Bowling For Soup Broke My Brain

The perils of nostalgia and how to fight it

A few months back, I was visiting my parents in upstate New York.  One of my favorite things to do when I’m up there is drive around, run errands for them, and listen to music.  I never get to drive and listen to music in the city, so I make the most of any opportunity to do so whenever I'm in the suburbs. It's why I always go to Dunkin' in the morning and get coffee for everyone when I visit my wife's family in New Jersey. They think I’m being kind and generous, when in reality, I just want to get out of the house and listen to Tool at maximum volume.

On this particular occasion when I was visiting my parents, I took advantage of their satellite radio and was listening to the Pop2K channel.  As someone who graduated high school in (gulp) 2004, it plays everything that was on the radio when I was a teenager.  Riding in a car and listening to Ja Rule’s “Always On Time” isn’t something I’ve experienced since the first George W. Bush administration, so I was having a pretty good time as I made my way to Stewart’s to pick up ice cream.  However, things quickly turned sour when the next song came on.  Bowling For Soup’s 2004 hit “1985” started playing, and I spiraled into a minor existential crisis as I drove up I-87.

“Oh man, I remember this song!” I thought to myself.  And then I realized this song is twenty years old, and it’s about being nostalgic for a time nineteen years in the past.  The length of time between now and “1985” has become longer than the length of time between “1985” and 1985.  The fact that I was nostalgic for a song about nostalgia was spiritually painful, on a deep and profound level.  Time’s unceasing march, something I’ve always understood intellectually, finally became clear to me emotionally and intuitively.

Things got worse from there.  I heard the line “She rocked out to Wham!  Not a big Limp Bizkit fan” and flashed back to the summer of 2003 when I saw Limp Bizkit opening up for Metallica at FedEx Field in Maryland.  I was heading into my senior year of high school at the time, and I had loved Limp Bizkit in middle school.  I even owned a red Yankees baseball cap specifically because their much-maligned lead singer Fred Durst wore one.  I didn’t care much about the band anymore, but I immediately got swept up in the music once they started playing.  I remember standing there, rocking out to “Break Stuff” and thinking at all of 17 years old, “Wow, remember 8th grade?  What a great time that was.”  My nostalgic memory of being 17 years old while being nostalgic for when I was 14 almost made me drive into oncoming traffic.  It was like a Russian doll of regret and lost time.

Nostalgia is probably my least favorite emotion.  I think it’s useless at best and deeply, deeply toxic at worst.  The fact that it’s practically the foundation of our culture right now is something that really bothers me.  Everything currently on TV and in movie theaters seems to be based on the premise of “Hey Millennials, remember this thing from your childhood?  Well, it’s back with all of the original actors.  But this time it’s poorly made and everyone looks like shit.”

Obviously, I’m not immune to the pull of nostalgia.  I wouldn’t have been listening to Pop2K in the first place if that wasn’t the case.  But I really try not to fall into the trap of thinking too much about “back then.”  There’s a tacit admission that comes with looking at the past too fondly.  You’re saying that the Now is so bad, so difficult and lacking in promise, that you need to mentally revert back to your younger years to feel any sense of comfort or joy.  At its core, nostalgia is just a wistful type of nihilism.

Because “back then” was never what you thought it was.  It wasn’t better, it was simply a time when you hadn’t yet failed and felt the crushing disappointments of life.  Saved By The Bell wasn’t a good show, you were just full of potential when it was on TV.

And that’s really the point of nostalgia.  You’re looking back because you wish you could transport yourself to “back then” and utilize the hard won knowledge you’ve gained since that time.  It’s the premise of that Faces song “Ooh La La” (A song Ronnie Lane and Ronnie Wood wrote when they were 27 and 26, lol).  It’s a fantasy we all have, to go back to high school knowing what we know now.  We’d be so much cooler, and so much more popular with the objects of our desire, and end up in such a better place than the one we currently inhabit.  But you can’t go back with the knowledge you have now.  That’s the one positive aspect of time’s continuous movement forward. If you’re doing it right, you grow and become a better person than the one you started out as.  Your life is harder and marked with disappointment and loss, but it’s richer and deeper and more meaningful.  Going back would negate all of that.  You can’t have it both ways.

There are a ton of examples out there, similar to the Bowling For Soup song, that distressingly highlight the passage of time.  Two of my personal favorites are that if they made That 70’s Show and Dazed and Confused now with the same lookback window, they would take place in 2002 and 2007, respectively.  As a 2004 grad, I am now too old to be a character in a modern day Dazed.  So with all these signifiers of my age swirling around me, how do I combat the urge to fall into nostalgic reverie?

I avoid thinking about the past by intentionally thinking about the future.  I imagine ten years down the line, or twenty, and I wonder “What would future me feel nostalgic or regretful about if he was looking back on this time?”  It’s a mental exercise that grounds me in the present and nudges me to take advantage of the good times that are happening right now.

The first thing that comes to mind is the fact that I don’t have kids yet. I’m looking forward to having them and know it will make my life better, but I know it will make it much harder as well.  I consider myself a somewhat busy person, but I’m aware that my current level of busyness is nothing compared to what’s to come when I have children.  I’ll be looking back on this time when my wife and I were DINKs (Double Income, No Kids. It’s an acronym I absolutely hate, but unfortunately it’s very accurate) with fondness, wishing I could go back to that simpler time, if only for a moment.  So I try to take advantage of that and enjoy my current freedom as much as I possibly can, because I know it will eventually come to an end.  

I’m also extremely lucky to be a healthy person right now (knock on wood), with a body that functions more or less as it should.  I know that won’t always be the case either, and when I’m in my 40s or 50s and dealing with bad knees or an aching back (or worse), I’ll look back on my 30s and say I didn’t know how good I had it.  I try to be thankful each day that I wake up with everything in place, able to move about with minimal amounts of pain.  Who knows when the last day I’ll be able to say that is going to come.

That’s the secret to combating nostalgia, I think.  Don’t look back and think about what you’ve lost, or didn’t capitalize on.  There’s nothing to be gained from that, and it’s only going to hurt you in the long run.  Think about now, and try to be grateful for the things you know you’re going to miss in the future.  That way, when a song you haven’t heard since high school comes on the radio, you can make it to the grocery store without thinking too hard about your regrets from senior year.