Nostalgia used to be a private feeling: a smell, a song, a half-remembered summer. Today it is a market. Old television shows are rebuilt with new actors, trainers from the 1990s are sold again at triple the price, and vinyl records, once the technology of the past, are now a luxury for people who own the best streaming services.
The commercial logic is simple. Memory is free to produce and difficult to resist. A company that sells the future must persuade us to want what does not exist yet. A company that sells the past needs only to remind us of what we already loved. The risk is small: if the product was popular once, it may be popular again.
But nostalgia is not a true record. Psychologists describe "rosy retrospection": the habit of remembering the pleasure of an event and forgetting its boredom, its bad weather and its small humiliations. The "good old days" are a selection, and the selection is edited by the part of us that wants to feel better. Advertisers did not invent this editing, but they have learned to sell it.
A strange result is that nostalgia is getting younger. Teenagers now feel affection for the early 2010s, a period which they barely remember. The cycle between an event and its commercial revival has shrunk from forty years to ten. Soon, perhaps, we will feel homesick for last year.
None of this makes nostalgia worthless. A song that returns us, for four minutes, to a kitchen in 1994 is a small and legitimate pleasure. The mistake is to treat it as a guide to what was better, or to what should come next. Nostalgia is good at telling us what we have lost. It is almost useless at telling us what we should do.
Fiction note: All people, places and events in this text are fictional.