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Nostalgia as a phenomenon - Alisa Karnaukhova

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Nostalgia as a phenomenon - Alisa Karnaukhova

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The visual concept of the book is based on a metaphorical understanding of the process of nostalgia - reality becoming a memory. This concept is expressed through the pictures. Throughout the book black-and-white photographs turn muted blue.

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Experiment Idea - Mutating/Corrupting Nostalgia

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Experiment Idea - Mutating/Corrupting Nostalgia

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Would be interesting to see what happens when you take something that inspires a particular kind of nostalgia but you morph it to fit a different era so it's like Uncanny Valley where something is off but it's a different kind of nostalgia.

Maybe it's about taking old school toys and changing something about them to communicate that nostalgia isn't an accurate way to look at the past but just something we turn to because current day is crappy.

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Can I create an opposite phenomenon to Nostalgia?

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Can I create an opposite phenomenon to Nostalgia?

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Capturing the nostalgic view and the actual toy at the same time - a look into someone else's nostalgia.

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Inspiration from Do Hu Soh - Transforming the familiarity of nostalgia into a liminal space, where nostalgia is both an idealized concept and a physical reality.

Can I find a way to create an installation that allows you to look at something which shows the rose tinted view of nostalgia which is see through like this artists work and once you rush in to experience nostalgia you are face with what it covers up - either how the past really is or how nostalgia is exploited to encourage consumerism in capitalism. Could use anaglyph effect - stereoscopic 3D effect achieved by means of encoding each eye's image using filters of different (usually chromatically opposite) colors, typically red and cyan. Anaglyph 3D images contain two differently filtered colored images, one for each eye. (Think Stefan Sagmeisters dog book cover.)

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Make use of simple pencil outline and contrast it with colourful observational drawing with my own experiment. I like this blurred effect - it's like not being able to pin point the exact memory but it being more about the feeling it brings. No memory is ever fully accurate and this is a great way to communicate this.

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I like the use of tracing paper in this. Could be cool to use this to communicate the outlines of the toy on the tracing paper and allow the memories and nostalgia to make up the colours and solidity of the object.

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"His work examines art histories’ relationship with the Internet world we now inhabit.

There is a twisted nostalgia to Gatenby’s paintings. His work subverts not only through subject matter, but also through technique. Gatenby distorts familiar characters, typically drawn as brightly-coloured and crisp cartoons, by blurring lines between classical painting and modern imagery. As with a lot of appropriation art his work inherently says something about its time as it reflects collective imagery back onto society, reanalysing information in a sort of mirror."

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Art Soup brings together 21 iconic works from the history of art and corrupts them with legends of popular culture. This collection aims to crash these two worlds to create a humorous and fun space. Most of the paintings included are the world's most famous paintings, constricting to present one piece from each artist.

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The Hours Have Lost Their Clock - Grafton Tanner

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The Hours Have Lost Their Clock - Grafton Tanner

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The Hours Have Lost Their Clock by Grafton Tanner: 9781913462444 | PenguinRandomHouse.com: Books

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The Hours Have Lost Their Clock charts the rise of nostalgia in an era knocked out of time. In The Hours Have Lost Their Clock, Grafton Tanner charts the rise of nostalgia in an era knocked out of…

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So how does all this research relate to my original question? I believe it has to do with the three key takeaways that I found - migration, the internet age, and sadness. For those like myself who weren't around to experience the 90's, 80's, and so on, we are just now going through the start of our own journey. Whether that be starting college, buying our first home's, renting out our first apartments, traveling without older adult supervision, and so on. We are all beginning to migrate at this stage of our life in one aspect or another, creating new milestones for ourselves. Right now, is the prime time for our minds to start triggering these nostalgic feelings as we begin to gain a sense of homesickness and perhaps even loneliness. While our first nostalgic thoughts will likely be pointed towards our connections to our previous home, we're going to be more susceptible to nostalgia in various forms.

At the same time, we're also living in a decade where the world feels much closer than it's ever felt before. The internet has expanded and evolved greatly in the past 20 years, and now we're entrenched in a web culture that's shrouded with the "random", e.g. memes, viral videos, and so on. We're connected even more with those that did experience the 80s and the 90s as they were occurring, and in a sense those individuals can share that nostalgia because of the world wide web. It also means we are going to be marketed and advertised nostalgia as we are grouped into that same broad age range of millennials even if we don't necessarily hold the same experiences and memories as older people in our group.

Our group is also living in an era where suicide rates are increasing almost across the board in many countries. Depression feels even more prevalent now, and the daily barrage of negative news that surrounds us doesn't help. This could also be a trigger for us to contain more nostalgic emotions.

I feel that a mix of these various factors has led us to this anemoia, where we are perhaps feeling at one of our lower points in life and/or are transitioning to a new point in our life where we may be alone. Because of how inherently connected we are due to the internet, however, we're capable of getting to that same nostalgic state that we so desperately enjoy and crave through different experiences that aren't inherently our own. This in turn can help raise our mood and lead to more prosocial behaviors.

I feel very grateful that I was able to live during this period, where the web is this wide, expansive ocean. Where subcultures like vaporwave are able to exist and thrive and be capable of bringing others who share the same sentiments together. Here they're able to create new experiences together, revel in that sense of nostalgia, and who knows - maybe when people my age are in their late stages of life, they'll feel nostalgic for this "Unexperienced Nostalgia" we feel currently and engage in a "Meta-Nostalgia".

Or maybe I'm completely off base and we just really like the lo-fi aesthetic that comes from the late 80s to 90s. I'm honestly okay if it's just that too, because it means we still got to experience the greatness that is Macintosh Plus 420.

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Anemoia | Why We Feel Nostalgia For Eras We Didn't Live In - Blogs - CNTR | CLTR

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For some reason, there's a warm nostalgic feeling I receive when looking at this sight, despite never growing up in an environment like it or even the decade such a hypothetical scene would be most commonly found in - the 80s and 90s.

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ISBN: 9780231167598

304 Pages

Format: Paperback

List Price: $27.00 £22.00

ISBN: 9780231167581

304 Pages

Format: Hardcover

List Price: $37.00 £30.00

ISBN: 9780231539609

304 Pages

Format: E-book

List Price: $26.99 £22.00

Nostalgia isn't what it used to be. For many of us, modern memory is shaped less by a longing for the social customs and practices of the past or for family heirlooms handed down over generations and more by childhood encounters with ephemeral commercial goods and fleeting media moments in our age of fast capitalism. This phenomenon has given rise to communities of nostalgia whose members remain loyal to the toys, television, and music of their youth. They return to the theme parks and pastimes of their upbringing, hoping to reclaim that feeling of childhood wonder or teenage freedom.

Consumed nostalgia took definite shape in the 1970s, spurred by an increase in the turnover of consumer goods, the commercialization of childhood, and the skillful marketing of nostalgia. Gary Cross immerses readers in this fascinating and often delightful history, unpacking the cultural dynamics that turn pop tunes into oldies and childhood toys into valuable commodities. He compares the limited appeal of heritage sites such as Colonial Williamsburg to the perpetually attractive power of a Disney theme park and reveals how consumed nostalgia shapes how we cope with accelerating change.

Today nostalgia can be owned, collected, and easily accessed, making it less elusive and often more fun than in the past, but its commercialization has sometimes limited memory and complicated the positive goals of recollection. By unmasking the fascinating, idiosyncratic character of modern nostalgia, Cross helps us better understand the rituals of recall in an age of fast capitalism.

A provocative, interesting, well-researched, and well-written work that will make an important contribution to studies of memory and modern culture and will illuminate Americans' evolving relationships with their past. Susan Matt, Weber State University, author of Homesickness: An American History

Retro is big business. Nostalgia fuels demand for oldies music, muscle cars, television reruns, vintage fashion, and a dizzying array of collectibles and kitsch. In a history that is stunning in its breadth and insights, Gary Cross, the preeminent historian of consumer culture, explores the allure of past fads and fashions and examines nostalgia in its diverse forms, from the toys, dolls, popular music, and television that recapture a lost youth to the heritage museums and theme parks that act as sites of collective memory. Americans may consider themselves a forward-looking people, but their nostalgia for remnants of the past remains intense. Steven Mintz, University of Texas at Austin, author of The Prime of Life: A History of Modern Adulthood

This informative look at collecting and consumerism is recommended for researchers of history, memory, cultural studies, and consumption. Library Journal

An important addition to the growing body of literature on nostalgia. Tobias Becker, H-Soz-u-Kult

Cross has written a provocative study, which will have broad appeal not only to scholars but to all of us in North America who have grown up in the age of fast capitalism. Canadian Journal of History

Introduction. Our Nostalgic Novelty Culture
1. Guys Toys and "Girls" Dolls
2. Lovin' That '57 Chevy (or Whatever Was Your Favorite Car at Seventeen)
3. (Re-)Living That Golden Decade
4. Leaving It to Beaver and Retro TV
5. Give Me That Old-Time Radio
6. Dilemmas of Heritage in an Era of Consumed Nostalgia
7. Pilgrimages, Souvenirs, and Memory at Disney
Conclusion. Where We've Been, Where We Might Go
Notes
Index

Read the introduction, "Our Nostalgic Novelty Culture":

About the Author

Gary Cross is Distinguished Professor of Modern History at Pennsylvania State University. He is the author of a dozen historical books on childhood, consumption, technology, popular culture, and work, notably Men to Boys: The Making of Modern Immaturity; The Cute and the Cool: Wondrous Innocence and Modern American Children's Culture; and An All-Consuming Century: Why Commercialism Won in Modern America.

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Consumed Nostalgia | Columbia University Press

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Nostalgia isn't what it used to be. For many of us, modern memory is shaped less by a longing for the social customs and practices of the past or for family ... | CUP

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How has nostalgia manifested in Millenials? 

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How has nostalgia manifested in Millenials? 

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gaming league of legends world warcraft blizzard hearthstone unboxing gamer older funny enjoyable new content unknown player battlground

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NostalgiaScape, Dedicated to making you relive those feels of childhood through sight and sound.

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90s toy commercials batman "90s kids" nostalgia "90s nostalgia" nostalgic 1990s "90s music" "90s movies" "90s ads nostalgia" "90s nostalgia box" "90s kids no...

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Classic Nostalgic 90s Toy Commercials and more

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Welcome to Retro Player One 📼 I create NEW MIXES WEEKLY! I curate vaporwave, synthwave, chillwave, retrowave & future funk into early internet, 80s/90s/00s nostalgia themed mixes! If you want to unlock new memories, step into one my mixes! To Submit Music: Fill out the form linked on my channel! To business inquiries: Use the email linked below!
To further support the channel: I have a Patreon where I give Patrons access to source files of mixes, allow them to name mixes, give them early access to mixes and shout them out on every mix that I make! Please go support the channel on there - it keeps up the weekly mixes! (https://www.patreon.com/retroplayerone) NOTE: This channel is not monetized. All ad revenue goes to the artists in these mixes. 💯

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Instagram: @beautyinsideabox I love dolls! I've been collecting dolls pretty much all my life and now have a massive collection! I made this channel so I could share my finds with the doll community. Hope you like my videos and don't forget to subscribe!

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The videos on this channel are for entertainment and historical appreciation/analysis. I do not claim ownership of anything on the channel. This channel is not monetized. Any ads that appear on my videos were placed there by copyright holders.

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Go back to the 1990’s via this nostalgic TV simulator and relive the original ads, music videos, movie trailers, shows and more!

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Steven Rhodes | Featuring custom t-shirts, prints, and more

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Nostalgia injected with a twist of darkness, step into the world of Steven Rhodes! Shop t-shirts, prints, and more on the Steven Rhodes Threadless shop!

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Only 90's kids will remember zine - by Never Brush My Teeth

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Only 90's kids will remember zine - by Never Brush My Teeth

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❗SHIPPING NOTICE, PLEASE READ BEFORE MAKING AN ORDER: The shop is on semi-vacation mode from 24 December until 15 January. That means that during that time, you can still browse the shop and make an order but all orders will be shipped out around after the 17th of January 2024. Thank you! :)

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"Only 90s Kids Will Remember" is a zine filled with abstractly nostalgic themes and references from the decade of the nineties. A mixture of drawings and photo collages that might remind you of a texture or an image you had burried in your mind for years, references that only nineties kids will remember (just kidding, this zine is for everyone just most references are from the 90s xD) and ironic visuals of the damnation this decade included.

📚 Size: 25 x 17.5 cm / 40 pages + cover / staple bound

Risograph printed in Fluorescent Pink, Yellow, Green, Red, Blue, Black and Aqua on recycled paper Crush Citrus , 120gr inside pages and 200gr covers.

🍄 All inks are soy & rice based and the papers FSC certified.

✨ All orders come with extra goodies ✨

🕸Due to riso magic and the handmade finish of this zine, every copy is slightly different from the other and miss-registrations, slight discolourations of solid ink areas, page spreads middle connections misalignments and all those little happy accidents of the riso zine-making process are to be expected :)

! Content Warning: Some of the pages might be triggering to some people as they might refer to, describe, or picture: trauma, violence, family trauma, societal oppression, death and discomfort.

Created by Never Brush My Teeth and printed in Sleep On It Press studio.

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❗SHIPPING NOTICE, PLEASE READ BEFORE MAKING AN ORDER: The shop is on semi-vacation mode from 24 December until 15 January. That means that during...

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This project draws inspiration from the resurging popularity of classic games. Intricately hand-sculpted from coloured paper, I used various paper-sculpting techniques to reimagine iconic game designs such as the Nintendo Gameboy, NES One Console and Sony's PlayStation One. The sculptures have been created using a six-tone colour palette, evoking vintage design references.

