OPINION | PHILIP MARTIN: How nostalgia feeds our souls (original) (raw)
People say America is trapped in nostalgia, though that diagnosis seems to be lazy cultural shorthand that sounds persuasive until you start poking around underneath it. Every few months, another think piece arrives explaining why vinyl records are returning, why young people are buying film cameras, why independent bookstores survive Amazon, why baseball exerts its pull despite decades of predictions about its death, why luxury whiskey culture resembles a secular liturgy, and why boutique Blu-ray companies package old movies with the reverence medieval monks reserved for illuminated manuscripts.
The underlying assumption: Americans are sentimental, spooked by the future and busy romanticizing the past because the present feels unstable.
We like to treat memory as a documentary when it's more like an "inspired-by-a-true-story" director's cut. The past people pine for almost never existed in the shape memory gives it. Nostalgia works because it's a ruthless editor.
Nobody's clamoring for a return to cigarette smoke in every restaurant, casual workplace sexism, segregated neighborhoods, weak coffee, leaded gasoline, three TV channels or small-town suffocation dressed up as moral order. Those supposedly stable decades felt less like comfort than slow suffocation.
What people miss are emotional conditions associated with those eras: continuity, orientation, ritual, social density, slower rhythms, and the feeling that public life possessed some durable structure.
Nostalgia cuts out the boredom, cruelty and banality of the past and lights it beautifully.
People romanticize old record stores because memory transforms them into scenes
from a Cameron Crowe movie. In reality, many record stores were cramped, dusty and staffed by semi-hostile obsessives who judged your taste with theological severity. But they were also places where young people formed identities, where accidental conversations occurred, where expertise existed outside algorithms, where boredom could suddenly become discovery.
Teenagers learned geography through music scenes: Memphis. Athens. Liverpool. Minneapolis. Laurel Canyon. Manchester. Sometimes entire identities emerged from conversations near the import section.
Those places created serendipitous encounters.
You could not instantly summon every song ever recorded from a glowing plastic rectangle in your pocket. You had to search. Waiting became part of the experience. Somebody recommended an album. You saved money for it. Maybe the store only got two copies. Maybe you drove across town because another place heard they might receive it Friday afternoon.
Friction, these days, is practically a luxury item.
Streaming offers abundance, but rarely produces attachment. Spotify gives listeners access to nearly every song ever recorded while somehow making music feel more disposable. Vinyl slows the process. You physically select the record. You place the needle. You listen to Side One because skipping tracks requires effort. The limitations become part of the pleasure.
Modern systems know our preferences, but don't know us.
That may explain why so many supposedly obsolete experiences keep returning in altered forms. Record Store Day now produces lines that wrap around city blocks. Repertory screenings of "Jaws" and "Stop Making Sense" sell out with audiences young enough to have discovered both through streaming algorithms. Independent bookstores host silent reading nights packed with people in their 20s and 30s who could buy every title cheaper online but show up anyway because browsing shelves alongside strangers satisfies some appetite the Internet never anticipated.
Bookstores remain one of the few places left where lingering still feels socially acceptable. You wander without much of a plan. You pick up a novel because the cover catches your eye or because somebody left a handwritten recommendation card beneath it. When you don't know what you're looking for, you leave yourself open to surprise.
A while back I sat inside a bookstore watching people doing nothing particularly productive. Somebody slowly worked through a biography thick enough to stun a burglar. Two college students compared heavily annotated paperbacks while their phones remained untouched on the table for nearly 20 consecutive minutes, a feat that may qualify as minor science fiction in modern America.
Nobody looked efficient. Everybody looked human.
For decades, the country optimized itself around convenience, efficiency and scale. We automated checkout lines, digitized entertainment, collapsed local retail, replaced wandering with recommendation engines and gradually removed thousands of intermediary spaces that once existed between private isolation and mass society.
Then we acted surprised when people started grasping for texture, ritual and physical presence.
A record store was never merely a retail outlet. A newspaper was not simply a delivery system for information. Movie theaters, bowling leagues, churches, FM radio stations, civic clubs, local bars, shopping malls, bookstores and department stores all performed secondary functions modern America rarely discusses because those functions were difficult to quantify on quarterly earnings reports.
They organized time, created recurring rituals, forced people into low-stakes encounters with strangers. Most of all, they made life feel lived-in.
For years Americans mocked malls as symbols of suburban conformity and teenage aimlessness. Then the malls vanished and people suddenly realized they had also functioned as one of the few remaining indoor public spaces where adolescents could exist semi-independently without spending enormous amounts of money. Teenagers once spent entire Saturdays wandering food courts. They flirted badly. Bought terrible sunglasses. Developed social instincts. Now many of those same interactions happen through phones while teenagers sit alone in bedrooms narrating themselves into existence on TikTok.
