Retro over Retro: Nostalgia toward the Things We Had Never Experienced

(심화영어작문I - 휴업 기간 중 가정 학습 과제 (제18차))

 

Koo, Jae-young 2

정현숙 Teacher

Advanced English Writing I

3 April 2020

 

Retro over Retro: Nostalgia toward the Things We Had Never Experienced

 

  The retro trend is ever-lasting. Elders have nostalgia toward what they used to do in their childhood and seek to do it again, reminding themselves of their old memories. This trend is, for sure, repeated because almost all the children get old to be adults who miss their memories in the childhood.

  But what does it sound like if we miss things we’d never experienced? Well, that’s the trend of nowadays. Let me take you two examples of this. One is the vogue of typewriter. Though it is also fair to say that the vogue of typewriter was accompanied by the vogue of ASMR, as the young enjoyed the typing sound of typewriters, the vogue of typewriters might not be able to appear without the nostalgia toward the things we’d never experienced. There also exists possibility that the users of typewriters are elders. But thesedays, the design of typewriters are being diversified in favour of the young. Taking this point into consideration, we can easily reason that the primary target of the typewriters are young people.

  Another example that shows this retro-over-retro trend well enough is the movie ‘The Grand Budapest Hotel.’ This movie was well-known to trigger people to have nostalgia of what they’d never experienced. This movie uses some stagecrafts that are not used in recent years, but were used in pretty long time ago when it is seen in the viewpoint of prime audiences of the movie. This movie truly was a fad among youngsters. However, these ‘youngsters’ are not in the age group of people who actually experienced these old-style stagecrafts of movies. The truth is that one of the pervasive review of the movie was that ‘it drives me into the nostalgia of what I had never experienced before.’

  Like these two examples mentioned above, the young people of recent times enjoy having nostalgia toward what they couldn’t afford to experience as it was a vogue in too old times. But why? Why do the young enjoy them? As our society is more civilized and developed, individualism and cynical attitude become pervasive, and the young people is suffering from voidness. They don’t know what the voidness is exactly. The young who go through those voidness, the lack of being together, inevitably go in search of togetherness. We learn that individualism is the trend of the modern time, which drives the young to find the cause of lack of togetherness in the ‘time.’ Those people go back and back to find the togetherness, and eventually even try to enjoy the culture of old times. More importantly, the young are sick of outcomes of nowadays. All the products of recent times are cold, stiff, and formal. The young hardly find interest in those semi-dead things. And they suddenly got to experience what they had never experienced for the reason that they hadn’t gone through that generation. Those new experiences are not cold, stiff, or formal. Sometimes they don’t have rules, sometimes they give the sense of warmth. I think these are the reasons why the young are enjoying and searching for the things that they’d never experienced.