Google is the super flat design principle that dominates pretty much every piece of software we now use, and far from it being progressive or efficient, I see it as the death of diversity, creativity, and individuality - in other words, it's the antithesis to everything we need to be motivating if we want to recreate a future that dares to imagine something different.
It isn't just Google that is to blame for this direction of travel, I can pinpoint the exact moment the bell tolled on aesthetic design, it first struck when MySpace was challenged by Facebook, in the former you had a site that promoted individuality, you could design your profile as you saw fit, and add anything that it was possible to add with HTML, no website since then has achieved that level of customisation atop a centralised system. The closest thing you can get to it today is to create a website of your own, but even with tools like Squarespace and point-and-click designers you still need some technical knowledge to set the whole thing up which most people don't have - admittedly most people redesigning their MySpace profiles didn't fully understand the HTML they were using, but that lack of understanding did not stand in the way of utility, if it worked, people didn't care, and the more they could customise the more their creativity flourished.
Facebook on the other hand was designed first and foremost as a means to harvest data, the student project it spun out from was even a data harvesting tool with albeit more misogynistic origins, that should have been the first red flag but still people jumped on board because it was new and had a much lower barrier to entry, you didn't require any technical knowledge at all and depriving others of their creativity took away the feelings of inadequacy if you couldn't express yourself creatively it didn't matter because no-one else could. Facebook was uniform, in every sense of the word.
That bell tolled again a few years later when Facebook introduced timelines, the profile page was fundamentally redesigned and one by one every third party service that allowed users to express some form of individuality was removed. Facebook reached its final form as a database for the collection of user data that users had been conditioned to use and fill with everything it asked of them, as opposed to expressing yourself it became a tool for mapping relationships and interconnectivity.
The death of diversity in design wasn't limited to websites either, one by one the pieces of software we used every day fell to more sterile alternatives, Yahoo Messenger, AIM, and MSN all gave way to Skype, and eventually Microsoft Teams, iMessage, and WhatsApp, or if you're more security and privacy conscious, Telegram and Signal, but all of these apps share the same basic design, a chat history with a text box and send button at the bottom, a contact list of people who have your phone number, even the emoji we use today are standardised, the custom emoticons of MSN are long gone, even if you send a GIF you likely search for it using the native GIF search panel seeing a curated list of GIFs to choose from.
This ethos spills over into the real world too, take a look at the hundreds of cell phone designs that existed throughout the 90s and 00s and look at what we use now, every phone is some variation of a black glass rectangle, the only thing that differs in experience is the operating system, and even then they are all trending in the same direction towards flat, all white or all black interfaces with limited icons, basic text, and less opportunity to express any creativity.
History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme, we may not have experienced this before in software and hardware terms but decades ago we experienced this with architecture, when minimalism took hold in the early 1900s, killing off Art Nouveau, decades later Art Deco fought back and for a time it thrived, but minimalism returned in the 60s, again there was a push back with Post-Modernism, this cycle continued. The 90s epitomised colour, yes everything was cheap because it had to be, people were broke after successive financial crises [sound familiar?] there was a renaissance of diversity in design, it's that aspect that I believe we are most nostalgic for, and it's something we can do again, not in the same way, but knowing what we know now, inspired by what we hoped for and dreamt of then.
Nostalgia isn't something to be ashamed of, you're not clinging to the past, you're clinging to the belief that things can change because they did before, nostalgia is the proof that you don't have to accept the future that the present has laid out before us, dare to dream and find inspiration in the echoes of hope from decades past
Nostalgia isn’t escapism, it’s a receipt
People love to dismiss the validity of nostalgia and discount it as something that isn't productive, but if you want to create, you have to reflect, you have to spend time imagining, building a vision before you can realise that vision. An artist doesn't put a brush to a canvas without an idea of what they want to create.
Nostalgia offer us the opportunity to take our despair and put it in context, when we remember a world before everything felt like a crisis, when the web was still young and full of possibility, when friendships and connections were built on shared experiences, we remember when hope didn’t feel like a luxury item, when the future belonged to everyone, not a bleak outlook that we expect only those with money to survive.
When we look back, we’re not escaping reality, we're escaping the simulated reality we were conned into living in, we’re reminding ourselves that the world can be a better place, because we’ve seen it be better. The horrors of the world that exist today still existed back then, they just didn't hold the keys to our lives, they weren't the focus of our existence. You don't even have to have lived through it yourself, younger readers who romanticise the 90s and 00s do it because they can sense that energy too. You may not have been there, but you can feel the residue of a time when optimism wasn’t ironic, when hope wasn't a commodity inflated to a price few can afford.
