The ‘Retro Tech Dreams’ Twitter page posts nostalgic and vintage photos of old tech every single day. The account is fairly fresh, created just over half a year ago, in June 2022. However, in just a few months, it’s already managed to garner a following of over 82.6k social media users.
That just goes to show how powerful nostalgia is: pics of things that used to surround you every single day grab your attention and force you to compare your current life with how you lived back then. Odds are that many of you reading this miss the past quite a bit, and would love to travel back in time to experience it all over again.
Sure, there’s an argument to be made that tech products and entertainment ‘aren’t made as well as they used to be’ now, in 2023. However, what we miss the most might not actually be the aesthetics of the tech or the actual video games and programs we used, but the sense of happiness and freedom that we had when we were younger.
The tech that we used might have been cool, but it wasn’t ‘the point.’ It just happened to be what surrounded us while we had fun with our family and friends. All of the music, video games, TV shows, and other forms of entertainment were ways to connect to each other and have communal experiences. What also helped was that your friends were often physically present, instead of interacting over the internet. LAN parties, anyone?
Now compare that to what we have now. The technology we have is far more advanced, powerful, and convenient, but it’s arguably also made us feel a bit more isolated. This will vary from person to person and from Panda to Panda.
Try to compare the amount of time that you spend messaging your friends on social media versus how much time you spend with them in person. It’s far easier to meet up with your friends while you’re still at school or university because you’re all spending tons of time together, in more or less the same physical space.
Fast-forward to when you have a full-time job and tons of responsibilities. Not only are many of your friends most likely living far away, you might feel utterly exhausted after a long day at work. Sending someone a meme while watching Netflix on the couch might be all the energy that you can muster.
It seems hard to fathom that somebody will ever feel nostalgic for much of the tech we have now, which feels quite impersonal: though it allows for instantaneous long-distance communication, the emotional impact is less than what the tech of the ‘80s, ‘90s, and 2000s likely provided. However, most likely, we'll still have people in the future who look back at this point in time and see it through rose-colored glasses.
Previously, Bored Panda had reached out to child and adolescent therapist Kemi Omijeh, a member of the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy from London, with a few questions about nostalgia.
"Many psychologists, myself included, believe our childhood is the foundation to who we are as adults. It explains why we frequently revisit our childhood as it influences our present," she told us during an interview earlier.
The therapist explained that people feel nostalgic for their childhoods if they were loved and nurtured when they were young. However, if that wasn’t the case, they likely won’t have a smidgen of nostalgia for that time period.
"If we’ve had a difficult childhood, it can be hard to feel nostalgic, instead it will feel like something we need to get over in order to move on," the expert told Bored Panda.
