Our obsession with nostalgia is driving a trend revival spiral

In fact, one of the things that will not survive is novelty itself: trends, fads, fashions, scenes, vibes. We are thrown back into cyclical time; what’s growing old is the cruel demand to make things new.

Just as every decade can be defined by a fashion or musical style, looking back at our 2020s from the future, what will we yearn for?

Is there anything to iterate upon if our moment is already defined by prior generations’ sensibilities?

The 20-year nostalgia cycle, climate-change nihilism, information saturation, streaming-era content overload, and our collective Long COVID of the soul have converged in a tidal wave of tackiness.

So there’s a weird thing going on where there’s abundance, and yet, at the same time, we’ve become really conservative about our own styles, because people fundamentally don’t want to adopt things that feel inauthentic to them, or will be judged inauthentic.

And because culture is so ephemeral, there’s just more stuff that people are worried that —

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There is a ton of nostalgic longing for these previous eras and scenes like “Indie Sleaze” without any of the desire to create the environment to make new versions of them possible . [...'] This forced synthesizing of the past for the sake of our generational feeling of missing out is the ultimate sign of the times. It’s preferable to try and crawl... See more