The future feels abstract but the past is proven
Ironically as much as Google's "Material" may be a marker of the world we live in, a virtual construct that you can't actually touch or feel, named after something real - you can't get much further from simulation than that, and yet, the irony is that it is material proof that holds the prize we cherish. There is a renaissance of physical media, vinyl sales are growing, many are switching streaming services off and recovering or building new libraries of media they actually own in opposition to the pay-to-experience model that pervaded our lives for so long.
The Millennial experience is best described by false promises, we were promised financial progress that never materialised, we were promised an education that would give us an advantage, a competitive edge that never materialised, the only thing that has grown and become self-evident is debt. The single most distinguishing marker between people who have money and those who don't isn't the cash in your wallet or the balance on your bank account, it's ownership. Rich people, the people who are actually rich, not the people who think they are, those people own assets, and because they own the asset, they don't pay to use it. From streaming services, to credit cards, to our education, to the houses we live in, we "buy" things we never actually own, even if you manage to get on the property ladder you haven't got very far in reality, you "own" a property with a debt secured against it and even if you manage to pay it off, you can't buy bread with a brick, if you want to unlock the equity in that home you have to sell it, or rent it out to someone else and give up the utility of living in it yourself rent free.
Hope is supposed to be forward‑looking, but when every promised future fades into fantasy and the reality of the present persisting takes hold we are overwhelmed by economic instability, climate anxiety, political whiplash, and a cost‑of‑living crisis that makes “thriving” sound like a myth. Shift your perspective however, and you swap uncertainty for certainty, the past is concrete, for all the good and the bad that it contains, it is static and within that stasis is certainty. We find comfort in watching the same old shows, the same old movies, playing the same old games, and listening to the same old music because it doesn't change, we know exactly what to expect from it and it never lets us down, if it doesn't live up to our expectations the problem lies with us, because it wasn't trying to meet them.
The certainty of the soil of our decaying past is rich with nourishment, ready to feed our hope, it is within that soil we need to plant that seed and let it grow, by looking back and taking stock, by being realistic about the past and asking ourselves what parts of it we want to save, with the answer to that question our goal becomes clear, to incorporate those elements into our lives once more. When you look to the future you need faith, that might not be faith in God or any deity, it might simply be faith in people and society to come to a realisation and change, but when you look to the past you're not asked to have faith, you're asked to pay attention, it's not a question of speculation, or belief in what might be possible, it's acceptance of what has already been achieved, what has been done before, you might not be able to recreate it exactly but you can bring it forward.
We watch movies that remake the movies of our childhood, listen to remastered records, play rebooted and remastered games, because we want the idea, the creativity, and the inspiration the past held, blended with the technology of today, to recognise that the things we abandoned because they weren't viable, can find new life in the present with the technology we now have.
The past wasn’t perfect, but it was powerful
Hope is a powerful thing, to live in a world without hope is to surrender any chance of changing that world. There is hope that still exists in the past, an echo that still rings for those straining to hear it. The past wasn't perfect, utopia has never existed, and it probably never can, but the dream of it can inspire a direction of travel, and even if you will never reach the destination, every step closer to it is a step towards progress, towards change, towards a future we actually want to live in.
Modern life often feels like something happening to us. Algorithms decide what we see. Corporations decide what we can afford. Governments decide what rights we have. The pace of change is so relentless that it’s easy to feel like a spectator in your own life. But nostalgia reminds us of a time when we shaped culture, we didn't just consume it. When we built things online, not just reacted to them, when we played games we didn't just watch someone else play. When dreams weren’t immediately filtered through economic feasibility.
Nostalgia is my drug, but it’s also my proof of concept
I’m not embarrassed by the comfort I find in old songs, old shows, old games, old memories, and old dreams. To me they’re not distractions - they’re anchors, touchstones that remind me of the world as it once was and the world as it could be again. Hope doesn’t always come from looking forward, sometimes it comes from looking back and remembering that the things we miss weren’t illusions, they were real, they were ours, and they can be ours again, albeit in new forms, in new contexts, in new eras. The past can’t be rewritten, and I wouldn't want to, even if I could, for good or for bad, I hold onto what was important to me from that time. The future can be reimagined — and nostalgia is the bridge between the two, it's the colour palette, ready to be drawn upon as we paint a future that we actually want to live to see.