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Vignette: Interpreting Nostalgia @ BSMT Space

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Vignette: Interpreting Nostalgia @ BSMT Space

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About
BSMT will be closing 2023 with a group show set to peel back the layers of time through a collection of nostalgic 'snap shot' paintings by a collection of 38 artists across Urban and Contemporary art, a space for memory and artistic expression to converge. Mirroring our collective and individual experiences,'Vignettes' seeks to echo past decades through a series of 40 x 40cm works, each a unique narrative fragment capturing the essence of a period of time through diverse artistic lenses. With over 40 works available from both established and emerging artists, this capsule collection is a perfect opportunity for collectors to begin or diversify their collection by discovering new artists at affordable prices. With drinks supplied by our good friends at 3AM Brewery and Debo on decks for the opening night, 'Vignettes' promises to take us on a whimsical and evocative journey between past and present, a collage of 'remember when' or 'back in the day' memories that are definitely worth revisiting! Vignettes will be featuring work from the following artists: Blond Truluv David Shillinglaw Dotmasters Eloise Dorr Errol Theunissen Gokcen Yuksek Jimmer Wilmott Joseph Loughborough Lucie Flynn Manuel Zamudio Mighty Monkey Motel seven Myne and yours Perspicere Pez Barcelona Real Hackney Dave Richard Berner Russell Herron Simon Hennessey Skeleton Cardboard Timothy Gatenby Visit the Exhibition We invite you to join us for the opening night of 'Vignettes' on November 30th, 2023. The show will run from December 1st to January 14th 2024. To RSVP for opening night, please contact hello@bsmt.co.uk For press enquiries, please contact hello@bsmt.co.uk. Find BSMT Gallery at 529 Kingsland Road, E84AR, London IG: @bsmtspace

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Vignettes: 'Interpreting Nostalgia' - Exhibition at BSMT Space in London

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Vignettes: 'Interpreting Nostalgia' features over 40, 40 x 40cm works from 38 Urban and Contemporary artists, both established and emerging.

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Museum Of The Home - Rooms Through Time 

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Museum Of The Home - Rooms Through Time 

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See some of the ways in which homes and home life have evolved in the past 400 years.

The main living space of the home has been many things - a bustling hall, a formal parlour, a cosy living room.

Our Rooms Through Time are based on real London homes and their owners would have had enough money to decorate and live comfortably.

These rooms change throughout the year, as the stories and objects within them are re-styled buy our curators to coincide with Festival of Home, which runs throughout the summer and has a different theme every year, and our Winter Festival, which runs from October to late January every year. It's worth visiting more than once in the year to see these rooms come alive in different ways.

Real Rooms

There are many stories and voices missing from our Rooms Through Time. We want to work with our visitors and communities to understand what the rooms could look like if we were to rethink who they are about.

Part-closure of Branson Coates wing

Reopening Summer 2024

Some of our period rooms (1870 to 1998) are temporarily closed for refurbishment. Years in the making, we're bringing seven new period rooms to life which will reflect the interconnected histories of our multicultural East London community. Our Rooms Through Time from 1630 to 1830, Home Galleries, and Gardens Through Time are open as usual during this period.

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Rooms Through Time | Living spaces through time | Evolution of our homes | Museum of the Home

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Rooms Through Time - Explore the ways in which homes and home life have evolved in the past 400 years

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How Disney Exploits Nostalgia | The Breakdown

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How can we learn from nostalgia instead of condemning the future to stunted cultural growth? 

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How can we learn from nostalgia instead of condemning the future to stunted cultural growth? 

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Dependance on Nostalgia: Are we afraid to create and consume original content because there's a risk it won't be successful/we won't like it and regret wasting money?

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Dependance on Nostalgia: Are we afraid to create and consume original content because there's a risk it won't be successful/we won't like it and regret wasting money?

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Are Gen Z the first generation to not possess an original culture that isn't borrowed or reimagined in modernity from generations past? 

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Are Gen Z the first generation to not possess an original culture that isn't borrowed or reimagined in modernity from generations past? 

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Instagrammer Polly Pick Pocket interview - Nylon

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Instagrammer Polly Pick Pocket interview - Nylon

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Welcome to Favorite Follow, a series highlighting NYLON's favorite creators and the stories behind some of their most memorable content.
For every unwatchable Hollywood remake resurrected through the relentless nostalgia industrial complex, there's a small reprieve. On one niche corner of Instagram, nostalgia lives in a tiny, colorful case, complete with an even tinier girl - Polly Pocket.

Polly Pocket collectors have seen a micro-boom in interest thanks in part to never-ending pandemic weariness, a 2018 relaunch of the toy closer the original's scale, and the promise of a Lena Dunham-directed live action Polly Pocket film. The Polly Pocket community is surprisingly robust, filled with people who are willing to shell out serious cash to relive their childhood wonder; according to Architectural Digest, mint condition Polly Pocket compacts sometimes sell for up to $1,000 on eBay.

There's a Polly Pocket collector account for everyone; some are completionists who collect every piece, down to the dolls, while others focus on creating adorable scenarios for the dolls in the compact. Then, there's Polly Pickpocket, run by Julia Carusillo. As a set designer and artist, Carusillo's interests vary from her fellow collectors; she finds herself more captivated by the architecture of the miniatures, along with the general absurdity of the Polly Pocket world. "I have an obsession with the bathrooms and Polly Pockets," she says over a Zoom call with NYLON. "I think it's so hysterical to take the time to design the sink and toilet of a kid's toy. It just cracks me up."
What's the backstory to your obsession? How did you get into Polly Pocket?
Carusillo's eye for detail brings the magic of Polly Pocket to a new level as her photos show off the painstaking detail of the miniature worlds. Suddenly, you're not looking at a vintage children's toy, but a sculpture with textured, plastic pool water that feels like a David Hockney painting and just happens to double as a pencil case. Ultimately, Carusillo's love for Polly Pocket aligns with her maximalist core. Minimalism was never the name of the game as far as Polly Pocket was concerned - how else would the smallest woman in the world have a Parisian pied-à-terre that includes views of the city and a garden with a cherub statue with her own face? "Everything right now is just like let's take minimalism to the point of unrecognizability,'' she explains. "I'm a maximalist to the core. I'm sorry. I love to have fun. So kill me."
What made you want to start collecting?
Dunham, if you're reading this, you know exactly who to hire.
Which ones do you like the best?
Growing up, I had a ton of Polly Pockets. My sister and I shared all of them. We were obsessed. I think the reason that we got into miniatures is because of Polly Pocket. I don't know if you've ever seen the American Girl rooms. I want to say they're 16 by 16 by 16 shadow boxes, basically, that you fill in with miniature furniture, all the same scale. You can buy it from them, but my sister and I would make our own, and we just got obsessed with tiny stuff. I've never really lost interest in Polly Pocket, but I didn't collect at all until maybe 2016.

I can't remember what exactly spurred it, but I was like, "It'd be kind of cute to have a Polly Pocket in my apartment." And then, I went on Craigslist and some woman in the Chicago suburbs was selling a Tupperware bin of 50 of them for $100. And I was like, "I know that that is a very, very fair price." I just went and got them all and that totally started me being like, "Oh wait, now I just want to fill every crevice with tiny Polly Pockets."
Is collecting the dolls an important part of the process?
I love a classic Polly Pocket, the heart-shaped compact. I always show in my photos that they're Bluebird, because Bluebird was the original British company. This guy literally invented this for his daughter and built one. And then, it became a manufactured thing.
I think, because you're an artist, you're viewing it as a study of spatial design.
I really like these classic ones because they just have kind of a quaintness to them. And, I've always thought that the difference between printed matter on the walls versus the 3D stuff was a super fun element kind of for adding detail. I love the kind of super vintage ones, but I'm not the kind of collector who is like, "This is 1989, blah, blah, blah." I look it up when I do this stuff.
Has collecting inspired your sense of design at all?
I have a big stash of dolls, but I don't collect them actively. It also makes it easier for me to collect because if you want to buy a set with all its original dolls, even if it's not in its original packaging, it's way more expensive. And, I just don't care. I like the architecture of Polly Pocket. That's what interests me.
I remember at one point you would make molds from the interiors and then cast them in cement. Is that still happening?
Yeah, exactly. That's why I like to photograph them the way that you would with elevations on a plan for architecture where it's head on view, back view, isometric view, detailed shot. I love to be able to do that. I think that's a little bit of what people enjoy about my account is that I will take a photo of just the toilet. And, you can see how that was molded and sh*t like that.
Julia!
I think I have always been somewhat intrinsically inspired by Polly Pocket because I was so obsessed with it growing up. I also loved dolls and Barbies, until older than you should. I was playing with Barbies in middle school and loving it. I think that being so into Polly Pocket made me a really good model maker, which is something that I have to do as a scenic designer, because I love making the tinier sh*t that my fat fingers are capable of. So I think in that way, I've always, actually been inspired by Polly Pocket. I can't necessarily say I've designed anything that is that kind of microcosm of a world that a Polly Pocket compact is. I definitely think the way that they arrange space is so clever and they really are elevations of buildings when you open them flat.
Why do you think Polly Pocket is having a resurgence right now? I feel I'm seeing more coverage of it.
When I first started collecting five or six years ago, they weren't as precious to me because I didn't have a big collection. I thought it'd be so fun to make cool sh*t with these. I was really into casting and resin and cement at the time. I was obsessed with cement and doing it in my tiny apartment. I got in a lot of trouble when I moved out for all the cement. I was literally mixing and pouring cement in my apartments.

I know. Ridiculous. No one should ever rent anything to me. I had this cool putty that cures once you've pressed it onto a surface. I would press the putty and it would get into every single crevice. I'd pull it out, and then I would pour either resin or cement in it. It was so f*cking cool. And I loved them. But when I moved, I purged and threw them out, and I really wish I still had them because that project was awesome. It destroyed a couple Polly Pockets, so I don't do it anymore. It was so fun. They looked like weird Roman artifacts or something, but Polly Pocket.
We have to talk about Lena Dunhan's upcoming Polly Pocket movie. Are you excited? How do you feel about it?
I've definitely noticed that, too. My account hasn't grown wildly in the last year, but I definitely get a lot of engagement on it. One of the things that I love the most, and I'm not someone who's like, "I get energy for my online community!" or anything that, but I do get the most heartwarming comments on my photos, usually between sisters tagging each other and being like, "We had this one! We had this one!" They'll comment on 10 in a row and send me a message that I reminded them of their childhood. I'm like, "I can't believe I'm providing sweet moments for people. Who would have thought."

Also, I think people are obviously on their phones way more than ever. I think having those little cute moments pop up in your feed are just little light moments that people enjoy. There's obviously always the nostalgia factor for sure. When I have friends come over, they always want to check out the collection. They literally get lost in it. It's sweet. Guys and gals alike are just like, "They're so tiny. Oh my God. I remember blah, blah, blah." They're a very analog toy too, which is part of why I like them. Some of them have batteries and lights, but for the most part, you can stash them away for 30 years and they're still in the same condition.

First of all, the day that that happened, I got no less than 30 texts and DMs about it. People were like, "Are you involved in this yet?" I'm like, "I f*cking wish." I read a lot about it, and I still don't quite know how it is technologically being made and what we will be looking at. Polly Pockets are literally a set. It's almost more theatrical than filming, but a proscenium stage is an audience. This is literally made for making a narrative, you know?
Oh, Polly Pocket Reddit must be insane.
In that way, I think it could be fascinating. I think they'll obviously hire unbelievable designers, knowing who's involved with this. I just cannot f*cking wait to see, first of all, the texture that they decide to go with for the set, whether it's going to be glossy plastic or realistic, just from a set design point of view. I'm very, very interested in how they're going to do that.
Something that caught my eye on your page was the Polly Pocket Fabergé egg homage. I'm obsessed with them, and this one is so beautiful.
The thing about Polly Pocket is she's like Barbie in that she doesn't have a set personality, but she's not as impressive as Barbie because she doesn't have multiple jobs. She just lives in different worlds and fits into different ones no matter what's going on. A couple of her friends have names, but she never has a romantic interest, none of that. I'm very curious what the narrative's going to be and how that structure is going to work. Polly doesn't have an age as far as I know. She's in scenarios where she's getting married, so I guess she must be of age, but she does other weird stuff like slumber parties. So, how old is she? Maybe Reddit knows, but I don't know.

I haven't gone deep only because I'm not a completist like I was saying with the dolls and stuff, and a lot of people are so obsessed with having the full sets. But, I definitely like to go on there. There's another account - I don't know how they accomplish this or own these pieces - but they have prototypes of a ton of Polly Pocket figurines and compacts that are unpainted or early drafts. They must know someone who works for Bluebird or came into them somehow, but they're amazing. It's so weird to see them without paint. It's like Roman sculptures or something.
If you had to live inside one of these, which one would it be?
Oh, my God. I know. This woman literally DM'd me and she was like, "I love your account. It brings me so much happiness. I have a few that I never play with and I would just love to give them to you." I had posted a hospital Polly Pocket, which I'm obsessed with. The x-ray is the funniest part. It's not in scale. It makes no sense with their bodies. She saw that I had posted someone else's wishing I had it, and she's like, "I'll send it to you." Then sent me this beautiful box, including the egg.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
That egg one I've never seen in my entire life online. I never knew that existed, but it reminded me exactly of a Fabergé egg. I literally went to that museum in Russia. My mom loves tiny stuff, too and I was there with her. The entire time we were like, "That's Polly Pocket. That's Polly Pocket." I guess there really is a tradition of miniatures and automaton. Also, I posted this a million years ago and I don't even know where I found it, but there was some religious artifact that was a little box that opened and looked exactly like a Polly Pocket. It was hand-carved wood and so gorgeous. I want to know the full history of tiny stuff.

This is a little fake Louis Vuitton monogrammed Polly Pocket suitcase. Isn't it funny? I think it's called Polly's Paris Apartment. It has this courtyard and some of my favorite Polly Pocket features ever. There is a little cherub sculpture, but its face is in the vernacular of Polly Pocket. I think it's so funny. It has this water feature, of course, a totally set perfect table. Up here where she lives, she's got her little vanity and a little dressing area. There's an elevator that operates from the side, it opens up to reveal little shoes and more of little sculptures from the side. And a balcony looks out to Paris. I just think it's so charming. I want to live in this opulent plastic home so badly.

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Nostalgia + Childhood Toys Excerpts to note

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The Millennial Market Millennials, born between 1981 and 1996, are a generation that has grown up in a world of rapid technological change. They’ve seen the rise of the internet, mobile phones, and social media.

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The Virtues of Millennial Nostalgia - Grattan Street Press

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Nostalgia is ingrained in the millennial identity. But while this has become an object of mockery, it can actually be a useful coping mechanism in these troubled times. One day, when doom-scrolling through Twitter, I happened across the most unexpected inter-generational debate I’ve ever read. A spa…

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Does Nostalgia Have a Psychological Purpose?

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Does Nostalgia Have a Psychological Purpose?

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Kaitlin Luna: Hello and welcome to Speaking of Psychology , a biweekly podcast from the American Psychological Association that explores the connections between psychological science and everyday life. I'm your host, Kaitlin Luna.

