To Nostalgia With Love. But Please Stop Texting Me
When my best friend Louisa (1970-2024) was still the editor of Oklahoma Today, I showed up to her office in Oklahoma City’s First National Center with a 1979 Barbie Dream House. I’d discovered it at a local thrift store and restored it to all its hot pink glory. My daughters played with it exactly one time and then it promptly sat in a windowseat collecting dust for over a year.
Louisa was smitten with it, a relic of our Gen-X childhood, one we wished we’d shared in real time as co-conspirators of secret codes and playground politics. In a single moment, the dream house reminded her of a childhood that had drifted out of reach, the father she lost too young, the weight of her own missteps. There was always a quiet knowing between Louisa and me. It was the hallmark of our friendship. We often stood together at the intersection of memory and prophecy without saying a word.
Writing About Memory
I’ve been writing about memory for years, tracing both the soft and jagged outlines of the past. There was a time when calling myself Generation X felt strangely subversive, like a quiet act of defiance. It was as if naming our place in the world disturbed the echo of the Boomers’ endless anthem. Is it any wonder that my senior class selected We’re Not Gonna Take It as our class song?
Over the years, nostalgia became our safest language, a gentle, covert way to assert our existence and make sense of our ironic lives. We used it to stitch together fragments of our identity. The mixtapes and latchkey afternoons; the thrill of MTV and hum of dial-up connections. These touchstones were proof that we, too, were here. And we paraded our existence to the Silent Generation, Baby Boomers and Millennials and then celebrated it with Generation Z.
Mining Gen X Memories
And, I used to love it. In fact, I’ve spent the better part of two decades mining Gen X memories on this blog trying to make sense of our analog childhood in an increasingly digital world. I’ve had a good run, remembering Saturday morning cartoons and the glow of tube televisions; Crunch Berries and disillusioned flannel.
Nostalgia has been a kind of superpower, a built-in Dewey Decimal System for the soul that quietly catalogued my past. Somewhere between REO Speedwagon ballads, the glow of waka-waka Pac-Man, and the neon sweetness of banana-flavored Bubble Yum, it organized my memories into familiar, retrievable shelves. The worn Sweet Valley paperbacks of my mind were proof of life, filed between ok, whatever, nevermind and don’t you forget about me.
Digital Séance
But lately? Well, nostalgia has become as annoying as a robocall during my Sunday afternoon nap. It’s desperate and clingy as it slides into my Facebook feed, algorithmically summoning me to Memory like it’s a paying client or something. I don’t want to relive stuff anymore. I have officially hit my limit on Facebook groups devoted to Yesterday and “You grew up in the ‘80s if…” Instagram reels. Click on a post about your old Holly Hobbie lunch box and you’ll be herded into a digital séance of TV guides, Cabbage Patch Kids and Holderness Family videos.
Gen X Memories Commodified
What happens when meaningful memories are parodied or commodified and repackaged as punchlines complete with pastel lighting? The trauma, confusion and broken promises didn’t make Gen-Xers quit. That stuff made us question everything. It made us skeptical, but not nihlistic. We didn’t become bitter, we became clear-eyed and fiercely independent. Honestly, we only used nostalgia to escape. It will never be our ethos. We were born to question the past, not worship it. I wouldn’t be surprised if it was a Millennial who thought using Every Breath You Take in a Stanley Steamer commercial was a good idea. Ugh.
It’s flattening to have the emotional terrain of childhood and youth reduced to a quirky, viral moment. Being a latchykey kid wasn’t that funny. At risk of sounding like a curmudgeon, it’s like the Gen X childhood has it’s own social media manager. I feel like a ghost stalking my youth. The cultural sugar rush has ended for me, friends, and I want to drive out of the Fisher Price Garage once and for all. I want to park my memories. I want to move forward into my life and decide when, where, why and what I will remember.
The Power of Memory
Don’t get me wrong. I still believe in the power of memory. I still listen to The Pretenders and I still love Calvin Klein. I still think there’s something sacred about documenting the past, especially for a generation that was largely overlooked in real time. When Louisa stood with me back in the early aughts staring at the restored Barbie Dream House, we were both mystified by girlhood interrupted. We were lost in the churn of motherhood but we still had each other. I miss her so. There is no hashtag for this and I do not want to organize my grief.
