The founder of ‘The Ultimate '80s Page’, Mikael, told Bored Panda that nostalgia was the reason he created it. “I have great memories from the ‘80s when I was a child,” he said. “Getting my first Nintendo at Christmas of 1986 or 1987 was the best thing ever.”
Nintendo, Pac Man, The Breakfast Club, the Indiana Jones franchise—these are just some of the things introduced in the ‘80s that became somewhat quintessential of the time. It’s not surprising that nowadays their name alone can work like a time machine, sending anyone who’s lived through the decade right back to it.
Professor of literature and linguistics at Mars Hill University, Hal McDonald, discussed why we feel nostalgic in a recent interview with Bored Panda. “With all of our autobiographical memories, we not only remember the sequence of events that made up the episode (the narrative), but we also remember—and re-experience—whatever emotions we felt when we first lived the experience.
“If a past experience was frightening, remembering it in the present can trigger the same feelings of fear we felt when we lived it. But if the experience was pleasant/happy, remembering it triggers those same pleasurable feelings once again.
“We tend to return to these memories again and again because they make us feel good. And because anything that reminds us of happy past experiences, or of happy periods in our lives, can act as a trigger for those happy memories, we seek out artifacts from our past (songs, movies, stuffed animals, smells, tastes, etc.) that are associated with those past experiences,” the professor explained.
Hal McDonald expanded on how certain things evoke nostalgia: “Any aspect associated with a remembered experience can trigger a memory of the experience, along with whatever emotions we felt the first time around. One very interesting aspect of such triggers involves the distinction between voluntary autobiographical memories and involuntary autobiographical memories.
“We feel pleasure when we intentionally retrieve a memory of a happy past experience, but to have the same memory triggered involuntarily, out of the blue, as the result of exposure to some trigger in our environment (e.g. smelling woodsmoke on a cold afternoon or gingerbread just coming out of the oven, hearing a song that was popular when we were dating a special someone back in high school, seeing a house we lived in when we were young) produces a much more powerful emotional impact, due to the element of surprise.
“Our brains respond positively to novelty, and when a familiar memory catches us unexpectedly it perceives the surprise as a novel experience, triggering reward centers associated with novelty. With involuntary nostalgic memories, we get two rewards for the price of one—the pleasant associations of the experience itself, and the surprise of unexpectedly remembering it.
The founder of the Facebook page, Mikael, shared that the things from the ‘80s he feels most nostalgic about are music, movies, toys, and clothing. Understandably so; the decade starting with 1980 was quite a significant time for all of the above, with the rise of MTV and the start of numerous media franchises; not to mention all the fashion trends, some of which are making a comeback (while others are making people cringe at the memories alone).
Pictures shared by ‘The Ultimate '80s Page’ cover all of what its founder is nostalgic about and more, depicting the ins and outs of the ‘80s popular culture. “It's interesting that so many people from all around the world share my passion for the decade,” Mikael told Bored Panda. He also pointed out that he loves reading the comments and appreciates all the positive feedback the page receives.
Mikael added that he never thought the page would grow so big when he first created it in January of 2015. “I think followers benefit from it because you can never have enough nostalgia. Sometimes when you see something from the decade you grew up in, it triggers a memory that you might have forgotten about until you saw that post on here. It's nice to keep older decades alive; in my case, the ‘80s, of course.”
“Nostalgia has many demonstrated positive effects on people who experience it,” Prof. Hal McDonald pointed out. “In addition to being a free source of pleasure (it feels good and doesn’t cost anything), it elevates mood, helping us to feel happy when we are feeling sad, and helping us feel even happier when we are already happy.
“Moreover, it alleviates loneliness, since most of our nostalgic memories involve other people, and reliving those shared experiences connects us with them. Nostalgia also promotes a sense of self-continuity (i.e. the perception that we have a ‘self’ that endures through different stages of our lives), which is particularly important when we experience traumatic events that threaten to create a rupture between the present and the past (the COVID pandemic was such an event).”
According to Dr. McDonald, nostalgia also fosters creativity by giving us a more open attitude toward life and new experiences, in addition to lessening our fear in the face of existential threats (i.e. our mortality), by reminding us that our lives have been meaningful.
Even though there are numerous benefits to feeling nostalgic every once in a while, it might have adverse effects on a person as well. But Prof. McDonald suggested that unfavorable effects only arise if we approach our past memories with the wrong attitude.
“The cultural critic Svetlana Boym identified two different categories of nostalgia, reflective and restorative. The concepts as she described them are pretty complex, but in a nutshell, reflective nostalgia involves an appreciation of a nostalgic memory as a memory, with a full understanding and acceptance of the fact that the experience itself can never be repeated. That way, we can savor the memory of the experience without fretting over the fact that we can never actually relive it.”
“Restorative nostalgia, on the other hand, longs for a past experience and attempts to recreate (restore) it in the present. The inevitable failure of such an attempt only serves to remind us that the past is, in fact, beyond our reach, and leaves us feeling sad about our past because it is dead and gone, and dissatisfied with our present because it is not as happy as the past we remember,” Dr. McDonald explained.