Nostalgia, that longing feeling for the past when things seemed better, easier, and more fun. It's the feeling behind countless number one hits. It's what's resurrecting old TV shows and being capitalized on by politicians. We all know the feeling. Some of us maybe a little too well. What psychological purpose does nostalgia serve? Is it good or bad? Are we more nostalgic today in our hectic connected world? Is there such a thing as the good old days? Here to help explain is Dr. Krystine Batcho, professor of psychology at LeMoyne College in Syracuse, New York. She's an expert on nostalgia and develops the nostalgia inventory, a survey that assesses proneness to personal nostalgia. Welcome, Dr. Batcho.

Dr. Krystine Batcho: Thank you so much. I love talking about nostalgia. Thank you for inviting me.

Luna: Absolutely. Absolutely, we look forward to hearing all about it. As a psychologist and a researcher of nostalgia, how do you describe nostalgia?

Batcho: That's a very important question because today many people are researching nostalgia, but they might be using the word differently. In fact, some people are probably talking about a slightly different experience or construct. I'm pretty faithful to the origins of the word nostalgia. The word was coined or invented a long time ago, over 300 years ago, and originally designated homesickness. Well, semantic drift over the centuries has broadened that to the notion of longing for or missing aspects of a person's personal lived past. That is the kind of nostalgia or that is what I mean when I talk about nostalgia and it's a wonderfully complex paradoxical experience.

Luna: Can you talk about the role of nostalgia in the human psyche. Why do we have that feeling?

Batcho: Most of the research available today including my research argues that nostalgia serves a number of functions. The thing that ties them all together is that nostalgia is an emotional experience that unifies. One example of this is it helps to unite our sense of who we are, our self, our identity over time. Because over time we change constantly we change in incredible ways. We're not anywhere near the same as we were when we were three years old, for example. Nostalgia by motivating us to remember the past in our own life helps to unite us to that authentic self and remind us of who we have been and then compare that to who we feel we are today.

That gives us a sense of who we want to be down the road in the future. The other way that nostalgia serves an essential psychological function is that it is a highly social emotion. It connects us to other people. It does that and so many beautiful ways. In the beginning, when we're very young, it's part of what bonds us to the most important people in our life, our parents, our siblings, our friends. As we go through life, it can broaden out and extend to a wider sphere of the people we interact with. It's a social connectedness phenomenon and nostalgia is in that sense a very healthy pro-social emotion.

The other way that it's unifying is that it helps us to unify what otherwise would be felt or experienced by us as conflicts. In itself, it is somewhat of a conflict because as I define it is a bitter-sweet emotion. It's sweet because we're remembering the best times, the good times of our life. The bitterness comes from the sense that we know for sure that we can never really regain them, they're gone forever. The irreversibility of time means that we absolutely cannot go back in time so it helps us to deal with the conflict of the bitter longing for what can never be again together with the sweetness of having experienced it and being able to revisit it and relive it again.

Luna: You've explained that there's two different kinds of nostalgia. There's the personal which we've just touched on and historical. Can you explain what each one is?

Batcho: In fact today, many people are arguing that there are even more varieties of nostalgia but when I first began collecting empirical evidence in the mid-1990s, I knew that another inventory existed. It was put together by a psychologist named Holbrook. That one contained items that were more oriented toward history and society across the years. That is the type that I refer to as historical nostalgia. The evidence shows that someone who experiences historical nostalgia might even have an emotional attachment to or longing for times in history that predate their own birth. That is very different from personal nostalgia.

Personal nostalgia means that you are longing for or feeling good about aspects of your life that you already live through and have stored in your memory. My original data, in the beginning, demonstrated that individuals can be experiencing a lot of one type of the nostalgia and maybe not much of the other. They're relatively non-correlated or independent phenomena. They're not the same thing.

Luna: Your research has shown that nostalgia can be a stabilizing force and comfort us during times of change and transition. Can you explain that a bit more?

Batcho: Yes, change whether it's good change or negative change. We know that it's stressful. It's very difficult to grasp change, because in some sense, at a very deep psychic level, change threatens us. It's a little frightening because we're not 100% sure that we can control it. One of the most important aspects of being a healthy human being is having a sense that you are in control of things. When things start to change, either very substantially, such as major events in a person's life, getting married or getting divorced, getting a new career, going back to school or graduating from school, it's comforting to have a nostalgic feeling for the past that reminds us that although we don't know what the future is going to bring, what we do know is that we know who we have been and who we really are.

It's a very comforting emotion. It also brings back; it stimulates memories of the times when we were accepted and loved unconditionally. That is such a powerfully comforting phenomenon, knowing that there was a time in life when we didn't have to earn our love, or we didn't deserve it because we earned a certain amount of money or we were successful in a certain venue. Our parents, for example, or our siblings or our friends simply loved us unconditionally. That is a wonderfully comforting feeling when we're undergoing any kind of turmoil in our personal lives.

Luna: When you're going through a difficult experience or a new change, as you mentioned, you might find yourself thinking a lot about memories from the past, is that correct to say?

Batcho: Absolutely. For instance, many people will tell you that if they're at a major event, graduation, a wedding, christening for a baby, very often what is happening is they have an entire flood of their mind with all the nostalgic memories that come to be relevant to this situation. When a parent is sitting in the audience, and they watch their child graduate, they cannot help but remember when that child was little and needed help putting their shoes on and thinking how far that person has come in life.

In a way, Nostalgia is like a measurement. It's a way we keep track of things, we monitor progress through life, not just for ourselves, but even for other people to whom we are very attached.

Luna: I want to flip that on the other side a bit and talk about today's political climate where many people are longing to return to "the good old days" in the United States. What does this say to you as a nostalgia researcher?

Batcho: It tells me a couple of things. First of all, different people have that kind of sense of wishing for the good old days for different reasons. Let's say, someone who is old enough to have lived through, for example, the 1950s, they might actually be experiencing some personal nostalgia because they're remembering how they and their family celebrated holidays, or what it was like going to school in the mid-1950s. That phenomenon would be very, very different for a younger person, for example, a member of the millennial generation. For them, it's not personal nostalgia, it's historical. Historical nostalgia, in my research, suggests is more likely triggered by dissatisfaction with the present.

If people are unhappy for any reason with how things are today, they're more likely then to experience this sense that things must have been better in the past. How far they have to go in terms of their longing can depend upon how much they know about history. Some of this gets handed down through stories from grandparents and some of it gets handed down through films that people watch or even literature that they've read. Someone could, for example, become enamored of a period in history such as Victorian days, not because they've lived through them, obviously, but because they have become romanticized and idealized in a way in literature and in film.

That kind of phenomenon is very, very different from someone who says, I think that today is a very stressful time, and when I was growing up, I think it was less stressful. The reason for that is because our memories are not faithful. They're not accurate to what things really were like. They're our impressions of what things were like in the past.

Luna: You want to expand on a little bit more. Do you think people are remembering the, quote, good old days accurately because a lot of you might say your life is worse, and this is the United States speaking of, it's worse than it was 60 years ago, in the 1950s are glamorizes being this ideal moment in time probably immortalized in a show like Leave It to Beaver or something like that. When you think about that, the experience of the 1950s of some people in America was probably wonderful, but the experience of other people at that time was probably terrible.

I'm thinking were white Americans experienced 1950s in one way. People of color experienced it in a totally different way. Women experienced it in one way, men experience another. Can you talk a little bit more about that like are we overly romanticizing that period of time in this country today?

Batcho: That is an excellent question. We have decades of cognitive research that show that the general default is that memories are not accurate, and that's true for all kinds of memories. When we think about retrieving memories, for example, if we want to retrieve what do we remember about the 1950s or whatever period in history that we've lived through, we can be very selective. When you think about a time period in society, it has so many components to it. One individual might be nostalgic for that time, but they're not thinking about things like racism or discrimination or even conflict. For example, the baby boomers, some of them were hippies during the 1960s, and when they get nostalgic for Woodstock, they might not be really thinking about the anti-war protests and some of the violence that occurred at that time. They're selecting out the parts of that. They might be thinking about, oh, I had wonderful friendships then or they might be thinking about some of their early romantic relationships.

We pick and choose. The memory process not only is selective, but it also distorts to some extent. We do idealize things on occasion. By the way, this is a two-edged sword because just as we can idealize and romanticize and therefore distort the accuracy of memories, we can go in the other direction. One of the reasons I find nostalgia so fascinating is because I have an interest in connecting the theoretical research in the laboratory to people's lived experiences because of clinical applications.

Some people find that their memories tend to go the other direction when they're remembering the past. They're always thinking of the negative aspects. Then they might distort that and say, "Oh, as a child, my parents didn't love me. They didn't give me toys. They were very mean to me. My friends bullied me," but actually, if we had a videotape of their childhoods, we might find that that's not necessarily totally accurate. Their childhood might not have been any different from their siblings' childhood. That makes us ask a question. Then why are some individuals selectively romanticizing the past whereas others are actually exaggerating its negative aspects?

That led me in the early research that I did to look at generations to some extent. I was interested in looking at the greatest generation, many of whom grew up as children during the Great Depression. I interviewed people who had experienced quite a bit of financial hardship. When they talked about their memories of their childhood, they, in fact, did talk about only being able to eat bread on many days. That idea that they recognize that their childhood was one of deprivation, one of hardship, you might say, does that factor into how nostalgic they would be then for those days? The answer to that is much more complicated than I thought it would be. I thought that those individuals would have the least amount of nostalgia. It turns out that it probably depends upon two things.

One is an individual's personality or their psychological well-being in the first place. If you have two individuals one of whom is really happy in their current life and they're emotionally doing just fine. They might go back and remember bad things and then laugh about them and say wow we've come a long way since those days haven't, we. Now we have a big Thanksgiving feast and we have all this food. I remember being six years old not having enough to eat. Whereas someone else who is suffering from something like depression or an anxiety disorder. They might go back and think about the past and then let that further sadden them rather than make them happy by comparison with how far they've come.

Luna: That's really fascinating. One thing I do my touch a little bit more to like, why do we remember something so positively something so negatively? Because you say it might depend on the person's mental state, how they're doing in life. It's just so fascinating how we can look back on an experience and say, even if it was bad you can go back and look at an experience and focus on the positive aspects of it.

Batcho: Yes, exactly. That is fascinating. I think that there are at least two levels at which you can ask that question. One level is when someone is sitting in private just reminiscing. There it is very important to think about their current mood state. Because we have mood dependent memory effects. When you're sad, you're more likely to think of sad memories. When you're happy, you're more likely to think of happy memories. On the other level, we have a social element and establish it is a social experience. If you're hanging out with friends and reminiscing about the days back in high school or college or whatever. Now, depending upon what your friends say in that social setting that might trigger you to either be more positive or more negative. In a way, one really good piece of advice is for people who are starting to feel stressed out or lonely, or sad.

It's very important to try to gravitate toward people who stimulate the best of what you can bring to today from your past. In other words, if someone is always bringing you down by saying, "Do you remember when we didn't have enough to eat? Do you remember when somebody was unkind to us?" That person is an influence on our memory retrieval processes and we're more likely then to experience nostalgia in a negative way. On the other hand, if you're hanging out with people who are laughing about the funny times and the times when something embarrassing happened, everyone loves to share their most embarrassing moment. In that social setting when it's jovial and people are feeling good about it and finding the lessons learned from it. Now, that might bring out the best of nostalgic memory.

Luna: It's interesting that a lot of it is dependent upon humans around you. That's really interesting.

Batcho: Yes, it is. I think it's of great importance today because some of the current survey data have suggested that especially for the millennial generation and other adults, there is a great deal of reported loneliness. Some people suspect that has a little bit to do, not entirely but a little bit to do with the Internet or cyberspace and social media. The argument is there are 24 hours in a day. How do you spend those hours? People who grew up before the Internet their days were spent largely either alone or with other people face to face. That's no longer the case. We have an incredible amount of time spent in cyberspace. Even when you're connecting to other people in a social way, you're connecting to them at a distance. I believe that the psychological distancing can make people feel lonelier than they would have felt had they spent exactly the same amount of time having a cup of coffee with that person face to face. I think that the social element needs to be explored and researched even more heavily given the great proportion of time that young adults are spending, not in actual face to face, but in virtual reality.

Luna: Yes. There's so many throwbacks, if you will, happening today like I'm talking about the TV shows that are being rebooted or were popular in the '90s bands from long ago have reunited and are going out on tour. There's places like Buzzfeed often feature, top 20 lists like top 20 toys from the 1980s that sort of thing. People really flock to that and want to share their memories of certain toy. I was wondering from your perspective, what that tells us about people today. Is it really because of we're hyper-connected all the time or could it be people are more nostalgic today is that we have access to sharing these memories with a lot of people all at once through the internet?

Batcho: That is a complicated question and I think there are several reasons for the retro-phenomenon that has become somewhat of a fad. I think on one level it tells us based upon the research that there's something people feel is missing in the current lifestyle and that what is missing might be this social connectedness up close and personal. On the other hand, it might be that people are losing track of their sense of purpose and meaning and the nostalgia, one of its healthiest functions is to keep us on track with regard to the meaningfulness of our lives.

Data suggests that nostalgia facilitates our understanding of meaning in life and so in a way when we look at all the reboots and people going back to the past, it might be telling us that people aren't 100% satisfied with the current lifestyle. There's something that might be missing on a much more pragmatic, lower level. You might argue that a lot of this is because we can suddenly, it has become so accessible with social media. All it takes is for one person to post something from the past and raise a question. Judy, do you remember watching this old TV show or I wonder whatever happened to and before. What, it can go viral and we have the technology now to really immerse people in these reboots and then spin-offs, et cetera.

Until it stops making profit, I think we're going to see this for a while. I don't think it's going to continue on unabated, however.

Luna: Is there some element of infectiousness to nostalgia? I mean, we talked about obviously people have more access to seeing these things online and they can share it, but even people, if they're physically together, does it become something that spreads from one person to the other?

Batcho: I believe it can be actually. I wish it were more infectious. I'll tell you what I mean by that. I think is infectious when you have a group of people who have some shared experience. The best example of that are when a group of friends are reminiscing about their antics, the things they did as either teenagers or children or what have you. There it's a bonding experience. Another example of that is we know from current research that sports fans love to do that. They talk about the games that they enjoyed and when their team was victorious. When you have a common bond, it can be very infectious and it's like a domino one memory triggers another.

