My moods run a predictable daily cycle. Morning is careless, unbothered, then pretty neutral throughout the day, but as night deepens, I become nostalgic, reflective, emotional. After a few hours in the tub, I don’t need the Miami Vice clip with the Phil Collins drum solo to crave a return to the ‘80s. TikTok AI nostalgia slop will do. Give me a quick cut between dawn light flooding a vintage floral bedspread, a greenery-lush mall, and a neon-lit arcade—all set to the same cop show sax riff. Even ‘00s kids report the same longing for a world they never knew.
Where is this coming from? We didn’t all watch the same Michael Mann films and then 30 years later collectively say, “Yes, take me back to the establishing shots of the original Hannibal Lecter movie, Manhunter. I wish to inhabit that forever.” Something else is going on. We’re all reprocessing memories in some convergent way, and what survives looks eerily similar. It’s worth getting to the bottom of this if our own government is now using the imagery to propagandize their ability to return us to that world.
All memory is rose-tinted. We had struggles and worries even in the ‘80s, but in memory, their negative valence is stripped. It’s a way of retroactively living in the moment, only instead of the present, it’s the past. Still, the tint seems to stop around the mid-’90s, right when the consumer internet arrives and the Encarta DVDs stop. Maybe the net allowed culture to travel too quickly and homogenize. Maybe its omnipresence is precisely what we long to escape.
Even if you never experienced that world and only know it through Stranger Things, you intuit something was different about that life. It was smaller. You weren’t locked into a globally-ranked competition in every single interaction. If you got a date with a varsity cheerleader and picked her up in your new red Cutlass, you were king of the world. No one could take that from you. Throw the game-winning touchdown? Ride the high for weeks, or if you’re Al Bundy or Uncle Rico, the rest of your life.
We spend a lot of energy countersignaling our participation in this global competition. “I post for my friends. I don’t care about likes.” I believe you, but even with a private account, you’re spending more time scrolling the global feed than your friends’ content, if you can even find it. We all are. Whether you want to play or not, the scoreboard is visible. Every glamorous video and preternaturally incisive quip consumed teaches you your rank. “Turn your phone off and it’s 2007 outside” is true, but not because it offers instant access to Wikipedia or lets you text your friends. Neither are why you’re receiving psychic damage 23 hours a day.
That is the sin of the smartphone. If it only connected you to everyone you care about and offered up all human knowledge, we’d have no complaints. The problem is it also serves up your position on the global leaderboard. And the leaderboard isn’t generic. It’s For You—your interests, your career, your hobbies, your type. People wealthier, happier, and hotter than you are farther along in life and better at everything you’re good at, all to an adoring audience larger than you’ll ever know. Known for being the local model train guy? The pride of that superlative will dissolve as soon as the algorithm learns of your interest. Smartphones are sin eaters we punish for revealing how big the world is.
Every few months, a millennial who recalls the disjoint ‘90s internet writes a manifesto calling for a return to the weird web. “Bring back webrings and GeoCities!” This is the same nostalgic cry for local status, only in another realm. Sure, sites were more distinct, but our recall of a wonderland of clickable oddities is mostly hallucination. Interactivity then was near-nonexistent by today’s standards. Most of our graphics were lifted, too. If you care about the content—photos, quips, and essays—current walled gardens surface them by merit better than ever. What you really want is to strip away the status markers, follower counts and likes, to return to a time when we each had an identity without a rank.
Pretend otherwise all you want, but you intuit the precise flow of status every day when you massage your following-follower ratio and judge others for theirs. An unreturned follow of a celebrity transfers nothing, affecting neither of your global ranks. A peer is risky. If they follow back, you’re even. If not, you’ll seethe with resentment at the rejection. A nobody with excellent thoughts? Unlikely; an unreturned follow is pure status outflow. You’re here to get famous, not help your betters do the same. “I follow everyone back!” Sure, but do you also dream of a deletion spree once you hit microcelebrity status yourself? We sacrifice potential friendships every day to preserve the second decimal place of our ratio.
Return to any decade you’d like. You have the money. The relative salaries of today are incredible and our wealth far exceeds even the booming Clinton era these videos call back to. You can have everything the happiest person in the ‘90s had and more: the 1200 ft² rancher, hatchback Chevette, towering four-foot speakers and projection TV, every video game console ever made. You spend most of your life at home. Why not make it look like your fantasy era? Grab an old Sears catalog and hit up eBay.
You won’t, because you can’t take the rest of the world back with you. That no one chooses to live this life is proof of a much stronger revealed aversion to relative deprivation. “Enough” in isolation can’t counter the envy you feel for the neighbor’s shiny lifted truck and granite countertops. If the Joneses won’t return with you by giving up their picture-perfect lifestyle, the deal is off.
If nostalgia really were about aesthetics, the market would have delivered on our desire by now. Why has no one redecorated a coffee shop in Global Village or a shoe store in Frasurbane or a bookstore in Utopian Scholastic? Why haven’t they put palm trees back in malls or reopened Natural Wonders? Because, collectively, we know deep down it would not be the same. We don’t want to go back alone to that world for its appearance, but to take everyone we’re locked in competition back with us. We want localized pockets of acclaim where we can actually win.
What’s the antidote to life as a continuous low-level skirmish? Fame is one. Pre-internet, fame was mostly instrumental—a means to more money and better mating prospects. Because the end was concrete and familiar, it was safe to admit. In the ‘90s, when we said “I want to be famous,” we pictured thrashing an electric guitar on stage while girls in the crowd squealed. That same word now disguises a very different desire.
Now, the pressure of the global leaderboard makes fame feel protective. If you were famous, people would recognize you and show deference. No more doors shut in your face because you came in five minutes before closing. That turns fame into a terminal goal. It becomes the end you want even in the absence of money or access. Surveys show declining interest in fame when it’s obvious the opposite is true. Instrumental goals are safely revealed because they don’t reveal your true, underlying desire. As a terminal goal, however, craving fame is unspeakably embarrassing. It conceals nothing but our fantasy to finally escape rampant disrespect.
Young people can’t articulate why they want fame for the same reason they can’t articulate why they want to go back to a time they never knew. Both are the only conceivable antidote to the gradual loss of dignity imposed by a planet-wide scoreboard.