Nostalgia

I haven't made a website in nearly 7 - 8 years. Creating websites was a big part of my childhood; it was often to be the landing page for any cool new inventions or technological things I made. I loved marketing my things, making shops, putting download links, etc. Most of the websites I made were online communities, fake stores that didn't actually sell anything, and landing sites for whatever thing I was trying to make or advertise to people (not necessarily 'advertise', but show-off to people). The great memories I have of making websites are so powerful, it was such a wonderful time in my life, where it felt like I was so happy....... so why.... am I not feeling that same way.... making this website.... now...?

Nostalgia, created from the combination of Greek words 'nostos' (homecoming in English) and 'algos' (sorrow in English), is something we all fall victim to in our lives, where life sucks, and we just want to go back to a time when it didn't suck. "Things were better back then," we tell ourselves. "It was a simpler time back then," we also tell ourselves. I've told myself this for many years, but as I've come to find out, it just isn't true.

I remember playing the Wii for the first time, playing classics like Mario Kart Wii, LEGO Star Wars, Rabbids, and much more. These games brought me so much excitement. Mario Kart Wii was the first online game I had ever played; I got the game for Christmas, at age 5. I lived out in the middle of nowhere in the country, with little to no social contact besides my parents and sister. Mario Kart Wii on its own was amazing, I had never played anything like it. But what really cemented the nostalgia of the game for me was the online mode. I mostly played the game offline, on my own, with the AI, but I vividly remember just pressing random buttons in the game, trying things out, and then suddenly a spinning globe in the middle of space appears. The button 'Worldwide' appears. 'Play with people from around the world', a piece of text shows in the bottom of the screen. I select it, I select my character and kart, and afterwards, the game says 'Searching for opponents...'. Within a couple of seconds, nearly a dozen Miis appear on the screen, all looking different. They look nothing like the Miis I had created. One by one, the game spins around the globe, introducing each Mii. 'EpicWinner23'... from Brazil. It shows a new Mii, spinning around the globe again. 'Adam', from United States. 'Haruki', from Japan. 'Amy', from United Kingdom. It was this simple act of showing these other players on the screen that left me with lifetime nostalgia; it was the amazement I felt realizing that I was playing this game with other humans from all across the fucking world. I had never played a game that did that; I played all my games by myself, not because I wanted to play them alone, but because I never knew you could play online with other people. Seeing all the names light up from around the world was such an amazing feeling, because this was completely new and exciting to me.

YouTube was also incredibly nostalgic to me; it was so amazing to see all the crazy things that people uploaded. I watched channels like Smosh, Fred, and the Annoying Orange. It felt crazy to be watching things other people had created on a tiny little iPhone 4 smartphone that I could take around anywhere. Plus, these YouTubers were fucking hilarious. Of course, being 6 years old, hearing somebody like Fred scream was so damn funny. The Annoying Orange was so amazing, because it was crazy to see somebody video-editing their face onto fruit, and Annoying Orange was just hilarious. Smosh, was a particularly nostalgic channel for me, as they put lots of fancy editing into their videos, but more importantly... swore. Yep, they said, 'fuck this', 'bitch', 'shit', 'asshole', and 8 year old me loved it. Another classic video I have absurd amounts of nostalgia for is a video called 'Super Poké Mario Fable'; it was nostalgic because of the cool stop-motion technique it used, which I had never seen before, but was so nostalgic to me because of the swearing. The shit they said in this video still managed to make me laugh now, because it was so vulgar and ridiculous, so I couldn't imagine how hilarious it was for little 8 year old me who had never heard swear words and was never allowed to cuss. It felt so special to hear them all swear, because I had never seen videos like these before, and I knew for a fact that I wasn't supposed to be listening to swearing videos, which made it even more funny and special.

For a memory that isn't tied to consuming digital entertainment, I always remember going out into the desert with my stepbrothers and pretending to be military soldiers. They lived out in the country, with a massive amount of land. When I'd visit, we'd always play pretend soldiers, going out into the desert, checking our corners, setting up bases, identifying targets, and exploring the desert. Perhaps my most vivid memory of our time was when we went up on this massive sand hill; this is where we would set up 'operations' and fend our 'base' from all the 'enemies' (it's in quotations because none of this was actually physically real). The hill was so massive. It's times like these that make me think, "ah man, I wish I could go back to that".

... so I went back to it. I went back to that massive sand hill, and... it's not massive. At all. It is tiny. The entire desert feels tiny. I went exploring around it, and found little to no enjoyment in it, besides the enjoyment in my head of the memories I had at the place. Smosh recently started making their old 'classic' videos again after they had bought out their channel that they had sold to some massive media corporation, and watching these new 'classic' videos just... sucked. It wasn't funny at all. It didn't feel the same. Did they change their format? No, it was the same thing they had normally done; a goofy comedy skit between the two friends (Anthony and Ian) where some supernatural thing happens and they fight over it. It's the same thing they did back in the day, and it was hilarious, but I watched the new ones and thought, "meh...". The new Annoying Orange nowadays sucks too, the jokes are completely childish and terrible. I don't have anything to say about Fred, since his channel died when I was a little kid, around 10 years old. I thought to myself, "ah, they changed things up, it's not the same as it used to be", but that's just not true. Smosh is the exact same now. The Annoying Orange's jokes are still as stupid as they used to be. The sand hill isn't as big as it used to be. Playing games online is the exact same. YouTube, while it has changed quite a bit, is still the same platform; you upload videos and watch them.