The reason why I say I wish it were more infectious is because that can break down when you have a group of people who do not have shared experiences to be nostalgic about. Suddenly if you have one individual wanting to reminisce about his or her own past experiences, but no one else in that group remembers those things or lived through those things. In, a long time ago people talked about generation gaps. Someone is talking about the 1950s a millennial says, Oh, I don't even know what you're talking about. I don't know that TV show.

I never saw that this can actually alienate other people because people don't necessarily want to hear about your nostalgic memories. They want to share their own. That's why I say I wish it were a little more open because we have so much to learn from one another's nostalgic memories. That's why I encourage people when they find themselves in a situation such as you're reminiscing about your past and other people start drifting away because they're bored, you might start asking them about theirs and start a conversation, a dialogue. In that sense, you can broaden it out a little more.

Luna: Can this nostalgia be a destructive force that can really incubate anger, isolation or hatred? It seems like it could have that potential

Batcho: Most of the research suggests that nostalgia is aligned with or correlated with very soft, pro-social emotions such as compassion, empathy, altruism. It's unlikely, generally, to be associated with hostility or anger. Can it be isolating? That's a very interesting question because you could argue that if you find yourself, the victim of or a survivor of very unique circumstances and now you're nostalgic for a time before that, other people might not be able to relate to you. You might or might not have the motivation to leave your past behind.

That led me to doing the qualitative analysis of memoirs of people, who had survived under wartime conditions. What's particularly interesting to me is that, when those individuals recount how they had to adapt to significant change. In some cases became relocated, not by their own choice but because of conditions of war. They became, for example, refugees or they had to emigrate. Initially, in the early stages, they almost had a psychic block against accepting a new culture, a new life. They almost wallowed in their nostalgic memories of the past and found as time went on that that became very isolating. Because the people they were among, were not able to share that.

What leads ultimately to a healthy kind of nostalgia is the one where the positive pro-social aspects of nostalgia can reconnect us now. Not just to people in our past but to the people we're dealing with today. That is possible, that can happen. All the memoirs that I've studied, have demonstrated how that happens. It happens by confronting the past with the current situation in trying to find what were the lessons we learned from our past that we can now tweak, update, customize and use to cope with the turmoil and the conflict in the change that we've gone through to sort of be more optimistic towards the future.

The other aspect of this is that some people are looking at what they might refer to as social nostalgia and looking at groups and having designs where they're comparing intra-group versus inter-group. In those situations, you're perhaps talking about a slightly different phenomenon.

Luna: Can nostalgia hold us back by keeping us dwelling on the past? Can it really impede what is happening in the current moment and in the future?

Batcho: When I began collecting data, that was the prevailing belief among theorists. Before people started collecting empirical evidence, it was just assumed. In fact, much of the psychoanalytic thought that predated behaviorism and modern or contemporary social science argued that it would be regressive try to revisit your past. That the danger was that if your past is better than your present, why would you not just then stay there? Well, once I began collecting data and then other people, of course, have extended this even worldwide, what we find is that generally speaking, that is not what happens.

I've thought a great deal about this and most of the research I've covered it looks like this. Nostalgia is bittersweet. Why did it evolve that way? If you take a social evolutionary perspective, it would make perfect sense that we would want to revisit our past so that we always learn from it. At the same time, we don't want to stay in the past. The sweetness entices us to revisit our past. Once we're there, the bitterness of knowing that actually it no longer exists reminds us that we must return to the present. That makes us want to return to the present.

My argument is that it's almost never, at least the research suggests it would be extremely unlikely for someone to want to remain in the past. If someone found themselves being trapped in the past, that suggests that they're experiencing some sort of difficulty. It could be that they're undergoing a very intolerable current situation in their life and they might seek counseling to help them deal with that because they're using nostalgia then or their memories as an escape. For the most part, most people my research shows, because nostalgia is a social emotion it is actually correlated with or associated with healthy coping mechanisms such as seeking out others when they're having difficulties. We, in fact, when we revisit our memories, we try to remember how other people in our lives solved problems in the past and then use that as a role model for how we want to solve the problems we're experiencing today so it's generally healthy.

Luna: How does age affect a person's feelings of nostalgia? Is it across the board or is it older or younger people?

Batcho: My original data set suggested that there is a bump in nostalgia where it peaks not in old age as many theorists would have expected but peaks in young adulthood. Most theorists argue that the reason for that increase in nostalgia during young adulthood is because it's such a pivotal developmental transitional period. It is literally the time when a person has one foot still back in their childhood and one foot anticipating their move into complete adult independence.

While they have a little bit of their identity still aligned with or connected to their past, they are eager to forge ahead and for that reason, there is a lot more frequency of nostalgic reminiscence going on because there's a bit over reluctance out of trepidation. Will my future be as wonderful and as rosy as my past was? We know that transitional periods including developmental ones trigger nostalgia.

Some newer research is suggesting that there might be a smaller but another bump in older individuals and that is because they're watching a significant change in their own lifestyle from when they were for example in terms of physical well-being or physical health completely in the prime of their health versus looking ahead toward aging as well I might not be able to be as active as I once had been or maybe they're suffering with physical conditions or disorders that limit some of their lifestyles. For that reason, they would also become more nostalgic.

Luna: Do you think nostalgia has always been a part of the human experience?

Batcho: When I first did literature review in order to put together my nostalgia inventory, I was really impressed to find references to nostalgia before it ever had the name nostalgia and those references go back thousands of years. You can find in literature all kinds of examples of people who were in some sense nostalgic for sometimes their home or their homeland and that fits the original definition of it as homesickness but also in terms of longing for the past and therefore the argument is that it's universal. It probably is part of the human experience, so it's always been there as a potential. It cuts across all cultures and all historical time periods.

Luna: That's really fascinating. Also can you just-- Now you've touched on it a few times, can you explain your nostalgia inventory and how you use it in your research?

Batcho: Yes, because I define nostalgia as a longing for or missing for one's personal past, I comprised it of items that asked people to what extent they missed something from their past. Some of the items on the inventory are really conceptual or abstract such as missing the innocence of childhood or missing the freedom from having responsibilities. Others are more concrete missing your toys, missing pets that you had in your former days and it turns out that there really are probably two factors within it.

One which is a more concrete set of things that we miss from our past and the other being a little more abstract a little more conceptual and I argue that nostalgia is an umbrella that covers both of those. My inventory measures it in a way that connects people to missing their own past and that is not correlated with inventories that look at it more as a historical type of experience or social event.

Luna: I might also go back to where we're talking a little bit more about the memories, how they can be both positive and negative.

Batcho: Yes.

Luna: In a previous episode, we did Episode 91 how memory can be manipulated. We featured memory expert, Dr. Elizabeth Loftus. She explained that memories can be manipulated under the right conditions. What are your thoughts on that and how that can affect our levels of nostalgia about the past?

Batcho: I agree. I agree completely. I think that to some extent, how we interpret our past, how we comprehend, can change. We can have retrospective comprehension or interpretation of our memories. That depends upon what purpose we're trying to serve in our present. If someone is trying to find a reason to feel loved or worthy of love, then they might have a guided sense through their own historic memories of looking for the times when they were loved. Maybe even doing an analysis of. I wonder if something went wrong or was I partly responsible or two, I just have bad luck?

A good example of that would be if someone is undergoing a breakup of an important relationship. Now, they might be motivated to have nostalgic memories either of that relationship and saying, gee, how did we come to this unhappiness when we were so passionately in love in the beginning? There are researchers now looking at relationship nostalgia. It can be helpful to some extent but on the other hand, if you're using it as a way of almost arguing that you want out of the relationship. You say, "Well, the reason why I am leaving this relationship is because when I compare my satisfaction with it today, with how much joy I got out of it in the beginning, I see that it's been all downhill."

I'm arguing here that our motivations can actually influence how we remember the past and how we interpret the meaningfulness of our past.

Luna: Just to wrap this up for our listeners. We've touched on a lot of different areas of nostalgia. I want to know, is there a way for society to collectively use nostalgia to better itself? How can we tangibly benefit from it?

Batcho: I think it's really a very important resource and it's underutilized. I say that even though we have all these spin-offs and reboots and we have a lot of nostalgia. If you use a search engine for the term nostalgia, it is incredible. You can find maybe near 300 million hits on that search engine but just because you have a lot of something doesn't mean that you're using it effectively. We could start to incorporate it more effectively, I believe. Not just in media, that's one great vehicle. We can also look at how we can use it in social media, in cyberspace, but also in education and perhaps in parenting.

One of the healthiest forms of nostalgia throughout human history has always been to connect each generation to the next. In that sort of bond, you pass down to the next generation, the best of the past. Just because we are oriented toward progress, doesn't mean that there isn't something of value that we might have forgotten from the past. A good example of that would be to say that all the technology that has been developed recently, is absolutely wonderful. All the progress in medicine has saved so many lives. We are almost obsessed with future-oriented progress. The only risk that brings us is the risk of wondering whether we've made certain trade-offs.

Are there things that were present before that were either not doing as effectively today? For example, are we helping young children develop empathy for others and empathy for those who are different from themselves as effectively as we might? There are many possible practical tools. It used to be that when parents had children, they relive their own nostalgic memories by reading children's books that they had read to them to their own children. Then when they became grandparents doing the same for their grandchildren, because the millennials have delayed marriage and children and family size has shrunk, we might be having a little bit of a deficit in those kinds of intergenerational transmissions.

I think that we can learn a lot from that and wonder how we can now tweak that replicate it today so that we don't just look across generations, but we look across cultures. We look across differences of opinion and diverse ideologies. So, what can we find that is a common bond so that we can get along with one another better than perhaps some people think we're getting along with one another today. Because differences can be divisive, nostalgia could be in a way part of the cure because nostalgia does the opposite. Instead of dividing, it unites.

Luna: There's a lot of great things that nostalgia can do for us if we just hone in on that and try to utilize it as you just mentioned.

Batcho: Yes, absolutely.

Luna: Thank you so much for joining us, Dr. Batcho. We really appreciate your time. It has been a really very interesting topic. I think our listeners will really enjoy.

Batcho: Thank you so much. I really enjoyed it myself.

Luna: Before we go, I want to remind you that we want to hear from you. You can e-mail your comments and ideas to speakingofpsychology@apa.org. That's speaking of psychology all one-word dot org. Please consider giving us a rating in iTunes, it really helps. Speaking of Psychology is part of the APA podcast network which includes other informative podcasts like APA Journals Dialogue about new psychological research and Progress Notes about the practice of psychology. You can find all of our podcasts on iTunes, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also go to our website SpeakingofPsychology.org to listen to more episodes. I'm Kaitlin Luna with the American Psychological Association.

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Speaking of Psychology: Does nostalgia have a psychological purpose?

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Kaitlin Luna: Hello and welcome to Speaking of Psychology , a biweekly podcast from the American Psychological Association that explores the connections between psychological science and everyday life. I'm your host, Kaitlin Luna. Nostalgia, that longing feeling for the past when things seemed better, easier, and more fun.

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Why are some individuals selectively romanticizing the past whereas others are actually exaggerating its negative aspects?

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Why are some individuals selectively romanticizing the past whereas others are actually exaggerating its negative aspects?

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Taken from Podcast with PHD Krystine Batcho - Does Nostalgia have a psychological purpose?

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Retro Revival: Nostalgia is the Product Everyone Wants

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Explore the transformative power of nostalgic branding in forging deep emotional connections with consumers.

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Does Nostalgia Have a Psychological Purpose podcast Quotes of note

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Does Nostalgia Have a Psychological Purpose podcast Quotes of note

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How Nostalgia Can Hide Dark Political Realities - Andrew Potter

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How Nostalgia Can Hide Dark Political Realities - Andrew Potter

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The satirical website The Onion once ran a story with the headline: "U.S. Dept. Of Retro Warns: 'We May Be Running Out Of Past." The conceit was that "retro consumption"-that is, the open-pit mining of our pop-cultural past-was creeping ever closer to the present. Where kids in the 80s held 50s-themed dance parties, by the mid-90s people were already waxing nostalgic for the halcyon days of late-80s hair metal. The story's (fake) source commented that: "This rapidly shrinking gap between retro and the present day is like a noose closing ever tighter around the neck of American kitsch." First published in 1997, the piece predicted that we'd be "out of past" to romanticize by 2005: "For the first time in history, a phenomenon and nostalgia for that particular phenomenon will actually meet."

They were only off by about five years, the past decade having seen the culmination of what's been called "nostalgia for the present"-the framing and romanticizing of an event or era even as it's occurring. The Onion article wasn't so much satire as an incredibly prescient take on how our culture would evolve under the enormous selection pressures of digital media. It's almost impossible to distinguish a nostalgia craze from a consumer craze anymore. Nostalgia is a form of consumerism, and consumerism is now little more than the dip of a credit card into the river of nostalgia that runs through our social media feeds.

As it evolves into the dominant mood of the 21st century, nostalgia culture has just become the culture, one where consumer crazes and social media shivers amount to little more than the context-free curation of the past. From this perspective, our obsession with nostalgia is just the flip side of the ideology-free eternal present of the end of history. Unmoored and disconnected from how history has actually unfolded, everything from Victorian-era motifs to Cold War symbolism to survivalist masculine posturing all gets funneled into the pop-cultural maw, from which it later emerges as one facet or another of contemporary popular culture.

At one level, the current obsession with nostalgia can be read as a straightforward response to rapid technological change. The world is crazy, fast-paced, and fragmented. Our every moment is a flood of texts and DMs and TikTok videos and memes, all of which pass by in an endless stream, seemingly without connection to anything but the passing show.

But this nostalgia-on-demand also points to an even more powerful force driving the cultural moment, which is nostalgia as the principle product of our most popular technologies. Video game nostalgia and retro consoles are a huge market. Remember Pokémon Go, the insanely popular app-based game from 2015 that saw crowds of civilians wandering the streets, stumbling into dead bodies, into crime traps, and even to their deaths? Its initial appeal leaned heavily on the nostalgia for the original Game Boy version of Pokémon, which, for many, was one of the first video games they'd loved as kids. There are countless other websites devoted to the curation of the past, including the straightforwardly named Nostalgia Machine, where you enter a given year and get served up a screen populated with links to the Billboard hits of time.

