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Nostalgia is not cultural comfort, but cultural cowardice. It’s a way for people to simulate connectivity whilst ignoring the collective responsibility we have to create our own future. With the rise of nostalgia, our culture more broadly is at a crossroads, edging towards implosion and the end of the present. 

Life in 2025 feels like a series of reboots. The shiny future we were all promised – one of flying cars which ‘Back to the Future 2’ predicted would arrive in 2015 – never did arrive. Thus, nostalgia has become the vehicle for our escapism – the means by which we may live out a fantasy of some cultural and political present that never came into being.

Writer Sayema Islam discusses how the Coca-Cola brand utilises nostalgia marketing in order to create a brand mythos.

Jennifer Hensey discusses how nostalgia romanticises submission, turning the tradwife into an aesthetic of comfort and control.

As the world tilts into economic freefall, social exhaustion and climate crisis, we start to reach backwards. Not because the past was better, but because the future feels like it’s been cancelled.

Photo by aj_aaaab on Unsplash A relative of mine recently said to me: “Films aren’t the same anymore, I don’t want to see anything at the cinema nowadays.” She worked in the film industry for 50 years. I had just finished asking her about her career and she reflected fondly, but to see her disappointment at what was once her scene saddened me. I thought back to the last time we had been to the cinema together. We saw The Naked Gun (2025), a legacy sequel to the original fra

The ’70s, the ’90s,  Y2K, all reborn through the lens of a generation that never lived them, yet they are attached to this idealised era. But beneath the sequins and nostalgia lies something deeper:

Are we in love, or are we in love with the idea of being in love?

The Life of a Showgirl provokes a debate rooted in the emergence of reboot culture and “nostalgia baiting” – two villains against authenticity, serving instead as a magnifying glass on the industry’s dependence on marketing and repetition.

Writer Louie Tunstall crafts a poem about how people romanticise experiences during their youth, and whether that excitement lasts.