Winona Ryder at the photo call for Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, in London, on Aug. 30, 2024.Scott A Garfitt/The Canadian Press
If you’re a millennial who’s into pop culture, 2024 has probably looked like this: You started the year hibernating with “comfort shows,” meaning reruns of Gilmore Girls or Seinfeld.
Over the summer, you listened to Charli XCX’s indie-sleaze-inspired album Brat, while feeling a bit like your hedonistic twentysomething-year-old self. This fall, you popped by a movie theatre to see the Beetlejuice remake and watch your ‘90s girl crush Winona Ryder on the big screen once again.
Nostalgia is everywhere right now – and we’re probably quite happy about it.
“I love Brat summer! All hail Brat summer!” says Anne T. Donahue, a writer with a special knack for selecting uber-relatable nostalgic memes to share on Instagram. “Charli XCX is a millennial [like me], so I’m all for her reclaiming indie sleaze.”
Donahue, however, is more interested in reclaiming the ‘90s.
“Being a tween-slash-teen in the ‘90s was so novel and exciting because outside of pop culture, there wasn’t a marker or cultural monolith in the way there is on social media now.”
It was a time of watching wholesome shows such as Sabrina the Teenage Witch and consuming innocent content like embarrassing stories in YM magazine. “I see that time as the last hurrah before I started high school and began framing parts of myself around the girls I wanted to be friends with or what I thought boys wanted,” Donahue says.
Today, she has returned to what she loved about the ‘90s to recover that carefree time in her life. “I’m wearing Gap Dream [perfume] again … I’m dressing in the type of clothes I wore before I was hyper-fixated on thinness … I’m rewatching the TV shows and movies that inspired me to go to the mall circa 1996 and buy best-friend necklaces. It reminds me that before I used to overthink so much, I actually just enjoyed things.”
That’s the power of nostalgia. It provides comfort by anchoring us to our past selves, says Krystine Batcho, a New York-based psychologist who researches the psychology of nostalgia.
“When you’re going through adolescence, you’re giving up all the wonderful things from childhood – the freedom from responsibilities, the feeling of being loved unconditionally, the idea of being free to imagine,” she says. Remembering (and romanticizing) elements from that time can help us find tranquillity in the warmth of familiarity.
“Nostalgia is a part of human existence. It serves our psychological and emotional needs so well.”
Engaging in nostalgic behaviour can do the brain good.
Researchers recently discovered that when someone is feeling nostalgic, two parts of the brain are activated: the hippocampus, which holds the memories of your life, and the mesolimbic dopamine system, which deals with rewards, Batcho says. The act of remembering what made you happy in the past triggers the release of dopamine, a hormone that makes you feel good.
It’s also about recognizing the good times and ignoring the bad. “We have what’s called rosy reminiscence, or rosy retrospection,” Batcho explains. “We remember things as being better than they were because we selectively recall the aspects that we enjoyed – they’re what we keep in our memory.”
A new area of research Batcho is exploring is called intergenerational nostalgia, which occurs when rosy retrospection is passed on to a new generation. That helps to explain why, say, people born in the early 2000s may find a fascination with ‘80s-based TV show Stranger Things. Their parents told them about what life was like back then – big hair, bright clothes, an obsession with sci-fi, mall hangouts, a dependence on answering machines – which can give the decade a particularly interesting halo.
“My dad romanticized the ‘60s and ‘70s, so I became obsessed as a kid and mainlined episodes of The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” Donahue says. Similarly, the ‘90s movie Now & Then became one of her favourites because it took place in the ‘70s and she could connect it to stories her father had reminisced about.
You may be wondering: Are we more nostalgic than past generations? Not necessarily, says Batcho, but we may feel that way because of how we consume content, and how much of it we consume compared with previous generations.
Social media fuelled nostalgia, Batcho adds, because it became easier to cultivate. For example, “someone who is nostalgic for the 1960s can now easily find or follow other people who are too.”
Some brands frequently post memes from old, much-loved TV shows such as Sex and the City to help build their images, while others partner with pop culture icons from decades past to relate to their customers on a deeper level.
Fashion brand Reformation recently launched a jewellery collection (and a series of videos) inspired by the glitzy Hemingway-Fitzgerald era of Paris in the 1920s. Before that, it tapped 2012 YouTube star Joanna Roobeck, founder of the Prancercise routine, to promote a partnership with Hoka. And at the start of this year, the brand launched a campaign to encourage Americans to vote, which starred feminist and anti-bullying icon Monica Lewinsky.
“Advances in our lifestyle and technology change the methods by which we enjoy, experience, share and pass things on to the next generation,” Batcho says. While the type of nostalgic content is sure to change over time, we won’t tire of it because it has a positive effect on our mental health.
“We’re all just combinations of all the things we loved and all the things that shaped us,” Donahue says. She refers to a line from Don Draper in Mad Men, fittingly the noughties show that took place in the ‘60s: “(Nostalgia is) a twinge in your heart far more powerful than memory alone … it lets us travel to a place where we know we were loved.”
Or, at least, a place where we find familiarity and feelings of happiness.