And then there's social media. Facebook has its "On This Day" feature, Twitter has a function that lets you see how your timeline looked any number of years earlier, while Instagram has at-the-ready filters to give any pic the look of a Polaroid that's been fading in a photo album for decades. If you're careless enough to upload your phone's pictures to a cloud service like Google Photos, you'll get a daily nostalgia montage of photos you took on this date one, two, three, and four years ago. You can now spend your days wallowing in the past; indeed, many of us do. Our culture has become a form of nostalgia-as-service. We're forever trapped in our online world, going round and round on an all-encompassing digital version of Don Draper's famous carousel from Mad Men.
All nostalgia is fundamentally about our present feelings of disquiet or unhappiness.
Some psychologists see this as a good thing, since nostalgia can serve as emotional ballast by keeping us grounded in something certain. Where nostalgia was once seen as a malady, a mental illness to be cured, it's now being interpreted as a healthy corrective to the fast pace of the modern world. The new wisdom is that nostalgia can serve as a cultural security blanket, offering a quantum of comfort or happiness in a world gone crazy.

Missed in all this is the essence of the nostalgic mood, which is not so much about "remembering" but misremembering. Nostalgia only works when we deliberately ignore certain aspects of the past and deliberately foreground other elements. It's about seeing the past in a very specific way-as more innocent, naive, and authentic than the present. All nostalgia is therefore fundamentally about our present feelings of disquiet or unhappiness, a state that always compares poorly with the past. And as harmless and inward as that might seem, it actually has enormous political implications. Underneath nostalgia's happy-go-lucky veneer is something a lot darker: identity politics, populism, and the culture wars.

*

Across the West, politics in the 21st century has been dominated by two features: nostalgia-based populism and identity politics. Not only has liberal democracy, with its pleasant mix of consumer culture and rights-based individualism, failed to triumph, in many places it's in retreat, while the hope for a technocratic political culture based on reason, science, and expertise is increasingly forlorn.

Almost from the moment he took power in 1999 in Russia, Vladimir Putin started building an autocracy on a profound sense of national loss over the demise of the Soviet Union, which he once called "the greatest political catastrophe of the 20th century." A decade later in the United States, one of the first and clearest politics-as-nostalgia plays was the so-called Tea Party revolution-the political movement that began in 2010 as a sort of reactionary insurgency within the Republican party in the United States. More recently, the politics of nostalgia has been the driving force behind two of the most seismic events of the last half-decade; namely, the election of Donald Trump as president of the United States, and the success of the Leave faction in the Brexit vote of 2016. Nostalgia has also been seen as a motivator behind other recent Western populist movements, including in Turkey, Hungary, Poland, and Brazil.

At first blush there seems to be no obvious connection between the nostalgic attraction of pop culture and political movements like Brexit or Trump's MAGA agenda. After all, there's nothing inherently political about, say, digging out your old flannel shirt and spinning a Nirvana CD. One might wonder, too, what harm there is in grownups bonding over a few rounds of Pokémon Go.

But this objection ignores the ways in which popular culture and politics have always intersected, each at once reflecting and responding to the other. It's surely no accident, for example, that television shows like Downton Abbey and The Crown romanticize a distinctive British culture and thus help normalize the political drivers of Brexit. Or take a television show like Netflix's enormously popular Stranger Things, with its racially diverse cast of Dungeons and Dragons nerds. Here, a veneer of current diversity politics helps distract us from the fact that the popular culture the show celebrates was, by current standards, enormously racist and misogynist. It can be difficult to notice just how much these seemingly innocuous exercises in cultural nostalgia feed into populist fantasies about a lost golden age.

The main features of this populism are by now familiar: the rejection of science and other forms of expertise, hostility towards immigrants, hatred of the mainstream media, and a deep antagonism towards elites of all stripes. The animating core of populism is the notion that a pure, true, authentic tribe or "people" are at every turn being subjugated, insulted, denigrated, and exploited by a class of globalist and cosmopolitan elites.

The narrative of an authentic folk betrayed by a false elite has fueled a reactionary conservative agenda, to the point where the predominant form of conservatism that exists in many Western countries is the populist version. Mainstream conservatives do exist, in academia, think tanks, and the media. There's also a substantial cottage industry of writings devoted to wooing conservatism back to its roots in small government economics and libertarian politics. The wooers haven't had much success though, and there's little reason to think this will change any time soon.

In its rejection of reason, science, and expertise, the right was to a large extent just picking up the baton from a left that spent much of the 20th century warning of an unholy alliance between science, technology, bureaucracy, and capitalism. Long before the Tea Party or the election of Donald Trump or the Brexit vote or any other manifestation of contemporary populism, the table was set for an across-the-board crisis of liberalism. In the West both the left and right have harbored a decades-in-the-making hostility to the status quo, a sense that the game is rigged, and that the solution to this problem is to be found in some combination of emotion, unreason, and identity politics. The inevitable consequence is a culture war.
From religion to schools to the medical establishment to the mass media and advertising, our culture is one big system of repression.
Every culture war rests on the shared conviction that the key to political power is control over the culture. In purest form, the ideology underpinning any culture war is the belief that all politics boils down to cultural politics; everything else, including control over the economy or various political institutions, is epiphenomenal. All politics is a winner-take-all struggle over whose taste, and which values, should dominate.

The culture war that most people are familiar with (so familiar that many people don't even recognize it as a culture war) is the one that's been raging in the West, more or less continuously since the 1960s, between the establishment and the counterculture. In a nutshell, the countercultural idea was based on a critique of "mass society," which holds that society is a set of interlocking and self-reinforcing systems, institutions, and ideals that promote and enforce the conformity that capitalism requires in order to function properly. From religion to schools to the medical establishment to the mass media and advertising, our culture is one big system of repression. From a political-activist perspective, you resist this system by "jamming" the culture by behaving in non-conformist ways.

This was the philosophical basis underlying the original sex, drugs, and rock and roll ideals of the counterculture: If society wants you to get married and have kids and live in the suburbs, you resist by having a lot of free sex and living in a commune. If The Man wants you to wear a suit and tie and keep your hair short, you resist by wearing bell bottoms and a tie-dye shirt and growing your hair long. And while the specific moves or poses changed over the decades, the basic structure of countercultural rebellion remained constant through successive movements, such as punk in the seventies and grunge in the nineties, culminating in the anti-consumerism movement of the early 2000s.

While the counterculture-along with its cultural off-shoots such as "cool," "alternative," "edgy," and "hip"-has pretty much faded out as a serious political battlefront, it remains important for a couple of reasons. First, it established the idea that a culture war was, on the one hand, always and everywhere a battle between the forces of repression and conformity and those of freedom and individualism. On the other, it helped cement the conviction that counterculture was an essentially left-wing phenomenon, and that the forces of conformity were arrayed on the right.

This dynamic, of a fundamental conflict between a non-conformist countercultural left and a repressive establishment right, came to a head during the last great culture war of the late 80s and early 90s. An early salvo was Allan Bloom's bestselling 1987 book The Closing of the American Mind, which blamed the counterculture-infused liberalism of students and the academy (as well as, of all people, Mick Jagger) for their embrace of cultural relativism and political nihilism.

Bloom's book sparked an enormous debate about the relationship between popular culture and political values, as well as the proper role of universities, the curriculum, and the so-called Western Canon. Five years later, the American paleoconservative Pat Buchanan gave a name to this debate during a stump speech for the re-election of President George H.W. Bush. Drawing an explicit comparison to America's still-fresh victory over communism, Buchanan said: "There is a religious war going on in this country. It is a cultural war, as critical to the kind of nation we shall be as was the Cold War itself, for this war is for the soul of America." According to Buchanan, the Baby Boomer, liberal, post-hippie Clintons were on one side of this war, George H.W. Bush and the God-fearing people of small-town America on the other.

Bill Clinton won the election of course, and his victory helped reinforce the view that, in America at least, conservatism was the party of religiosity, conformity, and establishment values, while the liberal "I didn't inhale" left was just the respectable face of the counterculture. It also reinforced bipartisan convictions around the importance of the culture war itself: both sides knew that controlling the culture was the key to political power; it just so happened that the liberals had won for a change.

This historical alliance between countercultural politics and the left is so entrenched that it's hard to remember that they are logically distinct; that there's nothing natural about connecting the two. In fact, what makes the present culture war so confusing, and so remarkable, is how its defining characteristic is the wholesale migration of countercultural thinking from left to right.

This was no accident; rather, it was an explicit strategy devised by Steve Bannon, Donald Trump's former campaign manager and chief of staff. Bannon's analysis of the overall political situation in America, and the respective strategies pursued by the left and the right, was in most respects completely orthodox, in that he saw political power as belonging to whoever controlled the culture. Indeed, despite long-standing Republican dominance in Washington, Bannon believed that in choosing to pursue cultural politics, the left had in fact adopted the better strategy. "While we were taking over Washington," he said, "the liberals were busy taking over Hollywood." In other words, the right controlled the state, but the left controlled the far more powerful instruments of cultural production. "Politics is downstream from culture" was Bannon's preferred slogan for the phenomenon he'd identified: the culture had become so hostile to right-wing ideas that it was seriously limiting conservatives' ability maneuver politically. In order to reclaim territory lost to the left, Bannon decided, the right needed to adopt a new cultural politics.

The need for a new "cultural politics" is what ultimately gave rise to the idea of the alt-right. What's often been missed in the debate over alt-right politics is that it is essentially a countercultural movement with a right-wing instead of left-wing valence. What makes the alt-right a countercultural phenomenon is that it has internalized the essential feature of the counterculture: the celebration of rule-breaking or norm-violation in whatever form. What makes it a conservative phenomenon is that the rules or norms of collective action or conformity that it seeks to undermine are those championed by the left under the guise of political correctness.

The alt-right's nonconformist gambits run from the refusal to be "politically correct" (e.g., objecting to using the preferred pronouns of trans individuals) to the ubiquitous online use of racist and misogynistic language, from the embrace of Nazi tropes and symbols to the rejection of virtually all forms of expertise and authority and even the repudiation of the legitimacy of the state and the rule of law. In general, whenever a norm or rule is designed to facilitate collective action in the name of progress, the alt-right sees itself as dutybound to violate it. Dissent is seen as an intrinsically political act.

It is amazing to consider the extent to which this is a repudiation of the conservative position in the culture war of the late 80s and early 90s, marking, as it does, a complete reversal of the traditional positions of left and right. The norm-flouting nihilism of the alt-right has been met, on the left, with the obsessive imposition of a constellation of increasingly strict and constantly shifting rules about people's public language and behavior. This behavior is what goes by the general term "woke politics," but a more apt term might be to call it the "ctrl-left."

It's important to underscore how unexpected this development is. For well over half a century, it's been an article of faith, agreed to by all sides, that the right was the side of rules, order, tradition, and circumspection, while the left was the party of rebellion, individualism, freedom, and transgression. Now the political valences have reversed themselves, with the right setting itself up as the true countercultural opposition to the left's restrictiveness and enforced conformity.

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Excerpted from On Decline by Andrew Potter Copyright © Andrew Potter, 2021. Excerpted by permission with permission by Biblioasis. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

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How Nostalgia Can Hide Dark Political Realities

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The satirical website The Onion once ran a story with the headline: "U.S. Dept. Of Retro Warns: 'We May Be Running Out Of Past." The conceit was that "retro consumption"-that is, the open-pit minin...

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"Finally, when a consumer’s authenticity is threatened, nostalgic reverie can increase authenticity, and under threat consumers may prefer brands or products that use retro-styling (i.e., those that use design elements referring to the past such as sepia tone photos; [32]). In all, nostalgia and nostalgic consumption can be restorative."

"a threat to control (i.e., a lowered sense of control) led to greater nostalgia relative to the absence of this threat [34]. Furthermore, a threat to belongingness also boosted nostalgia [35]. These threats can in turn lead to greater experienced nostalgia and purchase of nostalgic products [36∗] or enjoyment of nostalgic movies [37]. Nostalgia is an important part of the chain of how consumers resolve threats"

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The present review examines how and when nostalgia, a social emotion with a rich history in marketing, affects consumption-relevant outcomes. It comme...

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Polly Pocket Custom Repaints -Polly Vintage Pocket 

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Polly Pocket Custom Repaints -Polly Vintage Pocket 

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HOW I MADE MY CUSTOM MCDONALD'S POLLY POCKET

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Making My Own Polly Pocket: Halloween Vampire Mansion

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Polly Pocket Custom Paint - Adeena Grubb

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Polly Pocket Custom Paint - Adeena Grubb

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Addams Family 'Polly Pocket' Speed Build!

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Is Nostalgia a liminal space that must be passed through but not permanently resided in?

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Is Nostalgia a liminal space that must be passed through but not permanently resided in?

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Liminal Space and the Nostalgia Aesthetic

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Liminal Space and the Nostalgia Aesthetic

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Here are some key features and insights about liminal aesthetics:

a. Mood and Atmosphere: Liminal aesthetics often evoke a sense of mystery, nostalgia, and introspection. It embraces the beauty of twilight, foggy landscapes, empty hallways, and other in-between moments that evoke a feeling of uncertainty or anticipation.

b. Symbolism: This aesthetic may incorporate symbolic elements such as bridges, doorways, mirrors, or other objects representing transitions or thresholds between different states or realms.

c. Minimalism: The visual style of liminal aesthetics often leans towards minimalism, with muted colour palettes, soft lighting, and simple compositions. This simplicity helps to enhance the focus on the liminal space itself and the emotions it evokes.

Also read: Design history: 23 types of chairs, explained

The Familiar And Arcane World Of Kidcore

Kidcore, also known as kidwave or kidult aesthetics, is a trend characterised by embracing the nostalgic elements of childhood, particularly from the 1990s and early 2000s. It celebrates the whimsical, playful, and often brightly coloured aspects of childhood culture. Liminal spaces permeate many facets of kidcore. While liminal aesthetics has found a significant presence in online communities such as @ liminal_club and digital art platforms during and post-Covid, it already exists in some of our ever-favourite cartoons. For example, in Tom & Jerry, empty bedrooms, bridges with vacant roads, decadent hallways and eerie buildings have evolved into nostalgia. Yet, liminal aesthetics exude a sense of comfort in these spaces.

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What is liminal space? The nostalgia aesthetic used in the most watched cartoons

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Suspended in time, discover how beauty and comfort dwell between worlds in the liminal space aesthetic.

