Nostalgia for a Time I Never Knew

What it’s like to yearn for a past you only experience secondhand

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There’s something deeply messed up about longing for a time when you didn’t exist.

Yet here I am, 2am, watching grainy 1977 footage of Lynyrd Skynyrd playing the Oakland Colosseum on YouTube, feeling homesick for a musical generation I never really knew. The people seem entranced, the musicians seem ageless, the lyrics sound like promises from people who never thought they’d die. Everything seems more real, even through the didgital noise. The whole experience is made rather surreal when you learn that only a few months later, would die in a plane crash.

I’ve spent countless nights like this, diving deep into digital rabbit holes of decades past. We all do it — this strange archaeological dig through time periods we never experienced firsthand. The punk shows we never attended, the dive bars that closed before we could drink, the scenes that flourished when rent was cheap and expectations were lower.

We look at pictures of Studio 54 in its glory days, knowing nothing we did in college came close to what they got away with in the 1970s. We lose ourselves staring at concert footage from Pink Floyd’s original Dark Side of the Moon tour, wondering why we were so unlucky to have been born 40 years too late. We review black and white pictures from Woodstock, knowing we’d give anything to experience that for one day instead of the commercialized festivals and Instagram-drenched concerts of today.

We are left hunting for authenticity in our own age, an age where everything feels curated, filtered, optimized for engagement.

The irony isn’t lost on me that I’m experiencing this nostalgia through a YouTube algorithm, letting AI-curated playlists guide me through a selective view of history. We’re the first generation to have instant access to every decade’s cultural artifacts. We treat time periods like Netflix categories, binge-watching the past, cherry-picking the best bits while conveniently skipping the commercials.

But what are we really looking for in these temporal escape routes?

There’s a picture my dad has on his nightstand. It shows his father coaching a high school football game in 1960s small-town Indiana. After I take a long look at this photo, I close my eyes and sometimes shed a tear, imagining a yesteryear that I’ll never experience. I lose myself in smelling the field’s grass while picturing a society that seemed simpler and more sure of itself, a small town on a Friday night where the only thing on peoples’ minds was the home team’s next four downs, a world where there were still mysteries to explore because travel bloggers and wannabe Instagram influences hadn’t ruined them for the rest of us, a time when we knew our neighbors by name, looked out for the people down the street, and trusted our own government.

In this photo, you can see the people behind the sideline, sporting the styles of the time. There are no faces sunk in cell phones. Nobody’s taking selfies, so absorbed in themselves and proving they went somewhere that they don’t pay attention to the where they actually are. There are no “” in this picture.

The coaches wear crisp clothing, business-like in its appearance. I smirk to myself. Another thing that got thrown in the wastebasket in my generation: caring about how you look when you leave the house. When did it become socially acceptable in America to foist yourself on the public while wearing your pajamas? Or even worse, socks and Crocs? It’s pathetic.

If I sound like a bit of an old soul, trust your instincts. But don’t worry — I was born during the Clinton administration. I just have parents who taught me a deep appreciation and respect for the past. I often tell people that had I not majored in finance and foreign language in college, I would have majored in history. The stories of how we became who we are simply fascinate me, and it concerns me that current students

Again, I ask: what are we (or what am I) really looking for in these temporal escape routes?

Maybe it’s about economics.

We scroll through photos of mid-century homes our grandparents bought on single incomes, vintage apartments in now-gentrified neighborhoods that artists could once afford on bartending salaries while dreaming of the day they’d finally get that gallery show. The past becomes a mirror reflecting everything we feel we’ve lost — stability, affordability, the promise of a clear path forward, the assurance that we know what’s going on and are confident in the future.

My grandparents could afford a house before they were 25. My parents owned three in succession before they were 30. I’ll never own one, at least in the United States. I work in tech, make a decent salary, have stocks, and fund my retirement accounts. None of this matters when NIMBY politics and retirees who like their view of the hillsides get mobilized at their local zoning board meetings. But are another post.

I, like many of my millennial colleagues, am part of generation perma-rent, stuck in limbo because the old American Dream of owning a home is gone. I know I have to write my own way into the future, but I’m unsure of what that way is. Maybe home ownership isn’t the status symbol we all think it is? As George Carlin once quipped: “.” My alarm clock began ringing a long time ago.

