Deep inside our brains is an ocean of memories, emotions, and feelings that can be unlocked by the correct application of sights, smells, and sounds. Without warning, the theme song of a childhood cartoon or the smell of that one aisle in the corner store by your house can teleport you to another time. It might feel like magic, but nostalgia is a very real phenomenon.
The “Nostalgia” Instagram account is pretty self-explanatory, showcasing content that should be like a healthy blast from the past, both funny and relatable. So prepare for a little trip in time, upvote the images that unlocked some memories, and share your thoughts in the comment section below.
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Because nostalgia focuses so much on memories of how things used to be, both real and imagined, it’s important to keep track of what is a cherished memory and what is a specific, focused-tested set of concepts put together to evoke a specific memory. As cynical as it might seem, politicians, movements and advertisers are all wise to the idea of nostalgia as a method to manipulate people.
The “return to the good, old days” is a common promise for many politicians, and many products will try to associate themselves with potential consumers’ childhoods. Little reminders of childhood do often come with a comforting wave of emotions, just make sure that you don’t let people hijack it to sell you anything.
That being said, it is a real and verifiable fact that nostalgia can provide a good amount of comfort through times of sadness and uncertainty. Psychologists believe that in certain “doses,” it’s actually pretty important to our mental health. Think of it this way, when current circumstances don’t provide joy, your brain has this nifty little ability to just reach into the past and scoop up things that made you happy before. There might be diminishing returns, but hey, it’s a start.
To maintain the metaphor of nostalgia-as-medication, it is possible to “take” too much. After all, if you feel the past was too good, you might end up longing just to return instead of focusing on the present. The Germans, as always, have a term for this, called “Sehnsucht,” which you can now use as a complicated and pretentious way to talk about longing, desire, yearning, and craving.
I'm convinced that if you didn't, you didn't have a childhood. Change my mind.
The origin of “Sehnsucht” (capitalized because the Germans capitalize every noun) is “suffering,” which is ultimately what someone would probably feel if they have trapped themselves in the thought that things will never be as good as they used to be. However, some psychologists believe that over time, this emotion can help a person start to develop and plan out the steps to actually improve things.
Ah yes, the shin shredders. If your foot slipped off of one of those puppies, it was immediate blood and pain and bandaids and getting your leg doused in hydrogen peroxide and triple bac.
Once you realize the potential of tapping into the past to draft people’s emotions, you might start to see how it’s used everywhere. You might notice that the Instagram logo is, in fact, a drawing of a Polaroid, despite the fact that 99% of the userbase are probably using a smartphone. But somehow, an old camera seems more special and emotional than the many, smaller and often more powerful cameras we carry in our pockets every day.
And speaking of social media, you have probably seen how, for example, Meta products like Facebook and the aforementioned Instagram have “memory” functions that will randomly show you images from the past, normally on their one-year anniversary. This could of course be a bit misguided, as many people have documented randomly getting images from an illness or a breakup a year ago.
I still do this when I forget to bring along my cellphone to the toilet 😬
Other companies do their best to tap into this feeling as well. The Nokia 3310 phone was legendary for a variety of reasons, but it seems its reputation for being indestructible goes beyond the physical, as the company relaunched it in 2017. The phone seems like stone-age technology compared to any random smartphone from the last few years, but people do want to relive that two-tone snake game and the feeling of pressing some buttons.
Not a 90s kid, but I still had to learn this. I barely know my times tabels but I do know how to play 'hot cross buns' on the recorder 😁
The metal one at my elementary school had a 2 foot drop at the end. It was very dangerous, but so much fun! (Very few burns because of catholic school dress code)
Those plastic jugs of brightly colored sugar water! I never saw them in anyone's home - they only showed up at school or parties.
“Stranger Things” is another case-in-point, where much of the appeal is an idealized image of the 80s, alongside many of the tropes and cliches of 80s children's movies, such as the iconic “ET.” The show was a brilliant move by Netflix, as it managed to both attract gen x viewers who wanted to relive a past era while simultaneously creating nostalgia among younger viewers, a sort of self-perpetuating false memory of the past.
Computer lab? Jeez, at high school we got to look at the schools new computer.... Wasn't even turned on!
I never even saw a computer until I started work using one - an IBM mainframe at that. On the job training was the norm in those days, as hardly anybody had any sort of experience.
Load More Replies...Hahaha thats f****n right, I died of dysentery again!🤣
Load More Replies...I was telling my kids about how when I first started school the school had ONE computer and each class got a turn of it for a week. There was even a special unveiling assembly held to show it to everyone and special monitors in Year 6 in charge of transporting it to the designated classroom each week. It was some sort of Apple thing and had original PrintShop and Muppetville.
My school in elementary school had a specific lab that was just old school colorful Apple computers
Hey I also had a creepy computer teacher! He coincidentally also looked like the killer from the lovely bones. Very unnerving.