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Investigating the effectiveness of nostalgia cues in print ads targetting millennials

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Investigating the effectiveness of nostalgia cues in print ads targetting millennials

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CUES IN PRINT ADS TARGETING MILLENNIALS

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Nostalgia proneness and desire for uniqueness as determinants of shopping behaviour among Millennials

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Nostalgia proneness and desire for uniqueness as determinants of shopping behaviour among Millennials

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"Stern (1992) implies that the nostalgic appeals in marketing and advertising trigger into the consumer’s array of memories by reviving products, their packages and promotions associated with the past. Advertisers claim effective use of nostalgia helps to capitalize on the brand equity possessed via its recycled advertising (Winters, 1990). This concept allows the consumers to recreate the past through the nostalgic consumption despite that they cannot literally return to the past." Page 5

"As part of their study; Muehling and Sprott (2004) collated individuals’ cognitive responses that were exposed to either a nostalgic or non-nostalgic advertisement. It is worth to mention that the results identified there was a greater number of positive nostalgic thoughts that were generated via a nostalgia condition than via a non-nostalgia condition." Page 7

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Although nothing to do with Nostalgia, I believe this technique could be used to distort our own nostalgia and how we experience it to show others how it's being exploited by big corporations.

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Christina Seely, Next of Kin Portraits — EUQINOM Gallery

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EUQINOM Gallery represents artists specializing in photo-based art, video, and works on paper. EUQINOM Gallery also assists collectors in acquiring works and building collections based on their own knowledge and passions.

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S. D. Chrostowska, Consumed by Nostalgia?, SubStance, Vol. 39, No. 2, Issue 122 (2010), pp. 52-70

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You Are Your Memories TEDx Talk - Ryan Cummins

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You Are Your Memories TEDx Talk - Ryan Cummins

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"Memory is the glue that holds your mental life together. You are who you are because of what you learn and what you remember." 5:08

"Questions recalling experiences that carry with them a highly rewarding or highly pumitive stimulus. (easier to remember) 7:00

"Habituated experiences - low stimulus - short term memory - your brain chooses to ignore it. Sensitised experiences - physical change takes place in the nucleus of your brain cell. Strengthens communication between cells resulting in longer term memory. Long term memory doesnt just stick with you. It IS you. 7:20 DR Eric Kandel initially discover this.

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You Are Your Memories | Ryan Cummins | TEDxHollywood

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The Haunting Spectre of Retro Consumption 

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The Haunting Spectre of Retro Consumption 

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"Fittingly, consumers may often look at the past with a readily monetizable yearning, but the perceived hardships arising from lacking all the features of contemporary life leave them reluctant to actually desire a tangible return to old stuff (Brown et al., 2001). Rather, it is an elusive but select portion of the past they desire to be brought into modern life as an ideological remainder. Retro-commodities are thus irrevocably associated with brands and goods carrying aesthetics which point to ambiguous sheets of the past, created here and now, updated and repackaged to the expected performance of modern technological standards (also Brown, 2001a; Brown et al., 2003b), in effect purging all potentially negative historical connotations (Brown, 1999; Brown et al., 2001; Hamilton and Wagner, 2014)." Page 5

"From the perspective of marketing and consumer research, it would seem that nostalgia has become to signify almost the opposite of its origins; from malady to a pleasurable (and readily packageable) sensation (Cervellon and Brown, 2018b)." Page 6

"In a full production of its own temporal simulation, retro, in contrast to vintage and personal nostalgic objects which retain some indexicality to their historical context, plucks artefacts from history and strips them bare of all their problematic de facto historical context. We believe that retro revives inert temporal imaginations, turning them into zombified spectacles as part of the marketized myth of commodified authenticity (also Hietanen et al., 2020a). And the more the retro-necromancer (Brown, 2009) resurrects the past, the more the past will likely haunt us, a painful reminder of what we desperately seek to fend off." Page 7

"In these “conditions of digital recall, loss is itself lost” (Fisher, 2014: 2), and they now mark a past short-circuited and outside collective remembrance as digital technology comes to remember, control, and market an algorithmically splintered “dividual” of us and for us (Arvidsson, 2016; Cluley and Brown, 2015; Hietanen et al., 2020b). As Jean Baudrillard (1998) noted, “When everything can be seen, nothing can be foreseen any more” (p. 2), pointing to an obsessional reviving and reliving, a simulation of a virtual history, a retrovirus, history as ghosts (also Tanner, 2016)." Page 11

"We thus see the desire for retro consumption as a far more desperate desiring impulse—a largely unconscious attempt to reinsert a sense of history in culture that has largely occluded it, to invoke any depth in history. Indeed, “nostalgia that is now so pervasive may best be characterized not as a longing for the past so much as an inability to make new memories” Page 11

"it is important to recognize that hauntology characterizes a general cultural atmosphere of late stage capitalism. Indeed, to be a marketing scholar today is in effect to exercise hauntology, a half-lost remembering that we no longer participate in the optimisms of the past, as the happy days of marketing have increasingly evaporated along with the promise of liberation via consumption (also Takhar, 2020)." Page 13

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How will Nostalgia affect future generations when the past is at our fingertips through the internet?

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How will Nostalgia affect future generations when the past is at our fingertips through the internet?

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Nostalgia in the age of Escapsim - Asher Isbrucker

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Nostalgia in the age of Escapsim - Asher Isbrucker

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“How will our own time be defined and remembered. The archival power of the internet has given rise to a movement of temporal and cultural preservation. Now that we have the power to capture time in a bottle we can examine it whenever we like, we don’t have to let it go. It’ll be interesting to see how the first digital generations relate to nostalgia in the past given it’s abundance in todays culture.” 5:59

“The funny thing is nostalgia requires separation, a distance in time and an acceptance that whats gone is unretrievable. Otherwise, the spell doesn’t work. All we can do is examine our memories – a souvenir, a song, a home movie, the comforting glimpse of the way we were through a window, separate, distant and with. A longing that can never be cured. And remind ourselves that we’re an infinite product of where we’ve been, that memories are real even if they no longer exist. They happened and disappeared, and we kept something from them.” 7:47

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Past Futures: Nostalgia in the Age of Escapism

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How has Nostalgia changed since the invention of the internet?

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How has Nostalgia changed since the invention of the internet?

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Nostalgia’s fulfillment of agentic and communal needs

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Nostalgia’s fulfillment of agentic and communal needs

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"Our findings show that consumers with different self-concepts process nostalgic messages through different functions of nostalgia. This suggests that, to communicate effectively, nostalgic messages should fulfill the functions relevant to consumers’ distinct self-concepts. Determining which benefits to communicate to target consumers and how to communicate them is of significant value in the development of persuasive messages and in the more general arena of persuasive communication and advertising effectiveness." Page 2

"In sum, nostalgia can induce different behaviors from consumers, as it fulfills their different needs. Therefore, identifying the factors that promote an agentic versus a communal individual’s positive attitude toward nostalgia is important, because it will help marketers to develop persuasive nostalgic messages depending on consumers’ different types of self-concept" Page 2

"Pondering nostalgic moments facilitates recollectionsof positive self-images and thus increases self-esteem (Hartet al., 2011; Vesset al., 2010; Wildschutet al., 2006; Zhouet al., 2008)." Page 2

"We investigated the nostalgia effect through enhancement of not only social connectedness but also self-positivity, which has so far been under-researched as a function of nostalgia, especially in the field of consumer psychology.The results of the two experiments indicate that agentic individuals become more favorable toward a nostalgic target because they feel enhanced self-positivity, whereas communal individuals become more favorable toward the nostalgic target because they feel enhanced social connectedness" Page 7

"The interactive processes between different types of self-concepts (i.e., agentic and communal)and functions of nostalgia (i.e., self-positivity and social connectedness) on consumer behavior and decision-making should be important in various contexts. While the current research emphasized advertising and public campaign con-texts, the theorization and findings reported here are potentially applicable to other consumption or communication contexts in which persuasive nostalgic messages may be designed to influence message recipients’ behavior or deci-sions" Page 8

"Moreover, accord-ing to Stern (1992), nostalgia marketing is more useful andeffective when consumers are worried about the present,regard the future as dark, and wish to go back to thehappiness of the“old days.” Page 8

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Fountain of Youth: The Impact of Nostalgia on Youthfulness and implications for health

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Fountain of Youth: The Impact of Nostalgia on Youthfulness and implications for health

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"reflecting nostalgically on cherished memories of youth makes people feel connected with their younger self. Because nostalgia connects people with their younger self and is a potent reminder of how it feels to be young, we propose that nostalgia should make people feel younger and more youthful.

However, we anticipate that nostalgia’s impact on youthfulness will be moderated by age. Research indicates that the tendency for people to view themselves as younger than their chronological age emerges as a function of entering into adulthood and tends to appear in the late 20s and early 30s (Galambos, Turner, & Tilton-Weaver, Citation2005), but is most pronounced among middle-aged and older adults (Montepare & Lachman, Citation1989; Rubin & Berntsen, Citation2006). Abstract

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“While other forms of nostalgic collecting (like old cars or“oldie” music) evoke memories of the transition from childhood to adulthood, doll and toy collecting reveals the impact of consumption experience from the “wonder years” of early childhood, so much so that, in later life, memory of these collectibles often evokes deep feelings of identity of these very particular playthings in a nostalgic return to childhood.”

“Nostalgia in any form wasrelatively rare two centuries ago. Until moderntimes, few people travelled further than a day’swalk from their place of birth and most livedmuch as did their parents or grandparents.Time was experienced mostly as a cycle ofseasons and festivals, disrupted only byunwelcomed events like war or naturalcatastrophe. With little movement or change,there was not much to be nostalgic about.”

“It represents a longingfor the goods of the past that came from apersonal experience of growing up in thestressful world of “fast capitalism,” a particularlyintensive form of commodity culture, entailingthe increasingly rapid pace of production andpurchase, creating profit through the fastturnaround of investment. Stress resulted fromthis distinctly modern phenomenon – peoplefound identity and meaning in specific goods,but, as a result, felt that their selfhoods werethreatened when those things disappeared. Thislonging was often rooted in the formative yearsof consumers – that of childhood and youth.”

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20- and 30-somethings in the United States are burdened by financial woes and isolation, APA's 2023 Stress in America report finds

Cite this

Medaris, A. (2023, November 1). Gen Z adults and younger millennials are "completely overwhelmed" by stress. https://www.apa.org/topics/stress/generation-z-millennials-young-adults-worries

When "Hannah" graduated from college in 2019, her future looked bright: She'd landed an internship in media, moved to New York City, and joined a theater troupe where she quickly found community.

But just months later, the Covid-19 pandemic hit. Then in early 2023, her relationship ended, she got laid off, and anxiety set in. Now 26 and back in school for social work, Hannah doesn't feel "young and carefree."

"Not knowing what your future is going to look like in a world where nobody knows what the collective future is going to look like is, to say the least, overwhelming," said Hannah, whose name has been changed to protect her future job prospects.

Young adults in America like Hannah are reporting higher stress levels than older generations, with 18- to 34-year-olds saying their average stress level is a 6 out of 10, compared with a 3.4 among people ages 65 and older, APA's 2023 Stress in America survey found. Last year, this younger cohort said their average stress was a 5.8.

"Some stressors are fairly common during this life transition-career decisions, finances, planning for the future-but I believe something is different about what 20- to 30-year-olds are dealing with right now," said Chelsea Dudley, PsyD, a clinical psychologist at Coastal Therapy Group in Carlsbad, California, where she specializes in working with teens and young adults. She cited inflation, spotty health care access, and the aftermath of Covid as compounding factors.

Indeed, research shows that older adults tend to handle stress better than younger people, especially if they're able to give back in some way, said Cecilia Poon, PhD, ABPP, internship training director in Nebraska Medicine's psychology department and a board-certified geropsychologist.

That's not to say older generations are stress-free, or that the 65-and-up crew is a monolith, she added. "People in their 60s who are from the baby boom generation are not exactly dealing with the same stress as those in earlier-born generations," Poon said. And older adults from different racial and ethnic backgrounds, those in rural America, and those who identify as LGBTQA+ all face varying types and intensities of stressors.

"What are their experiences as they juggle their identities, health care needs, and their children moving away?" said Poon, who also serves on APA's Division 20 (Adult Development and Aging) executive committee. "And what about older adults with war trauma? They are re-experiencing a lot right now with all of the local and international conflicts."

Financial worries weigh heavily

From issues like discrimination and human rights to personal safety and violence, it's all stressful to younger Americans. But, like their older counterparts, health- and finance-related concerns topped the list of stressors.

Specifically, the survey found 18-34 and 35-44-year-olds were more likely than those 65 and older to report they feel "consumed" by their worries about money (67% and 63% vs. 13%, respectively).

"I've noticed more financial stress among my younger clients compared to a year ago, and I think that is completely understandable given this research and where our practice is located-in a high cost-of-living area," Dudley said.

Younger peoples' financial stress doesn't occur in a vacuum, Poon pointed out. In fact, when it means their elders are shouldering their costs or taking them back in, it can trickle up to older generations, too.

"There has been so much stress on older parents and grandparents, especially when their children or grandchildren are legally involved or unhoused," said Poon. "This is on top of existing caregiving demands of spouses, and, increasingly, children who are aging with or into disability."

But younger people report the deepest consequences of stress. In the survey, about two-thirds of 18- to 34-year-olds said stress makes it hard for them to focus (67%) and feel as though no one understands how stressed they are (66%). That age group was also most likely to say that most days, their stress is "completely overwhelming" (58%), that it renders them numb (50%), and that most days they are so stressed they can't function.

And younger cohorts are less inclined to report that they can recover from stress quickly.

"We are talking about an age group where 18- and 19-year-olds had to finish high school online and start college or their careers during so much uncertainty. No wonder they feel that people don't understand what that kind of stress is like," Dudley said. "For individuals on the upper end of this age group, they had to learn how to manage starting families and helping their young children through the pandemic, while also functioning themselves."

Indeed, the survey found parents of those under 18 also bore the weight of stress, with about half (49%) saying they feel completely stressed out no matter what they do, 64% saying they wish they had someone to help them manage their stress, and 62% saying no one understands how stressed out they are.

Increasing isolation isn't helping

While strong social connections are a well-documented defense against stress, young people seem to struggle most to make them.

APA's survey found that 74% of those ages 18 to 34 and 70% of those ages 35 to 44 say it's harder to connect with people today than in the past, and 70% of 18-34-year-olds and 65% of 35-44-year-olds say they wish someone would check in with them more frequently.

But the report wasn't all discouraging. Younger adults were most likely to feel confident about the direction of the country, and to say they believed elected officials had their best interests in mind.

As one 41-year-old man said: "The future to me looks bright and full of possibilities. I look forward to how life is going to surprise me, both in the good and the bad, and to the journey of becoming my best self."

