Words by: Karen Grace Prince
Art by: Nikole Bradbury

You’ve probably met someone like this.

They own a wardrobe that resembles the cast of ‘That ‘70s Show’. They think Pink Floyd is the greatest band to walk the Earth. They insist on capturing everything on a film camera. They refer to themself as an ‘old soul’ while pining for a past they took no part in making.

It’s me. I’m that someone. But I can’t say I don’t love it.

I’ve made Fleetwood Mac almost synonymous with my personality. I can recite Kafka’s greatest lines whilst simultaneously reminding everyone that he was a talent “gone too soon”. I will fight tooth and nail to declare Akira Kurosawa as the greatest director of all time (he is). I like to secretly upvote insufferable YouTube comments that take a dump on Gen Z trends. I purchase unnecessarily expensive postcards that I mail to friends who are merely a text away.

I know exactly what I’m doing. I toe the line between being deeply pretentious and incredibly self-aware. I am a mosaic of experiences, with little to no original thoughts, yet I borrow fragments from the past to form my core identity. I am the very antithesis of my being, the auteur of self-imposed superficiality.

And yet, I’m here to defend that… Hear me out.

There is a certain allure to romanticising nostalgia— glamourising a time you can never quite experience yet still finding a way to reminisce through art that has stood the test of time. The cultural zeitgeist of the past offers solace to us who seek refuge away from the omnipresence of technology. We exist in the fringes of a time lost, living vicariously through the remnants of media, culture and literature that has been persevered through generations. The pleasure of simple analog experiences—writing letters by hand, reading a book page to page or picking up records from the store—feel perverted with a swipe of your finger. And so, to claim these analog experiences feels like an act of defiance—an attempt to stand out against a crowd of more of the same.

I was born right at the cusp of the 2000s, not young enough to relate to Gen Z and not nearly old enough to be a Millennial. My cultural fabric has been woven with influences from every end of the spectrum. My father’s music collection became my music collection. My mother’s vintage clothing soon found its way into my closet. My brother’s millennial snobbery earned me a ‘PhD in maturity’. I am a patchwork quilt of conflicting periods. I have poached and appropriated. I have absorbed and adopted. I have everything and nothing at the same time. And so the culture and aesthetics of bygone years have found new life through my generational dysphoria.

Alas, my ambiguous place in the space-time continuum is no match for the humbling of common sense. The one that reminds me that I’m a woman and a Person of Colour. There are plenty of elements of the past I don’t love— I certainly don’t reminisce about living under colonialism or having no voting rights. Social progress, however substantial, is the only reason I can afford to enjoy what I can today, albeit with still a long way to go. The ace up my sleeve is that I can be nostalgic in hindsight, reaping all the perks of the past without giving up any of the luxuries of the present. I can be pompous in theory and practical in fact.

I embrace being everything and nothing all at once. And that’s perfectly fine.