Addicted to Nostalgia

There are a lot of things in life you can be addicted to, some are more destructive than others.  The National Health Service [NHS] in the UK defines addiction as "not having control over doing, taking or using something to the point where it could be harmful to you" - obvious examples aside, this definition throws open the possibility of addiction to all manner of things.

I guess really the crux of the NHS definition and its limitation isn't really what it can apply to, but rather that caveat "where it could be harmful to you" and the definition of harm therein.  It's easy to limit harm only to physical harm, but in doing so you would completely exclude many addictions where the negative affects are not physical but mental.  You can even go so far as to say that any negative impact on your life or limitation of your ability to live your life could be construed as harm.

I find it interesting to contemplate what that could be applied to and how far you can take it.  There are various media sensations where tabloids and magazines and their ilk often speak of addictions to things you wouldn't conventionally view as bad.  Rather than take that idea and apply it to something that would be controversial as many do, I'd rather apply it to something you might not have thought about.

If wishes, hopes, and dreams, can all be considered desires for the future or desires for how the present could be changed, then you could view nostalgia as the desire for the past - although you do have to draw a distinction between the past as it was and the past as we remember it because the two don't always align.  In that vein I would say that while depression can lead one to feel a mental and physical exhaustion and the desire not to leave bed, almost to the point where addiction to sleep and dreaming can develop, I would go so far as to say fixation on nostalgia itself can become an addiction in and of itself.

If you define side affects of a behaviour as being harmful if they impede your ability to live in the present and look to the future then you could say if your fixation on the past whether it be as it was or as you remember it, could be harmful if it stops you from living life in the moment.  If you miss out on experiences today because you long for yesterday so much, and deny yourself a future because you indulge in your desire to look back too much, is it fair to say you are addicted?

The reason I ask this question and pose this idea is because I am becoming increasingly aware of the negative impact on our society as a whole of a widespread populism that is defined by the desire to go back.  Across the western world, both sides of the Atlantic, populism has been feeding the idea that things were better in the past and that the world would be a better place if we went back to the way things were.  The trouble with this whole idea is that it is empirically flawed.  The economic models of the past wouldn't work with our current society, they didn't scale in the first place that was why they were replaced to begin with.  Progress was never something that was forced upon society as a whole, whilst undoubtedly along the way there were always those that opposed and objected and resisted change every step of the way the fact remains society as a whole moved in the direction it did because it was what people wanted.

I'm not convinced that many people actually want to go back to the past as it was, instead I think many people have romanticized it, particularly those who either did not experience it to begin with or weren't fully aware of it at the time to be able to judge it fairly.  When you ask people why they think the world was better back then, they pick out things they liked and completely forget about everything they didn't, many right up to the point where you can ask pointed questions about the negatives that they can't answer because they either didn't recall them or never experienced it themselves.

In the UK for example many people reminisce about the 90s and the 80s as decades of greatness which many would want to return to and relive.  The same people however can't justify that longing when asked about the negative events of those periods.  When you ask if people would like to rebuild the Berlin wall, the vast majority would say no.  When you ask if they want widespread unemployment and inflation that is spiralling out of control, they also say no.  When you ask if people want authoritarian governments with leaders that were akin to dictators who made decisions that even now decades later still impact upon the lives of people who lived through them, again people say no.  You get right down to it and see that really all people want is to experience the fashions again, the food they ate, the TV shows they watched, and the Music they listened to in an effort to indulge their nostalgia.  They don't actually want to live like they once did.  The World Wide Web was invented in the early 90s, but didn't become widespread to the extent it is now until the 00s, yet ask those so eager to return to the 80s if they would give up their smart phones, their tablets, and the ubiquity of the Internet to do it and you will see the reluctance begin to assert itself.  It becomes quite clear it's not the past as it was, but the past as they have idealized it that they want to return to - a world that never actually existed in the first place.

Have we as a society become addicted to nostalgia?  Is the depth and breadth of the political and social turmoil we live through today in reality a symptom of widespread addiction?  If so, how can you tackle that addiction?  Perhaps we need a radical solution to the problem; if one of the most effective ways to treat addiction is to go cold turkey, maybe it is time we started to seal away our past as a society in archives.  Stop repeating old television shows, stop selling old music, preserve it only in archives that can only be accessed for research and posterity.  Restrict publications and TV shows about past events to those of a verifiable nature.  Encourage society to move forward and stop remaking and remixing old content and instead create completely new content.  I'm not talking about rewriting or erasing history like that of Nineteen Eighty Four.  All I am doing is highlighting the fact that we as a society have been around for thousands of years yet it is only a few decades of the late 20th century that we fixate on, and one of the reasons for that is because so much information and content created during that time is so readily available to us.  We don't focus on the Roman Empire, or Medieval Europe to the extent we do with the late 20th century.

In the movie the Matrix when the first Matrix proved to be a disaster the machines had to rebuild and redesign it, in doing so they modelled it on the world as it was in the late 20th and early 21st century.  If we aren't careful then our obsession with that time period might become a self-fulfilling prophecy.  With the rise of VR and our pursuit of evermore immersive experiences it's not hard to see how a Matrix like simulation would become something people actually want to create and experience and it's not hard to see that time period becoming the one most people want to relive.  If we ever make that a reality and go back to lie in the poppy fields, what would that spell for the future of our species?