A Personal Revelation (Or Not)...
Hello again loyal readers. I hope everyone is doing well.
I will post my predictions for 2006 soon (I'm not quite done with them yet.)
This post concerns a minor personal revelation.
I was sitting at the computer playing solitaire and listening to some old 80's music (specifically, "Never Surrender" by Corey Hart) after an evening of updating, downloading, and general surfing. While I listened to the song, my mind wandered, as it is wont to do, and then it hit me. Does anyone know why nostalgia-based industries make so much money? Anyone...Bueller? Well, I will tell you. It is because, as everyone gets older, they start remembering and reassessing their youth. Whether it is consciously or unconsciously, enough people do it to drive a industry that is nostalgia based. By "nostalgia-based industries", I mean everything from "classic rock" FM radio stations and "TV Land"-style television stations to the folks who put out those "Best Of" Decade X albums and the producers of shows like VH1's popular "I Love The" [insert decade here] fare.
Now there is nothing wrong with a little nostagia. In fact, in tough or bad times, memories from our youths can be quite comforting (and in some cases, inspiring.) As long as you don't overdo it, I don't think that any p-shrink will tell you that reminiscing about days past is a bad thing.
The revelation I had doesn't so much deal with wondering about memories or reassessing my youth as it does with why we feel so nostalgic when such memories pop up. The revelation goes a bit like this:
First, I know that music can be an incredibly powerful tool insofar as churning up memories are concerned. Second, I know that those memories with strong emotions (good or neutral emotions such as those that give you a "warm fuzzy" feeling) attached to them can lead to deep feelings of nostalgia. The question I posed to myself was "Why does this happen?" So, I thought about it for a while. Using a combination of inductive and deductive reasoning coupled with personal thoughts and feelings, I came up with my hypothesis. That hypothesis is, when we are young, specifically when we are teenagers, we are transitioning from childhood to adulthood. During that transition, we are going through several difficult periods concurrently. Physically, we are going through puberty. Socially and emotionally, we are dealing with becoming aware of the opposite sex, dating, and, generally, the whole high school social period. Intellectually, our thinking is being transformed from the learning by recitation model of primary education into the critical thinking model of secondary education and adulthood. Generally, we enter, traverse, and exit this entire period in less than ten years (that is from the start of puberty to its end). To experience this massive upheaval and change in less than ten years means that the changes we are experiencing and information we are gathering about ourselves and the world around us happens extremely rapidly. This rapidity means that certain things get lost, forgotten or ignored. Couple the lost, forgotten, or ignored items with a teenager's desire to "cool" and aloof or with (as I put it) their inability to be anything but egocentric and you can begin to see that during our teen years we neither have the emotional maturity, nor the intellectual maturity, to appreciate the subtleties of the world around us. Couple that immaturity with the fact that the world around them is coming at them at an alarming rate, and you can see how the average teen may miss a few things. Now, one thing that any parent will agree with, is that the average teen doesn't miss much in the way of popular music. As we already know, music is a powerful memory agent.
Now, leap forward to your 30's and 40's. Time has eliminated the bad memories of our youth and polished the good memories. Suddenly, on the local radio station, a song from your lost youth appears. All of those good memories, so carefully polished, come flooding back, and suddenly you find yourself longing for the "simpler days" of 1985. You invariably remember something like sharing a romantic dance with "Mary Jane Rottencrotch", but you never remember the 16 girls who turned you down flat for that dance because you were either not in the "right" clique or because you were an a/v geek. (This may pertain to people feeling nostalgic for their high school days, but college nostalgia may be looked upon as merely an extension of the same processes described above but with a bit more maturity involved.)
Thus it is my conclusion that nostalgia occurs for two reasons. The first reason is that as teenagers we are aware of our environment, most specifically social happenings and the music associated with them, but are either too overwhelmed or immature to appreciate it at the time. And the second reason is that, as adults, we have eliminated, repressed, or just plain forgotten, all of the unpleasant memories, retained and enhanced the good memories, and have learned how to appreciate the environment around us.
Those nostalgia-based industries I spoke of earlier have learned how to tap the second reason above. That is how they manage to sell people their products. So next time you are considering shelling out $20 for a "Best of" Decade X cd, think about the reasons you want the cd. While you may still get the cd, you may also get a bonus while thinking about your reasons for the purchase...you just may discover something about yourself you never knew. And that in itself is well worth the $20.
As always, I am Chuck and this has been a minor revelation (more than a surprising thought but less than an epiphany). (And now you also know why I majored in History and not Psych!!)
