Nostalgia

This is because of the warm summer and the slow pace. It is because of the season. Nostalgia. Just saying the word already gives me that feeling of peace, of remembering things with joy and sadness at the same time. Nostalgia is addictive and, like everything else, in large doses it can be dangerous.

It’s the dose that kills, not the poison. In small doses, poison tends to cure.

For some reason, I searched YouTube for the name of the neighborhood where I grew up and found a video of someone driving through it in the opposite direction. Meaning, they weren’t entering the neighborhood; they were leaving it. Or, simply put, the person filming was following a route that, to me, looked like they were leaving my neighborhood.

We used to call the main streets avenues. Two lanes in each direction. But I think our definition of an “avenue” only meant you couldn’t close it to traffic to play football, because back then pretty much any “street” could become a football pitch.

Leaving aside kidding and exaggerations, that avenue became something like a tree-lined boulevard that led to a newer neighborhood. That’s how I remember it. That way out, with its new street, new neighborhood, and bigger houses, had a questionable bend in the road.

I remember that curve because someone died there in an accident. His SUV went off the road, crashed into a tree and split in two.

“A tree got in his way,” people used to say, with a certain dark humor.

In the YouTube video, the person filming went through that same curve. The avenue now has three lanes in each direction. Apparently the trees were getting in the way, because they’re gone. It seems the cars won.

The curve is probably not as dangerous as it was in my time, because traffic is now too dense to pick up much speed. That’s the thing about development: it rips out what could have been planned around.

Maybe it’s the summer, but lately I keep stumbling across things that take me back to the same place.

Nostalgia is trendy.

Although that framing feels too simple.

Not long ago I came across a video explaining how to use the protocol ICQ used in its early days. It’s Open Source now and, with a bit of knowledge and motivation, you can set up a network for you and your friends. But what I found interesting was Veronica’s reflection (she’s the author of the video) on that wonderful possibility we once had to connect and disconnect. Not going invisible, muting notifications, or switching on focus mode. Disconnecting. Not being there anymore.

God, those were the days.

I also came across El Elevador, a “hotel” where you make your reservation by letter. Calling it a hotel is probably part of the marketing trick, but the project looks fantastic. A handwritten letter on paper, a stamp, a postbox, and then waiting for an answer.

They might seem like vintage whims. “Sophisticated” ways of saying things were better in the old days.

But I think there’s something else going on.

Something similar is happening with imperfection.

Niu Lai, a Chinese animated film made almost entirely by a mother and her son, became a viral phenomenon this summer. It’s rudimentary, cheap-looking and clumsy. Apparently, people initially went to see it because it was bad. What’s interesting is that some of them then started celebrating precisely the things that made it bad.

It didn’t look like something manufactured by an industry. It looked like something someone made.

Something similar is happening with video games. The pixel is back. Old consoles, cartridges, remakes, little handheld emulation devices. An industry capable of rendering worlds almost indistinguishable from reality is discovering that millions of people want to see squares again.

We could decode this as generational nostalgia. I’m sure some of it is. But maybe we’re also looking for limits.

An 8-bit video game couldn’t do everything. A letter takes time. You could disconnect from ICQ. A film made by two people has defects. Things took time. They ended. And there were things you couldn’t do.

Maybe those limitations weren’t only problems waiting to be solved.

The difficult part is knowing what is worth bringing back.

And then there are nostalgics and nostalgics. Germany’s AfD, for example, wants to get rid of the Bauhaus. It sounds like a headline from a hundred years ago, but no. It’s from this summer.

That’s another way of looking backward.

Except that, in this case, the past is no longer useful for asking ourselves what we might have lost along the way. Instead, it becomes an imagined better time that we’re somehow supposed to return to.

And that’s not the same thing.

Nostalgia can be a useful tool when it helps us see the present. It becomes dangerous when we turn it into a project for the future.

So maybe I don’t actually want ICQ back. Or to book hotels by letter. Or to play only the video games of my childhood.

What interests me is why all these things are starting to feel attractive precisely now.

Maybe after years of making everything faster, more immediate, more available, more seamless and more perfect, we’re starting to miss friction.

Waiting.

Limits.

The possibility of disconnecting.

Even mistakes.

They say that as you get older, time feels like it moves faster. Maybe that’s why we miss going slower.

Going back to that curve near my neighborhood, one thing seems very clear to me now: the tree wasn’t to blame.

The problem was speed. Running for the sake of running.