We are obsessed with nostalgia. The “born in the wrong generation” idea rules our understanding of culture, or rather, our dislike of the current ones. So many people, especially young adults, feel certain they would have fit better somewhere else, sometime else. What exactly are they trying to escape in the present?
It’s easy to romanticize an era stripped of its complications. The glamour of the 1970s disco rarely recalls the queer Black and Latino clubs that were routinely targeted by police raids or the growing culture-war rhetoric. Silk gowns and candlelit ballrooms of the Regency era obscure an economy sustained by colonialism and the lack of legal autonomy for women.
The imagined past appears purified: a world through vinyl and vintage and analog, slower, genuine, more authentic. But there’s something uneasy in how we disregard the social unrest that shaped these eras; it’s too convenient to borrow aesthetics and leave the rest to history books.
Nostalgia can be a form of moral outsourcing. When the present feels too overwhelming or disappointing, the insistence that things were simply better back then becomes an available escape strategy. There is no need to confront the messiness of now if everything meaningful has already happened, if the true cultural moments have already passed. All that’s left is harmless yearning for what will not be back.
Part of what fuels this longing for the past is the friction we feel toward the present itself. We live in a new world of high-resolution capture, packaged food, and readily available information just a web search away. Maybe technology feels too futuristic, even when we’re already in the future by science fiction standards, and yet we still haven’t figured out how to place cell phones in movies without making it awkward. It often seems as if technology doesn’t belong in art and art belongs in the past.
It’s no surprise that people are falling back in love with film photography. The abandoned impracticality of the film camera has become prized again. There’s a strange comfort in grainy images, imperfect colours, blur, overexposure, surrendering to the possibility of failure. In a world where we can shoot a thousand digital images and delete every one that we don’t like enough, film is a rejection of perfection.
Film costs more; it’s truly an expensive hobby, and that’s why each shot truly matters in a materialistic sense. It slows you down, keeps you searching for a moment, place and time worth pressing the shutter for. By the time the film is developed, and you finally download your photos through a sketchy email, you have forgotten all about the little moments that got you incredibly excited.
There is something special in that recollection, in remembering yourself taking that picture, hoping it will turn out just as you’ve imagined it, and even if it’s not as good, the mistake becomes a beauty of its own. That feeling is always worth getting another roll of film.
Film’s revival fits a larger trend: analog games, hand-printed zines, collages, vinyl records, things that feel less immediate. This renaissance, and it truly is one, tells us less about the past than about our discontent with the present. When everything is instantly available, editable and endlessly shared, nothing is allowed to simply be. If a delayed image feels more meaningful, it’s not because the medium has some inherent beauty, but because we’ve grown uneasy with immediacy itself.
The cost, the inconvenience, and the uncertainty of film become negligible because they are reinterpreted through the lens of longing. Limitations of photography reframed as aesthetic depth. The past becomes meaningful precisely because we no longer have to live within its boundaries. We crave texture because digital feels too smooth, too performative. We crave mistakes because perfection has become predictable.
Even so, nostalgia doesn’t quite solve what unsettles us. The return of analog photography isn’t proof of some timeless authenticity we’ve lost, but a revolt against abundance. The more we produce, the less any single image carries weight. That is not to say that production is inherently meaningless, but in the way that we engage with it, substance becomes disposable.
Don’t get me wrong, analog media isn’t the solution to suddenly recreate authenticity. You can shoot on film, develop it, scan it, share it, and the analog aesthetic can become yet another digital currency. Even our attempts at going back to the pre-digital can end up commodified, sold in presets, overpriced point-and-shoots, thrifted cameras marked up threefold.
And that’s the contradiction at the heart of this longing: we want the feeling of another time without surrendering the comforts of this one. Nostalgia becomes another form of consumption.
Something about the contemporary world feels too fast, too weightless, too fragmented. Nostalgia shifts responsibility. If authenticity is located in another time, then there’s no obligation to create it now. We can borrow from the past as though nothing about the present is real enough. If meaning is associated with a bygone aesthetic, then the difficult work of building new forms of culture becomes unnecessary. We critique the present without inhabiting it, mourn a loss we never personally experienced, and avoid acknowledging that no amount of vintage can resolve alienation.
Until we ask why we feel the need to escape our own time, we’ll keep circling back to our patterns of consumption. When longing relies so heavily on forgetting the present, it’s hard to imagine a different reality for ourselves. When in doubt, we must remember that new meanings can be created, in all the messiness we’re tempted to escape.
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