Or maybe it’s about authenticity. We fetishize analog imperfection — vinyl records, film cameras, Polaroids, typewriters — searching for something that feels real in an increasingly digital world. There’s something almost religious about it, this worship of artifacts from a pre-digital age. As if by touching these totems of the past, we might absorb some essence of authenticity that feels increasingly rare in our own time.

There’s a local bar in my neighborhood I visited a few weeks ago where the whole schtick is “old” things: maps, National Geographic magazines, hats, toys, tapes, albums, trucks. You name it — the owner has collected it from somewhere. It’s like an antique mall meets a pawn shop meets a pub. And, true to form, it was full of people from my generation. We really are enamored with this kind of stuff.

Since childhood, I’ve enjoyed vintage and analog things. I wanted an alarm clock that flipped numbers instead of a digital one for a while. I refused to give up my tape player and CD player for an MP3 player for an embarrassingly long time. I used disposable cameras because I liked the printed photos and the mystery of wondering if I actually set up the shot properly. I learned stick shift in my parents’ 1988 Accord. I enjoyed using a real card catalog at my local library. I took a small measure of pride in my ability to use a phone book. Every trip to an antique mall was a chance for me to put my hands on things I read about in the many museum trips my mom took me and my brother on in our youth.

My dad’s massive record collection and our string of family cars that all had tape players ensured my music tastes were foundationally rooted in a time I’d only experience through books, music, and the occasional nostalgic documentary or piece of Woodstock concert footage I’d force myself to watch, knowing I’d only be more depressed by the end of it since I never got to live through it.

The darkness creeps in when you realize this obsession might be keeping us from fully inhabiting our own era. While we’re romanticizing wood-paneled basements and analog synthesizers and muscle cars and the times depicted in Dazed and Confused and the simpler political choices of communism vs the good guys, we might be missing the formation of our own cultural movements. We’re so busy curating the past that we risk becoming curators, rather than creators, in our own present.

But maybe there’s something valuable in this temporal confusion. We’re the first generation to have such intimate access to the past, to be able to learn from it, remix it, create something new from the pieces. Our nostalgia isn’t just escapism — it’s research and development for whatever comes next.

. (In fact, I wrote about the hobby on my Substack.) The was worn for half the season the year I was born. Part of my collecting research includes watching old game footage and looking on Getty Images to see if I can match the jersey while the player wore it. When I do this for older jerseys, it’s a window into the past. I see the fashion sense of the era in the crowds. I see the board advertisements from companies 3–4 logos ago, even from businesses that no longer exist. I see players wearing the previous era’s gear, most of them not wearing face shields because it wasn’t required. I see just how hammered, torn up, and beaten the jerseys get (the time that we collectors reference as “when [game] wear was [game] wear”).

I sometimes get entranced watching old game footage, and it very much impacts the way I view hockey in 2025. I think about the big hits the game no longer has. I think about the digital board ads and the sports gambling ads the current broadcasts have. I see how companies can sponsor literally every part of a broadcast, from overtime, to the , to the coin toss (Super Bowl), to the halftime program (March Madness), to even the broadcast itself. I see how much more protected today’s hockey players are, how much faster the game as become, how much, paradoxically, the styles in crowds seem to never change. Looking into the past via my hobby isn’t entirely escapism or nostalgia for another era, but rather my own personal R&D for how I watch the game, appreciate the game, learn about the game in the present.

Sometimes, in these late-night YouTube sessions, whether it’s watching legendary New Jersey Devils defenseman Scott Stevens (“Captain Crunch”) with an open-ice hit that would get him put in the penalty box for life in today’s NHL, or it’s watching of legends I’ll never see in their prime but to whom I feel I have a deeper connection than I do to my own neighbors, I catch glimpses of what I think we’re really searching for. It’s not the specific aesthetics or artifacts of past decades that draw us in. It’s the sense of possibility, the feeling that culture was something you could grab onto and help shape, rather than something that arrives pre-packaged, algorithm-approved, ready to consume, and disappears into the ether 30 seconds later.

The sun’s coming up now, and I’m still here, swimming in the digital archives of another era. Every generation probably felt both more and less real to the people living through it. Maybe the point isn’t to long for a time we never knew, but to create moments worth being nostalgic about in the future. Even if those moments involve watching vintage YouTube videos in the middle of the night, searching for echoes of authenticity in the digital glow of a world we’re still trying to understand.