Millennials and GenX get flooded with nostalgia vibes on their socials.
You might have seen this one floating around recently:
I just want to go back and relive the 90s one more time
I don’t think I appreciated it enough
Perhaps, like me, you read this and - boom - Britney blasted to mind. You nodded your head, sighed, and wholeheartedly agreed. You didn’t appreciate it enough. Honestly, I hadn’t a clue how good I had it. If I could time travel back to that decade (minus the media obsession with heroin chic) I’d go in a heartbeat and take my kids with me to devour all the boredom (mindfulness), creativity (scrapbooking) and punctuality (meeting someone at the exact time and place you agreed on without an infinite WhatsApp chat ending in a last minute rain check). A place where our only addiction to tech would be Snake. Where I wait weeks to see photograph of myself on holiday without realising I’m waiting because that’s just what you do. Where a conversation doesn’t involve mentioning social media or the dangers lurking on the internet because nowadays every damn subject - from small talk to the deep-and-meaningful - has been destroyed by it.
But remember that saying, be careful what you wish for? We are currently living our best lives, after all. Our wildest dreams have come true. The modern world is amazing…on paper…ahem, I mean, online. We have easy access to any movie, TV show and song ever made in an instant. We shop from the comfort of our own home. We can work from bed or the beach and see anybody via a screen anytime. We’re living in a sci-fi movie directed by Steven Spielberg without the slimy monsters destroying our picket fences. A world we made a wish for as we played on our bikes until the street lamps came on to indicate home time. We’re trapped in a digital age. And now, we’re numb. Aching for simplicity, the thing we once had, but never realised how good it was until we lost it.
Can we go back? Maybe not in a fancy time machine. But our brains are so overloaded and overwhelmed, surely there’s a way to slow down this cycle and create some space. Protecting our mental health and wellbeing is so important, and yet, we let that slip in the midst of our fast-paced lives. Can we embrace what we used to know? It was never broken.
So, why did we have to fix it?
1. Socialise Without Recording - Remember how you used to goof around with your mates, act ridiculously silly and laugh til you ached? Of course you do. You remember every joke, every feeling, every cringe. So where’s the proof? In your memory. Today, anything remotely funny (or not even funny) is on Snapchat or TikTok within seconds. We can’t look at anything elevated a milli-metre above the mundane without filming it JUST IN CASE we ever need to be reminded of that moment. Normalise seeing your friends and really see them. Listen, look, laugh. Refrain from watching what unfolds in real time through a screen. And when you go to a concert, don’t film it! You’ll never watch it back because footage of concerts is NOTHING like the experience of being there. If you need to hold something up, put the torch on and pretend its a lighter.
2. Drop By to Say Hi - This might feel alien to some people, but there was once a world (that existed for centuries) when somebody would knock on your door who didn’t deliver an Amazon package. Technology has encouraged us to build stronger walls to surround ourselves and hide. This might suit a lot of people and that’s fine, but the majority of humans thrive from human connection. Stu-dents are not socialising in person but sitting in their dorms texting. I chat to my best friend on WhatsApp for hours and she only lives a short walk away, but we can go months without seeing each other. This HAS to change. It has to revert.
3. Or Pick Up the Phone - When a friend (rarely) calls me, I instantly panic. “What’s wrong?” I ask. Thankfully, there is usually nothing wrong at all. We should normalise talking on the phone, but it was normal for decades. There were no crossed wires! No awkward pauses for answers! You got the message and the meaning all in one, like a package deal. Text messages have cheapened speak-ing. Voice to voice can create genuine relationships. Typing messages will forever feel robotic regardless of how playful you are with words.
4. Watch a Whole Movie - Without losing interest after four minutes, reading WhatsApp, checking your banking app or looking up actors on IMDb. It wasn’t long ago that a movie was a real treat, something you waited for and devoured. My sister and I would rent from a video store and watch that movie as many times as possible in the 24 hours before we had to return it. Even if it wasn’t that good. I appreciated the art of filmmaking and felt great satisfaction witnessing a story from beginning to middle to end. These days, we’re faced with too much opportunity to start things without finishing them. Why are we allowing ourselves to feel hollow when we can feel whole?
5. Use Stationery - Instead of just buying it! Are you the kind of person who believes your life will be transformed because you’ve just bought a new notepad? Is it on your desk, empty pages begging to be filled? Maybe your life hasn’t, well, transformed. Writing things down on paper is therapeutic and clear, unlike typing a note into our devices only to be distracted by a notification mid sentence. Use pencils and rub out changes or mistakes rather than risking deleting more than you’d intended to. Colour code. Allow post-its to shine in their glory. Enjoy the sheer, satisfying beauty that comes in a pretty pencil case and matching folder.
6. Switch Off On Holiday - Literally. Nobody needs to know where you and what you’re doing eve-ry second of the day. It’s your chance to experience something completely different and updating your “real” world isn’t allowing yourself to adjust to fresh surroundings. It’s weird but true to point out how once, nobody would contact you for two whole weeks. From the moment you got in a cab to the airport you were unreachable. You really were a million miles away, no matter the actual distance. Sure, your colleagues might have been a bit jealous of your trip, but it wasn’t rubbed into their faces. No negativity or comparisonitis was spread. It was just your turn to have a jolly.
7. Library Research - This one might baffle you. Why trawl through old books on a dusty shelf when you have all the world’s information at your fingertips? But having everything can mean we take less notice. Do you honestly retain quick blasts of facts typing into Google every other minute? But it’s likely you remember details of that project you researched by reading specific chapters of books and photocopying important segments. Wouldn’t it be a mindful joy to find information rather than overload mindlessly and take it for granted?
8. Introduce Yourself in Person - Where possible. The world is much smaller now we are super connected and unfortunately being interviewed for a job might happen entirely online. Even actors have to send a self-tape before being granted a meeting in-person, making it incredibly difficult to feel chemistry. Sometimes, I find joy in simply calling a restaurant to find out the opening times rather than looking online. I receive instant solid information. Better still, call in. If the person greeting you is lovely, you’re likely to book a table. If they’re rude, you’ll avoid wasting your money there. Having everything online numbs our judgement by hiding the truth.
9. Be Bored - Because this is how creativity strikes. Wander around for the sake of it - no podcasts, no texting - and take it all in. Allow yourself to feel a bit lonely and long for somebody to hang out with. Today, we have an endless supply of distractions that aren't all that satisfying. They're rarely worth remembering or talking to people about. Imagine having nothing to do for a few minutes…kind of impossible in this day and age, isn’t it? But if we could try, maybe we will remember that we’re living, and not just existing.
// Hayley Doyle
Comentários