Load More Replies...I remember playing ‘coolmathgames’ and all the kids told the teachers that it was actual math and not just normal games 😁
I finished high school when computers were still science fiction.
Still exciting to most students... Just not computing students
In the us '90s my school had a computer lab, and the teacher who was officially the system admin chose three students as his assistants. We each got a sp ecial key to open the lab, admin access to the server, which allowed us to turn on the Internet, and instant popularity among all the students. Good days!
So many computers-Never saw a computer lab that looked like this!
We had a typing lab in jr high. Both manual and electric. Yes I took it and glad I did.
In elementary school we had to go to another school to see a computer.
My best friend in college was in charge of timeshares on the lab mainframe Thursday nights. I definitely had an unfair advantage for research...
Um hello I just graduated from highschool, we used the computer lab and those computer in elementary school years ago
this must have been after my time. We didn't have computers in HS. I bought the first publicly available pc some years after high school. Had to do my own programming too since there were no applications or programs written yet. Then went to Apple because of the marketing, but then realized the mistake and went back to PC because of DOS, and AutoCAD. It was pretty rough back on the prehistoric days, but I always knoew it would evolved into what it is today.
They tried to teach us typing by putting manilla folders over our hands but I still look at my fingies whilst typing.
Our computer lab never looked like this, we had those old Macintosh ones
My late '70s Data Processing class did not look like this, lol. This might as well be the set of STAR TREK or something compared to what I first learned on. One massive computer we all fed our little data cards into. Years later, Windows 3.1 was a bloody revelation.
my school must be old, we used to play flash games in here and talk about fnaf conspiracies
omg... just looking at this picture... my soul just time travelled back to my first week at University... standing at the doorway... looking desperately for a computer. The joy.. the JOY in finding a free one in the corner...
Nope, just typing class. Not keyboarding, just typing. On manual typewriters that you needed to really hammer to get the keys down with enough force to leave a mark... Didn't see my first desktop until grad school...
We didn’t even have a main frame computer. Thing that only large corporations had.
The first one I saw was when as YR12 students 1979 we went to see what uni was like. The computer had punch cards . You typed a question and then took it over to another computer and feed it the card, which then gave you another card to take back to get read. Next computer I used was in 1986 that needed a cassette recorder/player to run the programs. Had to be at a certain volume to work.
We had 2 computers for the whole school, you needed a room just to store the huge floppy discs.
At my high school there was only one computer, and only the BOYS in the COMPUTER CLUB could use it.
At college we had queue early in the morning 6 to 7 am to book the time to use and pay a nominal fee. Colour printing took a day! Crazy! Video was black and white and choppy! So bad I thought I'm not doing that. Ended up directing TV commercials for more than a decade! Got out before social media was a thing. Glad I did.
I took computer class in the 8th grade, 1985. And by computers, I mean state of the of art Apple IIe's
I had a trs80 hooked to a tube tv…we couldn’t afford the equipment I needed
Then there's me, who is going into highschool, and had a whole coding class in a computer lab... Except the teacher was 1,863 years old and didn't know anything about coding.
Ah yes. The days of no internet safety, and teachers leaving kids unattended for an hour in the computer-room to drink coffee and talk s**t with their colleagues. Inevitably some kid put some porn up for shock value and everyone was a) horrified or b) giggling. And then the frantic turning off the screen if any adult came anywhere near. And there was no IT people monitoring the school web, just once the teachers figured out what the kids were doing, they TOLD us there was. 😂
I was in a 'gifted' program for 5th and 6th grade (and turned into an idiot as an adult) and we had access to a computer lab to learn to code in LOGO. I wanted to make a choose your own adventure game and soon found out I bit off way more than I could chew. It ended up onbly being like 10 pages long. lol
We had TRS-80s when I was in High School. They had 8 of them. All we could do was code, in Basic, on them.
Had a whole class in middle school to learn typing fast and other pointless projects 🙃
I use to have to go to the school library to play Oregon trail. We didn't have labs.
First computer at school was second-hand from Brunel University, c 1977. The headmaster had to give up his office to fit it in. It played mastermind on ticker tape - I'd guess about 4Kb of RAM. That pic is pretty modern, we had CRT screens well into this century.
or the frustration of having half a cardboard box over your hands so you don't look at them to type
and when you did you were either trying to save your city from tornadoes and fires or you were playing drug wars 😂
I was lucky to have a school with 2 computer labs and like 5-6 computers in each classroom.. p.s. I was in school from 96-2009
Computers were the things my father worked with, and some were large enough to fill a room. Another was the size of a small fridge, with a similar door on the front, and Dad came home telling of the day it wouldn't work. They called in the expert, who became frustrated because he couldn't fix it. Eventually he slammed the door, and it started working!
"Computer" lab in my high schools was a Navy surplus Teletype and a modem. One. For the entire school. When I was in college, I had to punch cards to use the computer.
When I was in highschool I volunteered to build four computer labs. That was the late '90s and the internet was a new thing.
