Nostos + Algos
Nostalgia: Longing for home / The pain of longing for homecoming.
About 60 years of marketing has programmed us to believe that the word is mostly about the material.
You can be Nostalgic about Pokemon Cards, about the simpler days when you watched cartoons on a box TV at your grandparents, and or when you played with Legos when you were young and unaware to the problems of today.
The most nefarious example of nostalgia being Disney adults. Who, spend vigorously and may even get into debt just to get a chance to go to the parks at least once a year. A deadly combination of programmed nostalgia and financial ignorance, Disney is taking advantage of a demographic of young adults (and old too honestly) who are stunted emotionally, who have never grown out of being a child and don't even have children of their own.
What these people are chasing is not nostalgia, you are chasing a chance to be a child again but it has been re-branded as nostalgia. I think the better term is Peter Pan syndrome.
It is such a powerful feeling that most every large corporate devil targets it and we as the youngest generations pay willingly when presented with the longing, comforting feeling of our simpler days in childhood.
SO, when are we as the youngest generations going to wake up and refrain from the impulse to keep buying worthless plastic crap?
Worthless plastic that is a fraction of the price it is sold at. Worthless objects that will never resell for what they cost you in the first place, that will never give you the reassurance of putting food on the table when times are tough. Times are tough now, and yet we live in excess.
In the West there is excess plastic mostly, excess food, but not much quality stuff. We are wasting away yet massively overweight. We have excess of items hoarded, but not much of value. We have been sold a lie as Americans, we have been sold the lie of conflating wants with needs. We are all victims of our own downfall.
Hey, don't get me wrong. I felt it. I felt Nostalgia growing up. I used to have an entire collection of Nintendo games and consoles that took me years to collect and that I prized. The nostalgia I felt was immense. When I woke up however, and saw that it was keeping me a child and not letting me aspire for more, I let it go. I sold it all.
The feeling of breaking from that nostalgia that was mechanized by massive corporations? Absolutely liberating. Then I realized, it's not true nostalgia. Nostos means 'to come home'. Are we really coming home when we see our shiny objects? OR are we so stunted emotionally and mentally to the point where we conflate home with a senseless object that without our own sentiment involved, is overpriced?