Excerpt:
There’s a haunting quality to missing something you never experienced. The New York Times recently explored a strange but increasingly familiar phenomenon: Gen Z’s deep yearning for a time before the digital deluge — a kind of “historical nostalgia” for an analog world they never actually lived through. But this isn’t just wistful sentiment or vintage aesthetics. It’s something deeper. Something raw. Something that reflects not a desire to rewind, but a desperate need to re-ground.
According to a 2023 Harris Poll survey cited by New York Times essay author Clay Routledge, “a social psychologist who specializes in nostalgia,” 80 percent of Gen Z worry that their generation is too dependent on technology. More than half of Gen Zers surveyed said technology is doing more to divide people than to unite us. Even more striking: 60 percent of Gen Z adults wish they could return to a time before everyone was “plugged in.” And they’re not just idealizing the 1990s, as the title of Routledge’s article suggests. They’re mining the 2000s, the 2010s, and even their own childhoods for signs of a richer, more cohesive culture.
…
Routledge’s New York Times piece frames this nostalgia as a healthy impulse that “helps people thrive in the present and build a better future.” Counterintuitively, he wrote, nostalgia is “a future-oriented endeavor.”
That insight is key to understanding Gen Z’s cultural moment. The nostalgia we’re seeing isn’t a refusal to engage with the modern world. It’s a survival instinct — a way of grounding oneself when the present feels fractured and the future untrustworthy. Routledge observes that “Gen Z appear to be mining the past to enrich their present lives — especially by fostering a greater appreciation for offline living.” In other words, the past is not simply a refuge. It’s a toolkit and a role model.
Read the full article at The American Spectator.
The American Spectator
Share:
Related Posts