For younger people lacking such optimism, Dudley suggested turning to proven stress management tactics, such as calling a friend or deep breathing. "Look for what is meaningful in your life that you want to invest more time in, and start small," she said. "Little by little, the small steps will turn into meaningful change."

Six Things Psychologists are Talking About

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Gen Z adults and younger millennials are "completely overwhelmed" by stress

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20- and 30-somethings in the United States are burdened by financial woes and isolation, APA's 2023 Stress in America report finds

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Millennials are changing the face of adulthood

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Millennials are changing the face of adulthood

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6. Caring for Aging Parents

Taking care of parents as they age isn't a challenge unique to millennials. As the members of this generation reach their 30s and 40s, their parents will start to require more care. A survey from Caring Advisor found that around half of millennials are already taking care of their parents, and many others are in the planning stages.

Nursing homes, adult day programs, home health services, and other professional options can get expensive quickly. Many people would prefer to live with their parents to care for them instead. Moving back in with your parents or having your parents move in with you is a major life change, and caring for them is an enormous responsibility.

7. Mental Health Concerns

With all of these financial, economical, and professional challenges, it's no surprise that millennials are feeling the stress. A study from Bensinger, DuPont & Associates found that around 20 percent of millennials report depression related to their job.

It's hard to know exactly how millennials compare in their mental health to older generations. Although mental health disorders are still stigmatized, younger people tend to be more open about their mental health struggles. More people than ever have opened up in recent years about experiencing mood disorders, anxiety disorders, and other mental health problems.

Some speculate that financial challenges are the driving force behind mental illness in the United States. Others believe that social media has a negative impact on young people's mental health because it leads to constant comparison with others. Regardless of the cause, it's clear that mental health is a big concern for many.
Seeking therapy, practicing self-care, and building a support network
To combat anxiety and depression, Millennials are encouraged to engage in the following strategies:

Seeking therapy: Professional therapy or counseling can provide valuable tools and guidance for managing anxiety and depression. Therapists can help individuals explore the root causes of their mental health challenges and develop effective coping mechanisms. Seeking therapy enables Millennials to work through their emotions and better understand themselves.

Practicing self-care: Engaging in self-care activities is crucial for maintaining mental well-being. This can include regular exercise, practicing mindfulness and meditation, getting enough sleep, and pursuing hobbies or activities that bring joy and relaxation. Prioritizing self-care allows Millennials to recharge and build resilience in the face of stress and anxiety.

Building a support network: Developing a solid support network is vital for addressing mental health challenges. This can involve seeking support from trusted friends and family members or participating in support groups. Connecting with others who have similar experiences provides a sense of community, reduces feelings of isolation, and promotes open conversations about mental health.

By actively addressing the prevalence of anxiety and depression among Millennials and by implementing these solutions of seeking therapy, practicing self-care, and building a support network, individuals can take positive steps toward managing their mental health and improving their overall well-being.

Therapy for Millennials

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7 Serious Problems Millennials Face Today

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With all of these financial, economical, and professional challenges, it's no surprise that millennials are feeling the stress.

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Children of the great recession: Millennials and the Economy

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Children of the great recession: Millennials and the Economy

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Hi-Fructose Magazine - The New Contemporary Art Magazine

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Peihang Huang Casts a Dark Shadow on Nostalgia - Hi-Fructose Magazine

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While childhood memories can bring about a pleasant feeling of nostalgia, they can also be a source of trauma that follows us into adulthood. Taiwanese artist Peihang Huang’s poignant paintings of battered toys evoke the latter. Huang’s paint strokes are loose and expressionistic, mapping out the figurative elements through saturated colors, the gradation of which is so nuanced that they appear almost iridescent. A decapitated Barbie doll and maimed Hello Kitty are splattered with blood-like red stains, tragically denouncing the idea of childhood innocence. Take a look at some of Peihang Huang’s paintings after the jump.

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Photograph 90's toys with polaroid film that is long out of date and repaint whatever comes out of it.  

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Photograph 90's toys with polaroid film that is long out of date and repaint whatever comes out of it.  

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Through this I am likening the exploitation of nostalgia to expired film - something that cannot be used or relied on forever. At some point you have to open doors to the new and fresh opportunities of the future.

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Draw polly pockets looking haggard and old, or hot wheels that have "broken down" corrupt how 90's toys are viewed to be more in line with capitalism exploiting nostalgia - this is my response to that.

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Draw polly pockets looking haggard and old, or hot wheels that have "broken down" corrupt how 90's toys are viewed to be more in line with capitalism exploiting nostalgia - this is my response to that.

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Made up of Abigail and Phebe Cameron, the Cameron Twins are London-based artists who recently graduated from Loughborough University with a degree in Fine Arts. Inspired by the likes of Rachel Maclean, fellow collaborative artists Gilbert and George, Jamie Andrews, Jeff Koons and Mike Kelley, they have already got their career off to a flying start with a solo exhibition in Leicester and a re-exhibit lined up for May 2022 in Kent.

Working across screen print, digital montage, photography, casting, sculpture and installation, the work of the Cameron Twins leans into a strong, garish aesthetic that plays with a bright and oversaturated colour palette. The result is a surreal juxtaposition of child-like naivety and chaotic imagery.

And by using scraps from their childhood to create their work, the Cameron Twins feel as if they are collaborating with their past selves. "This process acts as a visual conduit to our own past and childhood memories, and creates a shared sense of nostalgia that we express in our practice," the Twins explain. "The print process is very important in our practice as it allows us to explore repetition, doubling and mirroring in our work, which relates to our personal experience as twins, and also to create a strange, unsettling quality."

Part of the appeal of screen printing for the Cameron Twins is that the outcomes are often imperfect. The technique is somewhat uncontrollable and results in minor errors, which is a key quality of their work as it helps to create a "fun, child-like or primitive" characteristic.

On top of this, the Cameron Twins add: "Our practice is interested in incorporating recognisable, fun images and pop culture references from our childhood, such as Barbie, Trolls and My Little Pony. We enjoy using this popular imagery in our sculptures and prints as they add a playful and witty quality to the work."

Don't let the colours and presence of toys deceive you, though. The work of the Cameron Twins is not as wholesome as you may assume. Sinister tones and darker imagery are constantly lurking beneath the surface of their art, and under closer inspection, these elements reveal themselves to the viewer. The use of flashy colours only serves to underline how striking these hidden meanings actually are.

Take, for example, a bright and cheerful teddy bear who is casually holding a skull, the disfigured dolls which have extra limbs growing out of the top of their heads, or the print of a baby doll that has hauntingly had its eye obliterated. "We like to use unexpected, sometimes shocking, images and forms hidden within our child-like and naive aesthetic," the pair reveals.

"This is a theme within both our printmaking and sculptural practice, raising questions about the effect of nostalgia on people's own past experiences and memories and what might or might not lie just beneath the surface."

As for their sculptures, old, discarded toys are reclaimed and used to create new 'toys' which merge childhood memories and recognisable objects in an unsettling way. And even though these toys are "visually playful, having an overall bright, balloon-like, happy appearance", there's no denying that they fall within the disturbing realm of the uncanny valley.

The Cameron Twins do not use these nostalgic elements and bright colours for a cheap thrill, though. They are sincerely passionate about their methods because they are "intuitively and impulsively" drawn to them, especially in their post-Covid life.

"We feel this is a good way of connecting with people, believing if it makes us happy, we hope it will make others happy."

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Playfully sinister works by the Cameron Twins challenge our connections with our past selves

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Old paintings, childhood drawings and Barbie dolls are just some of the raw materials used in the multidisciplinary works of the Cameron Twins, an identical duo of creatives whose garish art playfu...

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Within the luscious pink acrylic that composes Yvette Mayorga's Surveillance Locket series, messages of joy and nostalgia for a 90s childhood coexist with critiques of consumerism and gendered labor. The Chicago-based artist uses tools like piping bags and tips to apply paint in peaks, curls, and scalloped edges evocative of an elaborately decorated cake. She builds each relief layer by layer, drawing on techniques she gleans from baking shows and Instagram tutorials. "Cake decorating is a true craft that is super laborious," she says.

This sense of labor permeates Mayorga's body of work and provides a conceptual framework that's as subversive as it is celebratory: "The color pink holds so much weight that is tied to fragility and prescribed to femme identity and gender norms. Piping and baking labor is also very gendered and constitutes a perceived notion of labor," she says. "I am saying that pink and baking labor is powerful. The hyper femme is powerful."

Alongside fields of ornate textures, the artist also uses the tactile material to define labyrinth-like playhouses, which reference the small, plastic clamshells called Polly Pockets. "It's a toy that I always dreamed of owning," she tells Colossal. "To me, it's a marker of attaining an Americaness that as a child of immigrants is often sometimes forced upon us in order to fit in." Mayorga's iterations include recreations of her childhood home alongside gilded rooms, staircases, and Rococo-style flourishes she admired while spending her childhood summers in west-central Jalisco and Zacatecas, Mexico. More modern emblems like cartoon-style characters and the televisions she used to watch MTV and Looney Tunes, alongside frames showcasing art historical works and selfies, complete the decadent mansions.

Beyond their idiosyncratic and playful reflections, though, Mayorga's works contain more ominous messages. She stations toy soldiers in entries and underneath staircases, shrouding the works with "a feeling of an impending doom" as the concealed characters surveil the scenes in a nod to patrols at the U.S./Mexico border. "My practice is a compounding of these two worlds coming together to create surrealist landscapes that are about the pink, decadent, playful, real-time, nostalgic, art historical, surveillance, and consumerism. To me, the decadence becomes the surrealist in-between space that marks my identity, because it is imagined and an aspiration," she shares.

You have multiple chances to see Mayorga's dioramas in person this year: in April, she'll be at EXPO Chicago, in a group show in Hong Kong this fall, and will open a solo show at Crystal Bridges The Momentary in October. A commissioned work will also be installed in O'Hare's Terminal Five at the end of the year. See more of her works on her site and Instagram. (via It's Nice That)

Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $5 per month. You'll connect with a community of like-minded readers who are passionate about contemporary art, read articles and newsletters ad-free, sustain our interview series, get discounts and early access to our limited-edition print releases, and much more. Join now!

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Piped in Decadent Layers, Yvette Mayorga's Bright Pink Playhouses Luxuriate in 90s Nostalgia - Colossal

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Within the luscious pink acrylic that composes Yvette Mayorga's Surveillance Locket series, messages of joy and nostalgia for a 90s childhood coexist with critiques of consumerism and gendered labor. The Chicago-based artist uses tools like piping bags and tips to apply paint in peaks, curls, and scalloped edges evocative of an elaborately decorated cake.

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For the last 13 years, guerrilla miniaturist Slinkachu ( previously) has been creating barely noticeable scenes to be discovered by unsuspecting passersby. The London-based artist uses tiny model people whose minuscule size creates humorous and thought-provoking scenarios. Slinkachu often comments on current events and social dynamics in his work. An installation at the Museum of Fine Arts in Ghent features a purse placed nonchalantly on a gallery bench, which turns out to be a meta-gallery. Inside the purse, small figures admire glorified tokens of consumer consumer culture like framed credit cards and lipstick sculptures.

Slinkachu's work is on view through June 22, 2019 in a two-person show with Jaune at Thinkspace in Culver City, California. You can see more from Slinkachu on Instagram, where the artist often shares videos that help contextualize the scale of his installations.

Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member and support independent arts publishing. Join a community of like-minded readers who are passionate about contemporary art, help support our interview series, gain access to partner discounts, and much more. Join now!

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Miniature Scenes by Slinkachu Comment on Consumer Culture

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For the last 13 years, guerrilla miniaturist Slinkachu (previously) has been creating barely noticeable scenes to be discovered by unsuspecting passersby. The London-based artist uses tiny model people whose minuscule size creates humorous and thought-provoking scenarios. Slinkachu often comments on

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Welcome back to Instagram. Sign in to check out what your friends, family & interests have been capturing & sharing around the world.

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Use different 90's toys or different items to turn into polly pocket worlds as a comment on modern consumerism exploiting nostalgia - OR how many modern things can you corrupt with nostalgia to manipulate a generation into buying. 

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Use different 90's toys or different items to turn into polly pocket worlds as a comment on modern consumerism exploiting nostalgia - OR how many modern things can you corrupt with nostalgia to manipulate a generation into buying. 

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Joana Schneider: If you know who she is it's time for botox

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Joana Schneider: If you know who she is it's time for botox

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Solo Show Joana Schneider: If you know who she is, it's Time for Botox | 1 June - 20 July 2023

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Joana Schneider will be showcasing her latest solo exhibition at Rademakers Gallery from June 1st to July 22nd, 2023. The exhibition, titled 'If you know who she is, it's Time for Botox' will feature a life-size installation inspired by the popular 90s toy, Polly Pocket. As a child of the...

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Yesterland - Disneyland History & Other Disney Park History

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Yesterland, a Theme Park on the Web, featuring Discontinued Disneyland Attractions

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Welcome to pollyther, where we create repainted Polly Pocket figures with attention to detail and quality. Our goal is to bring you unique repainted Polly Pocket designs that are fun and cute, without being tacky or overdone.

Started as a hobby, @pollyther has been recollecting Polly Pockets since 1992 and repainting them since 2021. My main job is running @jasmine_tease for our lovely customers. Follow our Instagram at @pollyther and TikTok at @pollyther

Pollyther is an account dedicated to repainting and customizing the adorable Polly Pocket. We believe that a small but thoughtful modification can make your Polly Pocket stand out from the rest! The most important thing we want you to know is that we love what we do, and we hope you'll love it too!

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Welcome to pollyther, where we create repainted Polly Pocket figures with attention to detail and quality. Our goal is to bring you unique repainted Polly Pocket designs that are fun and cute, without being tacky or overdone.

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Social media users helped a woman re-discover a movie she'd spent years searching for.

After I covered the story, a reader suggested the AI system ChatGPT could help too.

I took his advice, and found a show from the 90s I'd been trying to pin down for decades.

For over 20 years, I've been Googling variations of the phrase "giant babies, tiny adults" in search of a TV series I loved in the 90s. I've never been able to track it down.

I couldn't remember much else about the show beyond a surreal scene where a massive toddler watched the miniature cast run around. I hadn't seen it since I was 7 years old, but I thought about it a lot.

It's bothered me for decades, and it turned out I'm just one of many adults searching for the mysterious shows and movies we were raised on.

