I have a hard time letting go. Sometimes one gets haunted by the past not because it’s haunting but merely because it is past. Memories cling, like getting a song stuck in your head except it’s just a moment, a feeling, a texture – but there’s no way to just play the song, to compare memory to reality, to exorcise that ghost. You’re just stuck with memory, a hole where something once was, like a missing tooth.
I wish I were unique in this outlook, but this nostalgia addiction has become omnipresent and commodified. The past has never been so present, the leftovers reheated and resold, remake upon remake, pretending to fill that hole, and this keeps happening partly because it is profitable, but also because it keeps us bound, tied to our past, invested in our sunken costs. Even these remakes and retreads are punished if they go too far against the grain of pure obeisance to the past: When The Last Jedi came out and suggested that maybe worshiping nostalgia might be a bad thing people lost their goddamn minds, and god help you if you cast a remake with women.
Thus we are drafted into a war against the future. To become invested in nostalgia is to become a proponent of the status quo. The cause and effect on that is tricky though. Do we buy stock in nostalgia because it is being sold to us, bonds for the past, doomed, like us, to never mature? Or do we clamor for the familiar because the unknown future is too painful to contemplate? It is said that those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it. Apparently so are those who remember it too fondly. A healthy mind must be able to maneuver between the jagged rocks of nostalgia and amnesia, but it only gets harder as the fog banks roll in.
Systems, particularly those involving humans, have a tendency to optimize over time – and the question this statement should immediately prompt you to ask is: “Optimize for what?” In most cases, this means to more efficiently funnel resources towards those charged with maintaining the system. Still, usually somewhere on that kleptocratic curve is something vaguely functional – and, because it can be argued that this is the best vaguely functional system so far, it is declared to be the best system possible.
I am reminded of the parable of the Expert Beginner. If we look no further than our immediate selves and surroundings, we might reasonably conclude that we’ve achieved in the past some sort of pinnacle of civilization ,the end of history, and we only have to find our way back – but we could just as easily have reached a lesser peak, with far greater things being possible if we could only let go of our belief that we must by definition be doing things in the best possible way. We are, at best, reaching local maximum and then declaring it the top. This is, of course, disregarding the majority of people who don’t get to partake in these systemic benefits – both locally, as in the case of the poor and/or marginalized, and abroad, as in the global south which is drained of resources to make these excesses possible.
The mere presence of these massive pools of human suffering is proof that better things must be possible – and yet we remain lovelessly married to our pasts, and constrain our futures to the least of what can be imagined. History seems to be ending in a completely different sense now – the end of the ouroboros, devouring itself endlessly, feeding on the past in endless recursion.
We can’t right the wrongs of the past, only navigate them to find a better future. Regardless of whether we choose to let go, the past is only passing further away, and there’s no way we can age fast enough to catch up, much as we might try. The future can only be reached facing forward. Or perhaps it’s too late for us, and we are doomed to drown – but, at least, if we learn to let go, we might not drag down with us those who are trying to help.