I’m Done With Nostalgia

Because I have to be, in order to function

The other night I woke up at two a.m. and started replaying the events of my week, because that’s the logical thing to do at two in the morning.

I had a lot to do last week, and I tried to keep on track with it. I worked, I visited my mom in Memory Care, I made meals for my family and helped my kids with their homework and school events.

Because two a.m. always seems like a good time to be honest with yourself (it’s really not), I also remembered that I spent a lot of time watching YouTube videos. I did not watch videos on DIY methods or how to learn a language. I almost exclusively watched clips from Craig Ferguson’s late-night show from the 2000s, movie trailers from movies I loved in the 90s and 2000s, and also the full film of Brassed Off!, an Ewan McGregor classic made in (you guessed it) the 1990s.

By now it was nearly three a.m., and then I had this thought:

“I’m so done with nostalgia.”

I’m not even 50 yet and I’ve given up on my current life.

I didn’t want to work in healthcare, I’m terrible at salaried jobs and professional jobs (I hate selling my time for money and I ABHOR meetings), and I love to do anything with words. So I became a freelancer.

I come from a long line of freelancers. My people were farmers, and several of my siblings did freelance jobs for years and years. When I was little, my parents only had “disaster” health insurance with huge premiums, because, for the most part, if they or their kids had run-of-the-mill health problems, they just paid cash to work on getting them fixed. My parents paid a few hundred bucks each for the births of most of my siblings.

A few hundred bucks.

Imagine a world where it used to be possible to have your baby in a hospital for a few hundred bucks. That was possible in the 1960s.

My parents could freelance — own a business without health insurance coverage and a pension — because there was a little wiggle room in the society that allowed for people who wanted to freelance.

That is one thing I’m nostalgic for.

The other day my tween son said to me, “Mom, walking to school isn’t fun anymore. None of my friends talk. They just look at their phones.”

I’m emphatically not nostalgic for my own grade-school experiences, filled as they were with bullying and silent treatments (some things are eternal). But I do miss my youth without cell phones. I still remember the freedom of leaving your house to get away from your phone. I remember passing notes to friends during school, and making plans ahead of time and then meeting people where we were had planned, because nobody had any other way to get in touch with each other and change plans a million times.

Nobody knew every last little painful thing about Kim Kardashian, or Elon Musk, or whoever it is people like now. If you wanted celebrity news, you bought the magazines Tiger Beat or People or Entertainment Weekly, and after you read them, you were done with that type of time-wasting for the week.

Every now and then we went to movies where other people and listened to collective laughter (because strange little things called comedies, not just superhero action movies, used to get made). Sometimes we just went to coffee shops and libraries and stores and any number of other places because we couldn’t order every last little thing we ever wanted to be dropped at our doors.

We didn’t have alarmingly plunging test scores (that coincided with the rise in popularity of cell phones and the erosion of all our attention spans). We didn’t have an increasingly desperate education situation where rich people in rich suburbs do whatever they have to to help their kids succeed, including putting them in club soccer from the age of three, in the hopes of scoring that scholarship from a prestige college, while everyone else founders along trying to figure out what classes and test scores they need to get into any college, anywhere.

There was a time when it seemed like education was achievable for more people, even if you were a poor rural kid whose parents were freelancers. Education was expensive but didn’t put you in debt for the rest of your life. There were still jobs in things like communications and media and education that, while they probably wouldn’t make you rich, would allow you to live.

That is another thing I’m nostalgic for.

Have you ever seen the 1988 movie Crossing Delancey? If not, go watch the trailer, please.

The plot was this: Single woman in her 30s has a successful career as a bookstore worker and organizer of the store’s reading series. Her grandmother wants her to get married, but she doesn’t know that she has to or wants to. Comedy and romance ensue, and although there’s a happy ending, you’re left with the sense that, hey, even if the romance doesn’t work out, Izzy (the main character) still has a pretty good life. She’s secure in herself and her work and she’s perfectly at home in New York City, where she can actually afford to live (albeit in her rent-controlled apartment; do they still have such things?).

I watched that movie for the first time in my teens. And, I thought, THAT is the life I want.

I don’t need a lot of money. I didn’t really need the perfect man. But I wanted a life with work and books and ideas and talking and working with other authors and people who thought books and ideas and history were important.

I thought it might actually be achievable. I couldn’t wait to get to my adult life of books and friends and a world that wasn’t increasingly defined solely by those who have everything, all the money and power. I couldn’t wait to maybe meet someone and have kids and then help those kids realize the power of words and reading and being kind to people and having some human understanding and yeah, making enough money to get by and be middle-class-ish without the making of the money being the only fucking point.

I want the life I saw in Crossing Delancey.

I’m nostalgic for that too. This is why I used to watch that movie endlessly.

I want to get that feeling of hope back.

Hope is not coming back.

I’m not a moron. I’m not saying the twentieth century, or even just the 90s, were perfect.

But give me this: In the 1990s, Donald Trump was just a business mogul that everyone knew but also kind of just laughed at.

I don’t think the old days were necessarily better, but I still kind of miss them. And I definitely miss having the hope that I could make a living in the liberal arts, and maybe I could help my kids do so as well. I felt kind of like we were moving in a direction where we were trying to do some things about equality, about poverty, about access to health care that was getting better.

I don’t feel that way anymore.

And I don’t want to be nostalgic anymore. It takes too much time and it makes me too sad.

The life of books and education and maybe more world peace (rather than less) that I thought was within reach, probably isn’t.

So what do I do know? All suggestions considered. ChatGPT has come for my writing and communications gigs; so what practical thing should I learn to do? (Full disclosure: I’ve already thought of becoming a CNA because God know there is going to be a need and I grew up on a farm so I’m not afraid of hard work, but honestly? I’m 49 and I don’t think my back could take it.)

More importantly: How do I move forward when I don’t think there’s anything left to look forward to?