This is a poll for people over 40.
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This is a poll for people over 40. At what age did you find nostalgic content most compelling and appealing?
@futurebird
A few complicating factors:
Depression set in (as typical) in my 30s, so selecting "20s" mostly reflects the overall intensity of affect in general at that age.
ADD-related novelty-seeking is strong with me, so nostalgia isn't a powerful motivator in any case.
English is inadequate for discussing nostalgia deeply, as it doesn't even have the vocabulary to distinguish between 懐かしい and 切ない -
OK last one. I realized that "nostalgia" might not be a pleasant thing for everyone. How have you experienced it?
@futurebird i always feel nostalgia to be bittersweet!
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OK last one. I realized that "nostalgia" might not be a pleasant thing for everyone. How have you experienced it?
my take on nostalgia is, something that was great to experience is gone and there is no appropriate continuation or (re)new(ed) thing that can replace it in one's life - something that "continues the spirit" ...
... the reasons why such a break happens can be manifold.
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That was so exhausting. And my memories of boomers getting all sappy and obsessed with 50s crap really put me off ever doing anything similar since it always seemed so sad to me.
But IDK if you show me an MTV bumper animation I still might like it.
@futurebird @Moss The audience for That '70s Show definitely was not people who grew up in the '70s. I'm guessing the Boomers aren't who were watching Happy Days, either.
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OK last one. I realized that "nostalgia" might not be a pleasant thing for everyone. How have you experienced it?
@futurebird I've been thinking about this and it seems to me that the amount of nostalgia one experiences as pleasant is equal to the amount of ones privilege.
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This is a poll for people over 40. At what age did you find nostalgic content most compelling and appealing?
@futurebird it’s always been the least compelling or appealing content? Not quite sure how to answer the poll.
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@futurebird it’s always been the least compelling or appealing content? Not quite sure how to answer the poll.
@pdcawley @futurebird yeah have to throw my ballot this way as well.
I enjoy old stuff mixed in with new stuff, and I do occasionally partake in a light dose of nostalgia, but I always had a low threshold. Two episodes of "Stranger Things" and I was done with the "nerdy kids in the 80s doing stuff I did as a nerdy kid in the 80s except with supernatural horror instead of domestic trauma."
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This is a poll for people over 40. At what age did you find nostalgic content most compelling and appealing?
@futurebird I’ve been actively opposed to nostalgia since my 20s
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OK now a question for everyone.
As you have gotten older have you found that nostalgic content has gotten more appealing? Less appealing?
@futurebird less nostalgic for my own life but show me some art work a kid of mine made when they were little and I can’t keep my equanimity. And I do have the weird experience of hearing music that I desperately wanted to understand as a teenager to fit in, and now it is playing in the grocery store as a sort of modern Muzak; like hey they are playing the Dark Side of the Moon in the utterly conventional shopping thing. Not exactly nostalgia but something to do with time.
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This is a poll for people over 40. At what age did you find nostalgic content most compelling and appealing?
@futurebird I came of age in the early 90s, I felt like the punk/alternative scene contained a resistance to growing up. Wearing old fashioned clothes from the thrift store, trying to find plastic kids' barrettes, colorful yarn hair ties, childlike jewelry like we wore in grade school, candy ravers with pacifiers, Kevin Smith movies with rants about comic books and Star Wars movies. Hard to remember that those things, at the time, were considered kid's stuff, from our own childhoods, and the Star Wars franchise hasn't had a new movie for over a decade at that point.
Cartoon Network appealed, quite intentionally, to 20-somethings, with Space Ghost:CTC remixing our Saturday morning cartoons, they did a Scooby Doo Blair Witch, and even Power Puff, Dexter's Lab, Ren & Stimpy were more cartoons made for us than for kids, often with retro animation effects blended with the new.
All the action figures marketed to adults, that started during that time as well, and never stopped. We never let go of our childhood video games, a trend that eventually became normalized and heavily marketed, but we were originally *supposed* to have left Mario far behind.
90s music experimented with a lot of retro sounds, much of it from music of our 60s-70s childhoods, but also to earlier times. (Like Ska and Neoswing.)
So I think anyone my age (50) who liked that stuff during that time might want to think harder about how much of that was nostalgia for a lost childhood, something that before our generation, simply wasn't done. You were supposed to grow up, leave behind childish things like toys and cartoons, but we were the first generation who didn't. Hard to remember, because now it's normal.
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@pdcawley @futurebird yeah have to throw my ballot this way as well.
I enjoy old stuff mixed in with new stuff, and I do occasionally partake in a light dose of nostalgia, but I always had a low threshold. Two episodes of "Stranger Things" and I was done with the "nerdy kids in the 80s doing stuff I did as a nerdy kid in the 80s except with supernatural horror instead of domestic trauma."
@randomgeek @futurebird Nostalgic “content” can fuck all the way off. Nostalgic conversations with actual people is entirely different and way more enjoyable thing.
I enjoy the #TOTP reruns on a Friday night in the UK, but that’s far more about the folk busily taking the piss on here in sync with the show than the actual music.
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This is a poll for people over 40. At what age did you find nostalgic content most compelling and appealing?
@futurebird I'm not sure how to answer this because I (late 50s) grew up on old cartoons and reruns (e.g. Bugs Bunny, Gilligan's Island) and learned to read with old comic books (e.g. Jimmy Olsen, Archie digest reprints).
Nearly everything I spent time with was from an era before I was born, so "nostalgia" (in the simple "from the past" sense) has always been a big part of my experience. I still prefer older material to new, so the transition to "my personal past" is kind of a blur.
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@futurebird @Moss The audience for That '70s Show definitely was not people who grew up in the '70s. I'm guessing the Boomers aren't who were watching Happy Days, either.
@msbellows @futurebird the *audience* were the poor young saps who got those products dumped into their eyes. Think about who *ordered the shows into existence*.
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@msbellows @futurebird the *audience* were the poor young saps who got those products dumped into their eyes. Think about who *ordered the shows into existence*.
@Moss @futurebird I want to say it was just marketers who didn't care about the content and they weren't personally nostalgic, who just did focus group testing to see what would draw people's eyeballs. And maybe that's true for Gary Marshall, who created Happy Days and was a little too old to have been involved in the team culture it portrayed. But on the other hand, George Lucas absolutely drew on his personal adolescence in creating American Graffiti, so.
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This is a poll for people over 40. At what age did you find nostalgic content most compelling and appealing?
@futurebird I'm 75 and I still don't find nostalgic content in the least compelling.
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One more for everyone. When did you first experience something as being nostalgic?
@futurebird not applicable, still don't at 75.
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OK last one. I realized that "nostalgia" might not be a pleasant thing for everyone. How have you experienced it?
@futurebird From the replies, when different people hear "nostalgia", different definitions pop up in our heads.
Some people think "Oh like 50s/60s/70s/80s/90s/00s movies/music/games/tv/books or homages to those things in later works!"
Other people think "Oh like a deeply personal sense of retrospective longing or awareness that relates to people and places that I've been!"
With these polls, were you going for "media nostalgia", "personal nostalgia", or both?
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One more for everyone. When did you first experience something as being nostalgic?
After I retired I went through times I became maudlin about the people I used to work with.
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