On Zoomer Nostalgia
I'm a very young man, but it feels like my peers are more nostalgic than my parents. Sure, my dad loves him some Fraiser, but it doesn't occupy many conversations with friends his age. But if I make a new zoomer friend, we often end up talking about media from our childhoods.
Maybe they're just temporally closer. As recent graduates into adulthood, we have fewer adult experiences, so we end up talking about our childhoods more. Maybe young adulthood is just a nostalgic time of life. Your identity is changing very fast, you've only just becoming obvious that the world is a chaotic and scary place.
This makes sense, but it's very odd that zoomers pine for things we didn't experience.
If you ask a zoomer when she'd prefer to grow up, she'll often say "the 80s." Everyone I know who likes wiby.me is a Zoomer.1 Lots of people my age like retro games and old TV shows (or modern media that mimic their aesthetics, Celeste and Stranger Things come to mind). The guy who made that faux - VHSy Backrooms series? Yeah, he was born in 2005. And loads of zoomers love the fashion from previous decades (I can't tell you which ones because I got the wrong kind of autism).
I was going to end this by saying I couldn't explain this phenomenon. But, on reflection, I think I can. Zoomers aren't very hopeful about the future--I'm more optimistic than most, but I often feel like the world is going to Hell in a handbasket. So, instead of fantasizing about the future, we pine for the past. Even if we weren't part of it.
Of course, this could just be because I know more zoomers than millenials.↩