This blog post is part of the Agora Road Travelogue for June 2025

As of lately, I’ve been having the weirdest of feelings: real nostalgia, probably a sign of becoming old. I used to only attach the word “nostalgia” to the feeling that old things exude, most of which I’ve never interacted with. At the time of writing, the overused cliché for this feeling is anything 80’s, and that weird part of the 90’s that was just bleeding from the 80’s leftovers (think this Tom Scott’s video). “Nostalgia” was, thus, a quality of things, not a condition of them. But recently I’ve longing for things that I used to know and somewhat remember. Some of them I vividly remember disliking. For some others I go “oh yeah, I remember liking that”, but if someone would ask me why I did like them or even if I still like them, I wouldn’t be able to answer.

This sensation is brand new to me and I must say that I don’t like it. For starters, it makes me think that there’s an unaccessible part of my mind where my past recollections are stored, and which is growing larger and larger with the passing of time, a black hole where my memories go and which will eventually hold all of them. I’m pretty sure this is the underlying fear that dementia patients begin to experience and that has been grandiosely portrayed by The Caretaker’s masterpiece Everywhere at the End of Time. Second of all, it makes me flirt with the notion that objective enjoyment of art and all things beautiful is a thing that is out of the grasp of humanity, that unless you devote your life to the analysis of a single piece you wouldn’t be able to understand it at all. Maybe this is the feeling behind Lord Tennyson’s poem:

Little flower—but if I could understand
What you are, root and all, and all in all,
I should know what God and man is.

But that’s just growing old, right? I’m sure soon I will be able to see some of the good things that come with age, like experience and yada yada. For the meantime, I’ll try to embrace this feeling and make the most of it.

Time forgives no one, and now the things that form my childhood (or the fake memories of it, the only things that are left of it) are making a comeback in the form of that brief period of time in which a new fad is not mainstream enough to be nauseous nor underground enough for no one whose opinion matters to care about it. Ask any cool kid on the block and Y2K is where it’s at. The overall laziness and short attention span that social media has reaped from the minds of the younger generations (from which gen Z is no longer the youngest, but the oldest) has made it so that people now consume “aesthetics”, or the overall vibe that emanates from “stuff” rather than specific pieces. As such you could become a Y2K connoisseur without the need of experiencing (a disguised word for “consooming”) any of the art (a disguised word for “media”) that was produced in that era. You could become so by just seeing it on your TikTok, Instagram or Pinterest feeds. I’m not criticizing this, quite the opposite, I am part of the generation that gave birth to this new way of “experiencing” “stuff”: vaporwave (purists will say that we just stole it from seapunk, and maybe they’re right).

So, all of this rambling is just to say that I am going to be watching movies from my childhood (which I might have or might have not seen. I remember that beautiful excerpt from Borges’ Pierre Menard in which he, Menard, comes to the conclusion that a read and forgotten book occupies the same mental category that an unwritten book) without the need of trying to be objective, which is a lens I might unconsciously put on if I try to review modern or older films. Most of these movies are plain bad, and they are not even relevant in the sense that one might go watch the latest Marvel movie, even if it is not Casablanca, just because you might go watch it with friends. They are not classics either. They just exist. They were there in the right place and right time for them to make a permanent dent in my mind, like your first love or standing next to a couch, and maybe that’s all life is about.