Midlife vs. Middle School
To be fair, nostalgia has been important to me and moved me forward in many ways. It helped me understand my past and make peace with it. In many ways, it helped me build this blog. But, it’s 2025, and I want to talk about midlife, not middle school. I have complex issues to deal with and the nostalg-orithm has robbed the present of its oxygen one too many times. Even in Monica Lewinsky’s podcast, Reclaiming, which I recently reviewed, there is a focus on the past and restoration. I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that some of the guests recalling old wounds made me cringe a little. I kind of want everyone to get over everything and move on, called as we are out of darkness and into marvelous light.
Finally, while Gen-Xers, including me, expressed an early appetite for nostalgia, we never signed up for saccharine sentimentality, nor would we. Authenticity remains the compelling currency of Generation X, and it still commands resonance in an age of curated personas. Look around you, friends. Generation X is fully present and has already given our undivided attention to everyone and everything we hold dear. Nostalgia isn’t blocked but the posts are hidden.
The people will live on.
The learning and blundering people will live on.
They will be tricked and sold and again sold…
Response from Friar's Fires
The following is a response to the above post that my friend, Pastor Brett, sent me. I loved his take on nostalgia and wanted to post it here as a companion to this piece. Brett has been writing on the Internet longer than me over at Friar’s Fires.
The usual cycle is nostalgia first, commodification second. Younger Silent Generation folks and oldest Boomers found the tunes from their younger days on Oldies radio stations. Come Saturday morning, my father, a young Silent, would tune into a Tulsa AM station to hear an oldies show that wore the name proudly. But the commodification began to creep in with shows like “Happy Days.” Their oldies love became swallowed up in catch phrases and a sea of Scott Baio Tiger Beat covers.
Classic Rock
“Classic Rock” starts around 1980, picking up the 60s-era Boomers and cleverly avoiding anything like the world “old.” The “young people speaking their minds” could never be old, calendar say what it may. Nor, clearly, could they listen to “oldies.” Their music was classic. Then came the super-charging event of “The Big Chill,” sparking the commodification era of this nostalgia. A hit movie with a hot soundtrack suddenly had job lots of Boomers stopping and thinking, “We used to be cool – no, wait, we are cool and so is everything about our culture!” “Classic Rock” detonated and stations sprung up overnight, with “Nights in White Satin” clogging every single inch of the radio dial.
Nostalgia Rock
Boomer convictions that they remained the center of the universe as well as eternally young threw a gigantic wet blanket over so much pop culture. MTV, desperate for content, begins with new-wave and quirky Britpop, but before long we have a channel filled with the Rolling Stones, Pink Floyd, Jefferson Starship and, once again, the Moody Blues. Nostalgia rock filled the channel to such a degree that it had to create special shows for rap and new music. Boomer love of self and past had crowded out almost everything else.
So now it’s our turn on the wheel. Now our nostalgia faces commodification. It shows up in some ways in radio stations that play “’80s music.” But ‘”80s music” runs all the gamuts, from Hüsker Dü to the Stray Cats to Public Enemy to Journey to Randy Travis to Springsteen to Madonna to Michael Jackson to Reba McIntire to N.W.A to Whitney Houston to Tracy Chapman to Dwight Yoakam…
Gen X Cultural Milieu
Iconoclasm
I don’t know an X-er who doesn’t have some nostalgia. And why not? Our music was better. Our movies were better. Our hair was…well, let’s not go there. But – here’s the thing – we can do nostalgia all by ourselves, thank you very much. We’re kind of used to the pattern.
X’ers have taken lots of hits since polling determined our cohort – other than me – broke for now-President Trump in the 2024 election. But I wonder if in-depth surveying and interviewing would show that vote as one for someone, or against someone. Maybe against a system that pesters us, tries to slot us into neat and tidy definitions and, above all else, define us without our input. And many of us may not mind nostalgia as commodity. But a lot of us will resent the ever-loving-fire out of it, and ask just to be left alone.