I will post my predictions for 2006 soon (I'm not quite done with them yet.)
This post concerns a minor personal revelation.
I was sitting at the computer playing solitaire and listening to some old 80's music (specifically, "Never Surrender" by Corey Hart) after an evening of updating, downloading, and general surfing. While I listened to the song, my mind wandered, as it is wont to do, and then it hit me. Does anyone know why nostalgia-based industries make so much money? Anyone...Bueller? Well, I will tell you. It is because, as everyone gets older, they start remembering and reassessing their youth. Whether it is consciously or unconsciously, enough people do it to drive a industry that is nostalgia based. By "nostalgia-based industries", I mean everything from "classic rock" FM radio stations and "TV Land"-style television stations to the folks who put out those "Best Of" Decade X albums and the producers of shows like VH1's popular "I Love The" [insert decade here] fare.
Now there is nothing wrong with a little nostagia. In fact, in tough or bad times, memories from our youths can be quite comforting (and in some cases, inspiring.) As long as you don't overdo it, I don't think that any p-shrink will tell you that reminiscing about days past is a bad thing.
The revelation I had doesn't so much deal with wondering about memories or reassessing my youth as it does with why we feel so nostalgic when such memories pop up. The revelation goes a bit like this:
First, I know that music can be an incredibly powerful tool insofar as churning up memories are concerned. Second, I know that those memories with strong emotions (good or neutral emotions such as those that give you a "warm fuzzy" feeling) attached to them can lead to deep feelings of nostalgia. The question I posed to myself was "Why does this happen?" So, I thought about it for a while. Using a combination of inductive and deductive reasoning coupled with personal thoughts and feelings, I came up with my hypothesis. That hypothesis is, when we are young, specifically when we are teenagers, we are transitioning from childhood to adulthood. During that transition, we are going through several difficult periods concurrently. Physically, we are going through puberty. Socially and emotionally, we are dealing with becoming aware of the opposite sex, dating, and, generally, the whole high school social period. Intellectually, our thinking is being transformed from the learning by recitation model of primary education into the critical thinking model of secondary education and adulthood. Generally, we enter, traverse, and exit this entire period in less than ten years (that is from the start of puberty to its end). To experience this massive upheaval and change in less than ten years means that the changes we are experiencing and information we are gathering about ourselves and the world around us happens extremely rapidly. This rapidity means that certain things get lost, forgotten or ignored. Couple the lost, forgotten, or ignored items with a teenager's desire to "cool" and aloof or with (as I put it) their inability to be anything but egocentric and you can begin to see that during our teen years we neither have the emotional maturity, nor the intellectual maturity, to appreciate the subtleties of the world around us. Couple that immaturity with the fact that the world around them is coming at them at an alarming rate, and you can see how the average teen may miss a few things. Now, one thing that any parent will agree with, is that the average teen doesn't miss much in the way of popular music. As we already know, music is a powerful memory agent.
Now, leap forward to your 30's and 40's. Time has eliminated the bad memories of our youth and polished the good memories. Suddenly, on the local radio station, a song from your lost youth appears. All of those good memories, so carefully polished, come flooding back, and suddenly you find yourself longing for the "simpler days" of 1985. You invariably remember something like sharing a romantic dance with "Mary Jane Rottencrotch", but you never remember the 16 girls who turned you down flat for that dance because you were either not in the "right" clique or because you were an a/v geek. (This may pertain to people feeling nostalgic for their high school days, but college nostalgia may be looked upon as merely an extension of the same processes described above but with a bit more maturity involved.)
Thus it is my conclusion that nostalgia occurs for two reasons. The first reason is that as teenagers we are aware of our environment, most specifically social happenings and the music associated with them, but are either too overwhelmed or immature to appreciate it at the time. And the second reason is that, as adults, we have eliminated, repressed, or just plain forgotten, all of the unpleasant memories, retained and enhanced the good memories, and have learned how to appreciate the environment around us.
Those nostalgia-based industries I spoke of earlier have learned how to tap the second reason above. That is how they manage to sell people their products. So next time you are considering shelling out $20 for a "Best of" Decade X cd, think about the reasons you want the cd. While you may still get the cd, you may also get a bonus while thinking about your reasons for the purchase...you just may discover something about yourself you never knew. And that in itself is well worth the $20.
As always, I am Chuck and this has been a minor revelation (more than a surprising thought but less than an epiphany). (And now you also know why I majored in History and not Psych!!)
posted by Chuck | 01:24
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home