I was telling one of my carers how I remember being in year 7 (age 11-12) and having a big school celebration for having a computer lab open and how it was in the papers as we were one of the first schools in the county to get one! She replied "but you're only 34!" She legit thought they were something my mum in her 50's would remember happening and not me. I blew her mind with a lot of facts that day. She didn't believe the millennium bug was a real thing we were worried about until I showed her a news clip on YouTube! Felt very old that day
When I was in elementary, in the mid to late 80's, they didn't look like that. Then in middle school out math and science teacher had Apple connections and we got 4 in the room with us. And an early digital camera.
Some specialists have started to develop a concept of “forestalgia,” which is a sort of hopeful belief that in some imagined future, many things will be better. While an idealized future has existed for centuries, the advent of science fiction has created multiple generations who actively think about what the next few decades will bring.
I was ALWAYS taking pictures in high school with camera like this! Such good times! 🥺
I loved how the series got better with every episode. Not like most shows today
Sugar, spice, and everything nice These were the ingredients chosen To create the perfect little girl But Professor Utonium accidentally Added an extra ingredient to the concoction-- Chemical X Thus, The Powerpuff Girls were born Using their ultra-super powers Blossom, Bubbles, and Buttercup Have dedicated their lives to fighting crime And the forces of evil!
I'm going to buy BGT Malakai Bayho's new CD tomorrow; still love CD's and records. Tapes are to much faff.
Load More Replies...Gen X from UK here could relate to a lot of that stuff; the rest reminded me of my kids childhood. Ps 1980 was 25 years ago OKAY
I haven't had this much fun reading BP in a long time. Laughed my butt off at the comments. This nostalgia is great stuff! After a while, I get sick of all the retaliation, boo-hoo and in-law stories.
Fanta or Jaffa (orange soda) for Finns. ✌️
Load More Replies...I knew most of these (South Africa). We had (have) a lot of american cultural influence.
I'm a late ish gen z kid and I understand a majority of this stuff, half of it because I went to a poorish, small, private Catholic school for 2-5, now 6-12 I'm in a richer public school, which was a culture shock on its own from the shared Chromebooks and the computer lab to having our own frickin frackin MacBooks.
I am not a 90s kid, I was born in 2001 but I still related to a bunch of these
At the end of the thread, you’ll find a very tiny “Note: this post originally had 137 images blah blah blah.” Click on the 137 and that’s it. It’s in every shortened post. Hope this gets upvoted so that many people can see it.
Load More Replies...This was one of the best meme feeds I have seen in a very long time. This made me very very happy although making me feel quite old. I will be sharing most of these photos
There’s an Alec Benjamin song, called 1994 (when he was born), that describes some of these things! (Also the early 2000s)
So 90s is now what 80s was when I was growing up; the cool period of time children wished they'd been born in. lmao
HA! I recall ACTUALLY threading the 16 mm Birns and Sawyer projectors in grade school. Absolutely LOVED it. (No, I wasn't a teacher's pet otherwise.) But am ever indebted and grateful for being able to do this.
They should make a „57 glorious 30’s memes that you might be too young for” list.
I'm going to buy BGT Malakai Bayho's new CD tomorrow; still love CD's and records. Tapes are to much faff.
Load More Replies...Gen X from UK here could relate to a lot of that stuff; the rest reminded me of my kids childhood. Ps 1980 was 25 years ago OKAY
I haven't had this much fun reading BP in a long time. Laughed my butt off at the comments. This nostalgia is great stuff! After a while, I get sick of all the retaliation, boo-hoo and in-law stories.
Fanta or Jaffa (orange soda) for Finns. ✌️
Load More Replies...I knew most of these (South Africa). We had (have) a lot of american cultural influence.
I'm a late ish gen z kid and I understand a majority of this stuff, half of it because I went to a poorish, small, private Catholic school for 2-5, now 6-12 I'm in a richer public school, which was a culture shock on its own from the shared Chromebooks and the computer lab to having our own frickin frackin MacBooks.
I am not a 90s kid, I was born in 2001 but I still related to a bunch of these
At the end of the thread, you’ll find a very tiny “Note: this post originally had 137 images blah blah blah.” Click on the 137 and that’s it. It’s in every shortened post. Hope this gets upvoted so that many people can see it.
Load More Replies...This was one of the best meme feeds I have seen in a very long time. This made me very very happy although making me feel quite old. I will be sharing most of these photos
There’s an Alec Benjamin song, called 1994 (when he was born), that describes some of these things! (Also the early 2000s)
So 90s is now what 80s was when I was growing up; the cool period of time children wished they'd been born in. lmao
HA! I recall ACTUALLY threading the 16 mm Birns and Sawyer projectors in grade school. Absolutely LOVED it. (No, I wasn't a teacher's pet otherwise.) But am ever indebted and grateful for being able to do this.
They should make a „57 glorious 30’s memes that you might be too young for” list.