Over the years, I’ve dedicated what feels like miles of page inches to nostalgia in light of generational theory. Other counterculture figures have gone to great lengths showing how the outdated demographic models fail to account for the increasing rate of social change.
It’s not hard to understand. If your behavior models are based on lumping in those who came of age before 9/11 and pre-smarthphone with kids who grew up online, you won’t get accurate predictions.
Related: Lost Generations
The forgotten cohort of Generation Y comes up a lot because it corrects for many of the problems with those obsolete models. Gen Y is like a missing piece that fills in part of the generational puzzle.
Among the puzzles that acknowledging Gen Y helps solve is the uneven age demographic representation we seen in the nostalgia movement. Western pop culture has been stuck in restrospective mode for a quarter of a century. It’s reached the point that circus performers hired to look pretty in 1980s Brand X skinsuits are accorded the moral authority once reserved for the Magisterium.
Related: The Pop Cult Demoralization Trap
That’s because Millennials aren’t the primary driver of nostalgia-based outrage drama. They were brought up to shun anything that happened before they were born as regressive and problematic. They also lack the spending power to effect major change.
Gen Xers with fond memories of pre-death cycle corporate IPs contribute to the nostalgia movement, but they’re not main driving force. Being a dissident means detecting patterns. Most stereotypes contain a kernal of truth, and X-ers’ cynicism keeps them from getting too excited about Pop Cult product en masse.
Related: The Corporate IP Death Cycle
The Pop Cult is a Gen Y phenomenon. Its high priests leverage nostalgia for the “golden age” of the 80s and 90s to funnel adherents into the Death Cult. Few Xers are sufficiently nostalgia-drunk for that ploy to work on them. A lot of Millennials are already Death Cultists. Gen Y keeps the Pop Cult in existence.
That means Pop Cult nostalgia has a limited shelf life. As others have pointd out, there will be no nostalgia movement for entertainment product released after Cultural Ground Zero. And that’s because rehashing the following two decades would be an exercise in redundancy. You can’t be nostalgic for World of Warcraft, the MCU, and Joe Biden when they’re all still with us.
If nothing else, megacorps selling Gen Y’s childhood back to them gives the grift away. Let that be a reminder: Don’t pay people who hate you.
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