Nostalgia: The End of the Present

Photo courtesy of Ben Neale via the Unsplash license

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. 

Nostalgia feels safe and, at first glance, rather innocent. Who doesn’t want to live in simpler times? A time of single-salaried households, and lots of free love: a nice break from our own time in the rat race. I'm afraid it's just that - a nice, substanceless, sinister distraction. As we retreat away from our present, we forget to create our future. 

In his 2012 book Retromania, Simon Reynolds ascribes our love of cultural nostalgia to a cultural exhaustion. You are now a click away from any record, any book, and all creative ideas that have existed before. Almost 15 years on and as the culture of our own youth is now becoming nostalgic – we are no longer exhausted; we are cowards. 

By repackaging the trends of the past, we can access a slew of ready-made aesthetics. A prefabricated way to step into an evolved, developed and rich culture already there. Crucially, we can do this without having to confront their political reality. Creativity is no longer about pushing us forward, but rather about bringing us back. In doing so, our pop culture is reliant on a shared history; every reference must echo something we already know: Sabrina’s homages to Britney Spears, YungBlud’s references to Ozzy Osbourne, or Lana del Rey’s reimagining of 1960s Americana. Greatness has become imitation. 

This isn’t to say that artists aren’t creative - but the constant recycling makes creativity feel bureaucratic, bound by the need to latch on to a cultural canon, as if  identity and success were assigned from a predetermined list. The endless revivals, remakes, sequels are exhausting. Nothing feels new, and that's by design. Risk has replaced reliability; the past is a safe investment. The question is no longer what comes next, but what can be remade.

Nostalgia marketing is not new. We saw the 50s revival in the 70s and 80s: from Grease and the rise of Rockabilly in the music of the Stray Cats to sharp cut silhouettes reinvented with bright colours. By erasing segregation, sexism, and Cold War paranoia, the 50s were mythologised as wholesome and unified - an era of simplicity before the Vietnam War and Watergate. Nostalgia became a form of national amnesia. 

Then came the revival of “hippie chic” in the 90s. Britpop bands like Oasis and Blur echoed Beatles-era aesthetics and sounds and a more relaxed form of fashion through a grunge lens arose. This was nostalgia as a style, but without substance. In a decade obsessed with irony and retro-cool, the 60s were commodified. The defining spirit of the 60s was rebellion, but instead its peace signs became a branding tool.  

Why has nostalgia become such a pressing matter today? The concern is two-fold: its speed and its politicisation. 

First of all, nostalgia is leading us to a cultural implosion. Technology has dissolved the idea of a shared present. The monoculture - that brief sense of everyone watching or caring about the same thing - is gone. In its place, we have algorithms that feed us what we already like, carefully engineered to make us react positively. It feels personal, but it's pre-chewed. 

Trends now dictate taste. We live in an era of disposable micro-moments designed for rapid consumption. Culture no longer invites you to linger or develop your own response; it demands an instant reaction. To be creative today is to be marketable: a TikTok sound, a shareable image. The artist today has become the distractor - and nostalgia is their most powerful tool. 

Due to the rapid trend cycle, ideas aren’t given the time to mature. As such, allusion to the past allows for a prefabricated sense of wholeness. Movements and aesthetics rise and fall in a matter of months. Like fine wine served before it's ready, everything tastes the same: sweet, shallow, unfinished. People can readily step into a culture already made before the empty bottle is simply discarded, and we pull another vintage off the shelf. 

Now, we are reaching the end of our collection. As the culture of the 2000s has been drunk up, now we see the 2010s returning. But what will we do once those bottles are gone? 

The newest aesthetics - tradwife, old money, clean girl - might look aspirational, but it's just revival in disguise. Each one alludes to an imagined, sanitised past. The tradwife aesthetic romanticises the 1950s ideal of domestic femininity: the perfect house, the perfect husband. The clean girl is its minimalist successor, stripped of politics and pores, promising purity through consumption. The old money look resurrects 1980s Ralph Lauren ads of linen, pearls, and polo fields, and sells them as moral superiority. To be old money today doesn’t mean being wealthy: it means performative refinement and a way to signal class. 

Beneath these trends in particular lies something more sinister: the rise of idealised conservatism in pop culture. This isn’t just nostalgia for style - it’s nostalgia for structure, hierarchy and control. It’s a yearning for a world where whiteness, wealth and restraint defined cultural “taste”. Nostalgia gives people the permission to avoid their present responsibilities. Cloaked in cream tones and long dresses, many use these nostalgic styles as a way to appear above politics - to perform calm, and control in a chaotic world.

Yet, this dismissal of politics, especially of feminism, is itself deeply political. By presenting disengagement as elegance, these aesthetics mask the re-emergence of traditional gender roles and class hierarchies. The aesthetic of “not caring” becomes a costume for privilege - a way to signal superiority while pretending neutrality. 

The issue isn’t women making bread. The issue is that taste has become cowardice. It is culture retreating into the fantasy of control because reality feels too uncertain. 

Just as postwar advertising lured women back into the home under the guise of stability, pop culture now tempts us back into submission under the guise of style. The revival of "tradition" is not protection but regression, a soft-edged return to social hierarchies we once fought to escape. If we keep mistaking repression for refinement, our future won't just echo the past - it will repeat its cruelties. 

As such, nostalgia is meant to create comfort, and comfort is a political emotion meant to pacify. To pretend that culture exists in a vacuum is naive. Every aesthetic choice reinforces a vision of the world, whether we intend it or not. To refuse to acknowledge this is to abdicate responsibility. This is not neutrality but cowardice. 

Rightwing populism relies on nostalgia for mythic pasts they repackage as our “traditions. Our “heritage”. “Make America Great Again”, “Take Our Country Back” - all slogans of loss and restoration – but to make something great again, it must have been great in the first place. Sanitising the past means we are bound to repeat it. Nostalgia becomes a selective memory, a comforting lie that turns political paralysis into patriotism. 

However, this is not a uniquely right-wing phenomenon. Whilst the rise of nostalgia fueled populism is more dangerous, the left, too, often mistakes aesthetic performance for progress. The recycling of 1960s “free love”, or 1970s bohemianism on social media, has become a costume for rebellion rather than an act of it. Alas, Free Love isn’t free, and we must be willing to pay the price of embodying a movement rather than embalming its courage in aesthetics. We build shrines to rebellion rather than practising it. 

So here we are, at the crossroads of the future. Nostalgia has become our refuge and our excuse. It lets us avoid the messy, uncertain work of imagining a new world. Instead of confronting collapse, we scroll through it - wrapped in retro slogans, and instagram carousels, pretending the present will not unfold if simply ignored. 

Nostalgia doesn’t preserve; it paralyses. The more we look backward, the less we are capable of living now. The present has become a waiting room for a future that will never arrive, because all our energy is spent restoring what never truly was. Nostalgia makes us complicit in our own stagnation. It turns fear into fashion and cowardice into culture.

The truth is, nostalgia serves power. It sells comfort to those who can afford to forget. It teaches obedience - to gender, to hierarchy, to “heritage” - while disguising it as taste. When culture becomes cowardly, politics follows suit. We begin to mistake the familiar for the good. 

To live bravely, then, is to reject the urge to return. To resist the safety of imitation. To risk ugliness, uncertainty, and failure for the sake of invention. Courage today means building something that does not yet have an aesthetic. It means opening our eyes to the harm that trends can have. 

If nostalgia is the end of the present, courage is its beginning.

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Edited by Hania Ahmed, Creative Editor