Are you still feeling nostalgic, that wistful desire to return to a former time in your life either in dream or reality, a sentimental yearning for the happiness of a former place or time? Well don’t, nostalgia is so last month and isn’t what it is cracked up to be. Get with the times!
You need to be feeling nowstalgia, a wistful desire to be living your life in a world that is better than the one you are in and of which you are convinced that it is real but actually doesn’t exist. It is all the rage, millions of people are doing it but not the people in the know, not the trend setters but rather the everyday folks who you pass by in the street or in the supermarket.
Nowstalgia is the belief that the bread in Marks and Spencer tastes better than the bread in ASDA only because it is more expensive and comes in more alluring packaging and you can take it home in a better carrier bag and impress your neighbours. It is the belief that jacking in your job and your dull and mundane life and moving to a foreign country where you can’t speak the language and won’t have any money will lead to eternal happiness and that you and your partner who normally can’t stand to be in the same room as each other will be able to walk lovingly, hand in hand along the warm sands of a nearby beach. It is the belief that the small family hatch back that you bought for its low mileage and high economy is somehow better, faster and sexier than the hundreds of thousands of the same car in the same colour and driven by the same people that you see every time you go for a drive. It is the belief that the scratch-card win, when your luck finally arrives, will transform your life from being an overweight greying middle income suburbanite into a flash, buff and bronzed high roller who can party on until the crack of dawn.
Nowstalgia may sound like wishful thinking or dreaming or hope or even denial but it is not. There is something different at play here, there is a genuine belief that somehow the trials and tribulations of our quotidian lives are somebody else’s fault and that we are being held back from the lives that we are really entitled to and which are carrying on around us only in a parallel reality, held back by politicians perhaps or bankers or the media or your boss.
Nowstalgia is a yearning for a better life, the one we all know others are living where there is plenty of money, the sun always shines, no one gets ill or fat and people have friends round for dinner or throw lavish parties or go on luxurious holidays. It is a life that people live in the media, on reality television shows which give us an insight into the lives of the rich and slightly famous, in fashion magazines where a hand bag costs the equivalent of the gross domestic product of a small country and in film where boy meets girl, boy loses girl only to find her again and live happily ever after.
They say that nostalgia isn’t what it used to be but nowstalgia is something else, that yearning is for a time that never was and never will be.
Thoughts from a Guerrilla Worker 