You can feel the larger shift almost everywhere now. Restaurants replace servers with QR-code menus. Grocery stores install self-checkout kiosks that bark instructions in the tone of depressed airport robots. Concert-goers watch entire songs on their phone screens while filming evidence they attended the concert yet no longer fully experience it. Couples sit across from each other at dinner intermittently checking notifications like gamblers feeding slot machines.
German sociologist Hartmut Rosa argues modern life accelerates without necessarily becoming more meaningful. We save time while feeling perpetually short on it. Devices intended to simplify life often increase the number of interactions demanding our attention.
Even luxury arrives stripped of ceremony. Somebody can spend $300 on Japanese whiskey while staring at TikTok videos beside another person doing the same thing.
Maybe that's why rituals are suddenly back in style.
Whiskey culture increasingly resembles liturgy. Japanese whiskey bars, bourbon tastings, curated glassware, specialized ice and endless debates about aging and provenance start looking like a quiet rebellion against frictionless consumption. People are not merely buying alcohol. They are buying ceremony.
Golf works the same way, which may explain why it keeps dodging predictions of extinction. Golf is inefficient on purpose. Four hours outside chasing a small white ball across improbable landscapes makes no sense in a culture obsessed with productivity. Yet golfers keep returning because the game imposes rhythms modern life strips away: walking, waiting, conversation, frustration, concentration, delayed gratification and memory.
The round becomes a temporary operating system for being human.
That may also explain why baseball matters despite decades of predictions about shrinking attention spans and generational drift. Baseball pauses long enough for memory to enter the frame. Fathers and grandfathers remain present in the experience because the rhythms themselves changed so little. Other sports adapt more fully to acceleration. Baseball stubbornly retains dead time, and dead time matters.
This realization surfaces in recent movies, especially "The Holdovers." Many viewers described the film as nostalgic because of its 1970s textures and old-fashioned storytelling rhythms. But nostalgia is not really the film's subject. The movie is about institutional intimacy.
"Perfect Days" explores similar territory from a different angle. The film follows a Tokyo toilet cleaner whose life revolves around books, cassette tapes, photography, trees and carefully repeated routines. On paper, the premise sounds precious enough to cause hives. In practice, the movie feels profound because it understands what modern culture keeps forgetting: Routine can stabilize the soul.
Even "The Bear," beneath all the screaming and kitchen chaos, is about rebuilding meaning through shared labor, ritual and physical proximity.
And when institutions weaken, consequences ripple outward in strange ways.
When newspapers decline, communities lose civic memory. When local bars vanish, people lose informal gathering spaces. When churches weaken, people seek substitute forms of belonging through politics, fandom, ideology or online identity performance. When malls disappear, teenagers lose access to autonomous public space. When local radio fragments, regional culture weakens. When moviegoing becomes individualized streaming, audiences lose synchronized emotional experience.
More and more, people meet each other through ideological filters or algorithmic sorting. That is a difficult way to sustain a democratic culture.
Maybe that's why modern discourse feels simultaneously hyper-personal and weirdly theatrical. Social media turns everyone into a tiny broadcasting network endlessly narrating themselves into being. "Get ready with me" videos replace hanging out. Gym culture becomes self-documentation. Tourists back into landmarks for selfies instead of looking at the landmarks. Everything becomes content, because content is what remains when community erodes.
Which brings us back to nostalgia.
Maybe Americans are not trying to recover the past. Maybe they are searching for human-scale experiences capable of surviving the digital stampede. The popularity of vinyl, bookstores, whiskey bars, baseball, boutique cinemas, podcasts, farmers' markets and old diners does not represent a rejection of modernity so much as an attempt to smuggle humanity back into it.
The future should not look like 1978. The old world carried loneliness, exclusion and cruelty alongside its rituals and coherence. But the persistence of these supposedly obsolete experiences suggests human beings still crave places that feel inhabited rather than optimized, places where time slows long enough for attention, memory and accidental community to take root.
A civilization can survive political disagreement. It gets shakier when people stop occupying real spaces together.
The market keeps writing obituaries for old forms of life, yet people continue resurrecting them in smaller, stranger and more stubborn forms. Somebody still opens a hardcover biography in a coffee shop instead of scrolling notifications. Somebody still spends Saturday afternoon wandering through a record store with no particular destination in mind. Crowds still gather to watch 50-year-old movies in repertory theaters. People still linger after the final out at baseball games because the experience deserves a few extra minutes to settle into memory before everybody drifts back toward traffic and glowing screens.
The technology keeps changing. The hunger underneath it doesn't.
Philip Martin has been a columnist and critic for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette since 1993. In that time, he has won more than 100 regional and statewide journalism prizes, including five Green Eyeshade awards, published six books and released eight albums of original music. He appears weekly on “The Zone” with Justin Acri and D.J. Williams on 103.7 FM in Little Rock.