So what changed?... well, I did. It's no surprise that we grow up, or just change in general. Our sense of humor changes, our morals and values change and develop, and our priorities change. Fart jokes and Nyan Cat is not funny to me anymore; deeply jarring mature satire is funny to me now. When you're a kid, everything is new and exciting, because we're stupid and we don't think critically about things. LEGO Star Wars is one of the most boring, unchallenging games I've ever played, and yet, it was such a nostalgic game for me in my childhood, because I was simply happy to play a video game with LEGOs and Star Wars in it, my two favorite things at the time. I now think about all the mechanics of a game and its intricacies, rather than just simply the fact that it's LEGO and Star Wars together. I have standards, and I now have critical thinking and criticisms; children don't have that. Like stated before, we mature, and we grow out of things sometimes.

But what if I told you that was only a FRACTION of what nostalgia REALLY is?... a lot of the things I was so damn nostalgic about were things that blew my mind, that I had never seen or experienced before. THAT was what blew me away about them, the fact that it was brand new and revolutionary. Those moments of me first experiencing the internet, of me first figuring out that I could make my own website, those moments of me exploring a desert I had never seen before, those moments of being out in the country. They were all brand new to me, but nothing is new forever. I've been to that desert lot a million times nowadays. I've made, like, hundreds of websites already. I've played dozens of games online and have used every bit of the internet for years upon years. The novelty has worn off. The honeymoon phase is over.

On top of that, one thing I think a lot of people don't realize, is that they grew up... LITERALLY. When I was 6, 7, 8 years old, I was most likely about 4 ft 8 in. tall. Now, at age 20, I'm 6 ft. tall! No wonder that sand hill seems so damn tiny; it's not because it got smaller, but because I got bigger. That sense of wonder we experience can be in the literal physical scale of things. I can't tell you how many trampoline parks I've gone to as a grown-up that I visited as a kid, and just thinking, "What the hell? Why does it feel so much smaller than it was as a kid?". It's because I got bigger.

'Nostalgia', in my eyes, is a lazy brain hack that humans use to guarantee positive emotions when they think they can't find them anywhere. Humans feel this sense of uncertainty in new things, so they'd rather go back to some old thing they knew makes them happy, because they know for a fact it made them super happy, so, in our eyes, "Duh, why wouldn't we go back to that thing if it made us happy?". It's a cheap, flawed hack we use; it's lazy, and most of the time, it doesn't technically work. Sometimes it does, most times it doesn't. A human's critical error with nostalgia is that they chase after the specific content that brought them the good feelings, rather than chasing the good feelings themselves. As stated before, what brings me laughter nowadays is not what brought me laughter as a child. What made that Pokemon video so fucking hilarious is that feeling it brought me; that taboo, that sense that I wasn't supposed to be watching it. The same thing happened to me with Adult Swim; I remember being so full of excitement to watch Adult Swim at night, because I never got to watch it at my mom's house, I never got to swear, and I never got to stay up past something like 8pm, so it gave me this euphoric feeling. Nowadays, I go to bed whenever the hell I want, I watch whatever I want to watch, and I swear whenever I fucking want to swear. It's no longer novel. Watching Adult Swim now just does not hit the same, because it wasn't 'Adult Swim' that gave me the nostalgia, it was all the other little feelings on the side. Making these websites does not bring me the same joy anymore, because I am no longer a child enamored by the fact that I had the newfound discovery and capability of making my own websites. Seeing all the people light up across the globe on Mario Kart Wii was amazing, now it does not faze me at all, because I've played hundreds of fucking games with online multiplayer, and in fact it's so damn commonplace now. The novelty has worn off.

My mom told me that she loved playing with Barbies as a kid; her favorite activity with Barbies was to pretend she was a mommy, taking care of the house and the kids. Eventually, she lost interest in it, she grew out of it. It just didn't hit the same anymore. Why? It's because she leveled up, matured, and had kids. Barbies were the stepping stone to what she wanted to be; a mom. No longer did she get the same enjoyment out of playing mommy with Barbies as a kid, because now, she's a grown-ass woman, and she leveled that same thing up and made it happen for real, and she's having far more enjoyment out of being a real mother. It's the same feelings, but just evolved.

You can take a look at all of the times of greatness in your life, and if you really critically analyze it, it's because of the feelings it brought you, not the content itself; the things that bring you those same feelings are most likely going to feel different to you now. Do I yearn for a time where I can feel baffled and in complete awe of something again? Absolutely. Am I going to get it by playing the same game I've played for 12 years over and over again? No. Do I yearn for a time where I can feel excitement, discovery, and taboo, where I feel like I'm doing something super secret that I'm not supposed to be doing? Absolutely. Am I going to get that by watching something that is no longer exciting, new, and taboo? No.

For me, the best times in my life were where I felt in awe, where I built something brand new, where I discovered something new, where I pushed my limits, where did something I wasn't supposed to be doing. I'm not going to get that by doing the same thing over and over again. The best moments I remember in my life weren't spent trying to recapture old moments. It's time to stop chasing the same old things that used to give you good feelings, and chase new things that are going to actually give you those good feelings again.