Earlier this month, 21-year-old Grace Miller from Kansas City, Missouri, blew up on TikTok when she shared the details of a half-forgotten animation from her childhood she had been trying to track down with her dad for years.

Her video skyrocketed with 7.9 million views, and within 24 hours commenters had successfully found it. They then started helping each other find the movies, shows, and books from their own childhoods in a communal effort to reconnect with their younger selves.

When I reported on the story, a reader who goes by Brad Hines wrote a Facebook comment about his search for a Christmas animation from the 1970s. He wrote that "no amount of Google searches" had yielded the right results, so he tried the free-to-use AI resource ChatGPT instead which "had the answer instantly despite my vague description."

There was a fresh glimmer of hope for my own mystery.

ChatGPT didn't get me there immediately

I opened ChatGPT and typed in every tiny detail I could recall from the show: that it revolved around a young boy and a scientist who went on adventures, and in one scene they were trapped in a room while giant babies roamed around them.

ChatGPT immediately responded with an incorrect suggestion, so I strained my memory for more details.

Each time I added an extra element that may or may not have been an accurate recollection, ChatGPT offered another idea. It brought up the TV adaptation of "Honey, I Shrunk the Kids," a show called "Sliders" I had watched growing up, and other shows and movies I'd never heard of. None were the answer I was looking for.

Then I mentioned the show aired on basic television in the United Kingdom during the period, but it was likely an American or Canadian production. That's when ChatGPT got it right.

Finally, my mystery was solved

"It seems like you might be describing the TV show 'Josh Kirby... Time Warrior!' The show is an American-Canadian production that aired in the late 1990s, and it follows the adventures of a young boy named Josh Kirby, who travels through different time periods and dimensions," ChatGPT's answer read.

It was like moving a cabinet in your home and finding a long-lost family photo behind it. I was immediately taken back to my childhood, sharing a bedroom with my brother, as we watched the six-part series of feature-length movies that followed the time-traveling teenager.

Thanks to YouTube, I was able to re-watch the scene that had sat in the back of my memory for decades, and I realized I had gotten it totally wrong. They weren't giant babies at all. They were monstrous yellow mutants who kept the main characters as human pets.

Google may be accurate, but childhood memories aren't, so it was no wonder I couldn't find something I was describing incorrectly all this time.

My experience with ChatGPT felt more like a conversation, as it took my suggestions less literally and seemed to fill in the gaps until it figured out what I meant. It took less than five minutes to solve the mystery that had bothered me for decades.

I later re-watched the show in full. The video quality was terrible, the production was poor, and the storyline totally deranged - I loved every second of it.

Read the original article on Business Insider

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I spent 20 years unable to track down an obscure 90s TV movie from my childhood. ChatGPT solved the mystery for me.

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"It was like moving a cabinet in your home and finding a long-lost family photo behind it."

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Think about toys in relation to movie adaptions for nostalgia exploitation of old toys - Super Mario, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Barbie, Polly Pocket (Not released yet) 

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Think about toys in relation to movie adaptions for nostalgia exploitation of old toys - Super Mario, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Barbie, Polly Pocket (Not released yet) 

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Widely considered the Godfather of Street Art, he has created murals and billboards across the globe that blend dazzling visuals with biting political, consumerist and surrealist statements.

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"The Rabbbits" is a rock opera. Think post-factual Animal Farm meets Aesop's Fables on LSD. Delusionville tells the story of a society that was formed as different animals fell down a rabbbit hole and created a world with their own mythologies, religion, and politics. Every animal group represents an embedded archetype in the social structure that is about to come into question.

As time goes on the animals get riled up about the economic disparity and social injustice in their previously unquestioned world of delusion. Heroes rise up and inflate the ambitions of the underprivileged, only to be deflated in the end by apathy.

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Ben Frost is best known for his bold, irreverent Pop Art paintings. His instantly recognisable take on pop culture twists up everyday iconography from the world’s biggest brands. Subverting meaning and messages from the mainstream media, Frost’s scything commentary on advertising, entertainment and politics is both confronting and controversial.

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Australian contemporary artist Ben Frost is best known for his bold, irreverent Pop Art paintings. His instantly recognisable take on pop culture twists up everyday iconography from the world's biggest brands. Subverting meaning and messages from the mainstream media, Frost's scything commentary on advertising, entertainment and politics is both confronting and controversial.

Exhibiting internationally for the past two decades, Frost's solo shows span London, New York, Sydney, Los Angeles, Toronto, Singapore, Berlin, Miami, Torino, Bangkok and San Francisco. His work has featured extensively across countless media institutions such as the BBC, Wall Street Journal, Vogue, Harper's Bazaar, Juxtapoz and Adbusters.

Most notable fashion collaborations include working with Jeremy Scott to produce a Moschino Fall/Winter Capsule Collection 2018, launching at Milan Fashion Week, and partnering with Carolina Herrera for a limited edition release of her '212 Pop!' fragrance. He has also worked on projects with Pearl Jam, Rossignol, Mambo, Livid Music Festival and J&B Whiskey.

Exhibition highlights encompass shows at the Brisbane Institute of Modern Art, the MCA in Sydney, Urban Nation Contemporary Urban Art Museum, Berlin, and inclusion in an exclusive showcase of artists for Pop the Streets at Saatchi Gallery, London.

Frost is currently based in Melbourne, Australia, where he shares a studio with his fashion designer partner, Nixi Killick.

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Australian contemporary artist Ben Frost is best known for his bold, irreverent Pop Art paintings. His instantly recognisable take on pop culture twists up everyday iconography from the world's biggest brands. Subverting meaning and messages from the mainstream media, Frost's scything commentary on advertising, entertainment and politics is both confronting and controversial.

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Is Nostalgia marketing a game changer for the toy industry?

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Is Nostalgia marketing a game changer for the toy industry?

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"Furthermore, the results also showed that Attitude and Attachment towards the product (toys) play as a mediating role between Nostalgic Emotion and the Purchasing Intention of the customers. It can be concluded that toy manufacturing companies can use nostalgia marketing as an effective way to attract more customers, thereby increasing its sales and profit. The results of this paper add to the existing literature on nostalgia marketing and also provides an insight into how nostalgia marketing can be considered as a better marketing tool in the Toy industry." Page 1

"When it comes to marketing, experiential marketing has gained a lot of customer attention (Ju et al., 2016). Experiential marketing of a product is done by making use of the emotional aspects of the customers. Nostalgia marketing comes under the concept of experiential marketing. Here, people's feelings and emotions create an emotional link between the consumer and the product." Page 1

"Toys themselves can create nostalgic connections with customers. Companies producing toys need not modify the toys made by them to bring about nostalgic feelings in customers. Toys are usually purchased by parents or elders, which are in turn given to children. So, there is an opportunity available for the toy manufacturers to use these nostalgic emotions of the parents to create an intention of purchase for toys within them."

"There are three orders of nostalgia, simple nostalgia on the idea that the life that existed in the past was better and portraying an emotion of returning to it. Then reflexive nostalgia in which a person questions if the past were more superior than the present. Lastly, interpreted nostalgia where individuals compare their past with the present while incorporating the past experiences to augment the current life (Davis, 1979)."

"This positive attitude and attachment towards the toys are leading to purchase intention. Thus, nostalgia marketing can increase the sales of toys. Here, marketers need to consider the parents' nostalgic emotions and other older people who buy toys for children." Page 9

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Nostalgia as a Resource for Psychological Health

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Nostalgia as a Resource for Psychological Health

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The Perpetual Infantilisation of Millennial Women

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The Perpetual Infantilisation of Millennial Women

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the perpetual infantilisation of millennial women

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Freddos were introduced in the 1990s at a cost of just 10p, but now they'll set you back at least three times that as the cost of living hits chocoholics

Chocolate fans have been stunned by a new price mark up for Freddo bars, as the notorious budget treat has soared to nearly 50p in some stores.

The frog-shaped snack was introduced by Cadbury's in the 1990s at the steal-price of 10p, but since 2007 it has seen a number of hikes.

But today sweet-treat lovers face a near 400 per cent increase in the original price from one major retailer, who is now selling them at 49p a pop.

After sending out a secret shopper to do some investigating, Liverpool Echo reports that the average price of a Freddo bar is 30p.

While there were cheaper options to be had in some bargain stores, the findings were enough to make your teeth hurt.

Here's the full rundown of where to go and where to avoid if you're in the market for affordable Freddos.

Home Bargains - 85p for five (17p each)

If you're looking for the best value Freddo in town, Home Bargains is the place to go.

It doesn't sell individual Freddos but you can get a multipack of five for 85p - working out at 17p each.

B&M - £1 for five (20p each)

Up next for value for money is B&M, who are selling a five pack of Freddos for £1.

This works out at 20p each - which is still, unfortunately, twice as much as prices in the 90s.

If you're feeling like you're Fredd-y for something new, B&M has also stocked up on 'milky top' (half white chocolate and half milk chocolate) and strawberry-flavoured Freddos.

At £2.99 for a bag of 12, they work out at 25p each, so you're paying an extra 5p for the experience.

Tesco and Sainsbury's - 30p

Tesco Expresses and Sainsbury's Locals sell Freddos for a standard price of 30p - earning them second place in the expensive Freddo hunt. Online they sell for 26p at Tesco and 25p at Sainsbury's.

WHSmith - 49p

If you can believe it, the most expensive Freddo the ECHO found was 49p at WHSmith.

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Freddo bar soars to nearly 50p as chocolate fans hit by cost of living crisis

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Freddos were introduced in the 1990s at a cost of just 10p, but now they'll set you back at least three times that as the cost of living hits chocoholics

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In a bid to go green, the fast-food chain removed hard plastic toys two years ago

McDonald's claims the move reduced their plastic waste by more than 890 tons

But parents say the new cardboard alternatives are 'awful' and 'terrible'

Furious parents are urging McDonald's to bring back plastic toys with their Happy Meals after the fast-food giant scrapped them in favor of cardboard toys, which they have labeled as 'awful.'

Unhappy moms and dads have taken to social media to air their grievances, with one father saying their children 'used to love the old toys, not they just throw them in the bin.'

Others have urged the fast-food giant to use recycled plastic.

In a bid to go green, McDonald's removed hard plastic toys from their kid's meal boxes in the US two years ago.

This latest backlash comes after McDonald's faced similar criticism in 2019 for ditching plastic straws for paper ones, which customers said would get soggy and were hard to drink out of.

Currently McDonald's includes a mini Hasbro game in their $4.19 Happy Meals, including Guess Who, Twister and Jenga.

Another dad Philip fumed: 'The cardboard toys are awful.

'I also dispute that it was plastic waste, lots of families kept those toys - you can go into any charity shop and find them years later.

'Be honest, you saved money and still sold Happy Meals at an increased price point, nothing to do with the environment.'

One mom Tanya added: 'Unfortunately as good for the environment as they are, it means the new toys are disappointing for the children. They aren't normally things smaller kids enjoy playing with.

'And every toy my child has received was quickly destroyed, would it not be better to use recycled plastic.'

'The current toys are terrible,' one parent named Ash said.

'They don't make my child "happy," which is supposed to be the point of a Happy Meal....'

Earlier this month, the restaurant announced that the sustainable move reduced their plastic waste by more than 890 tons.

Using recycled plastic toys, McDonald's said they had built playgrounds for children.

These were made for its children's charity, Ronald McDonald House Charities.

One parent came out in support, saying: 'Ronald McDonald House is there when parents need it most.

'A very worthwhile charity, and thank you for being there.'

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Parents slam McDonald's 'awful' cardboard Happy Meal toys

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This latest backlash comes after McDonald's faced similar criticism in 2019 for ditching plastic straws for paper ones, which customers said would get soggy.

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Original Nostalgia paper - Johannes Hofer

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Original Nostalgia paper - Johannes Hofer

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MEDICAL DISSERTATION ON NOSTALGIA BY JOHANNES HOFER, 1688 on JSTOR

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CAROLYN KISER ANSPACH, MEDICAL DISSERTATION ON NOSTALGIA BY JOHANNES HOFER, 1688, Bulletin of the Institute of the History of Medicine, Vol. 2, No. 6 (AUGUST, 1934), pp. 376-391

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The need to belong: a preference for nostalgic products 

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The need to belong: a preference for nostalgic products 

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Still Preoccupied with 1995: The Need to Belong and Preference for Nostalgic Products

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Abstract. This research examines the conditions under which consumers experience an increased preference for nostalgic products, such as previously popular movi

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The Study of Nostalgia-Oriented Strategy Aimed at Millennials on the Example of the LEGO Group.

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The Study of Nostalgia-Oriented Strategy Aimed at Millennials on the Example of the LEGO Group.

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Keeping Memories Alive: A Decennial Study of Social Media Reminiscing, Memories, and Nostalgia

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Keeping Memories Alive: A Decennial Study of Social Media Reminiscing, Memories, and Nostalgia

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Mapping memory in the brain. Eric Kandel (2008)

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Paris Marx is joined by Grafton Tanner to discuss the dangers and consequences of companies and politicians leveraging nostalgia for their own purposes.
Grafton Tanner is the author of Foreverism. He also teaches at the University of Georgia.

Tech Won't Save Us offers a critical perspective on tech, its worldview, and wider society with the goal of inspiring people to demand better tech and a better world. Support the show on Patreon.

The podcast is made in partnership with The Nation. Production is by Eric Wickham. Transcripts are by Brigitte Pawliw-Fry.

Also mentioned in this episode:
Paris wrote about the material footprint of data centers in Disconnect.Ian McKellen broke down on the set of The Hobbit after acting with no other actors on a green screen.In an interview with Charlie Rose, George Lucas described differences between Soviet and US film industries.Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy told Vanity Fair it wasn't as fun making Star Wars films today as it was making the original trilogy.Jake Gyllenhaal described the difficulty of acting in a Marvel film after Spider-Man: Far From Home.Support the show

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how foreverism degrades our culture w/ grafton tanner

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‎Tech Won't Save Us: How Foreverism Degrades Our Culture w/ Grafton Tanner on Apple Podcasts

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Paris Marx is joined by Grafton Tanner to discuss the dangers and consequences of companies and politicians leveraging nostalgia for their own purposes. Grafton Tanner is the author of Foreverism. He also teaches at the University of Georgia. Tech Won't Save Us offers a critical perspective on tec...

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Frank Sidebottom/Chris Sievey Official Website - 11:37 Enterprises

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11:37 Enterprises is the official Frank Sidebottom website curated by the family of Chris Sievey.