The day after the Super Bowl normally makes for good conversation in the office. There was a decent amount to talk about this year. 

The game itself was a bit boring, although as one of my friend’s texted, it made for an excellent hate watch. 

Bad Bunny’s halftime show, one of the most watched ever, was incredibly cinematic.

And the advertisements were…weird.

It wasn’t lost on many people that nearly all the ads fell into one of four categories: AI, GLP-1s, sports betting, and nostalgia bait.

A lot of the normal advertisers were lost in this new grouping. We didn’t even get a Doritos ad this year. Instead, we got a lot of the above categories.

Today, I want to focus on the final category, nostalgia. Quite a few commercials relied on a sense of nostalgia to sell their product.

“Good Will Dunkin” threw a half-dozen awkwardly de-aged 90s sitcom characters at us. Coinbase tricked viewers into singing along with a karaoke version of the Backstreet Boys’ “Everybody (Backstreet’s Back). I enjoyed the reaction videos of people booing once they realized who was behind the ad. Finally, the Jurassic Park cast was used to sell Wi-Fi (again with awkwardly de-aged characters). 

Some of these are cute. A lot of them are groan-inducing adaptations that miss the point of the original, beloved product, but somewhere the message seems to be that nostalgia sells.

Nostalgia, though, is a slippery slope. Instead, we should turn to hope because it’s one of the strongest forms of resistance for our present.

Nostalgia Is Easy

The inspiration for this week’s post comes from a pair of newsletters by Kyla Scanlon. The first, The Nostalgia Loop Cycle, was published back in June 2023. The second, Buying Futures, Renting the Past, came from this past week. Both are fantastic pieces that dig more into the economic consequences than I will here.

Kyla states that “hope is the one virtue that requires imagination.” In order to hope for something, we have to imagine that the desired outcome is possible. More on that below.

Nostalgia, on the other hand, requires far less effort because we’re operating from a pre-established point. The Marvel movies, a favorite of mine in the 2010s, are incredibly guilty of this as Kyla explains.

Part of the appeal of each subsequent Marvel movie was that we knew the characters and how they might interact with each other. We understand who Captain America and Iron Man are and how they might interact with each other.

Maybe that’s why the new generation hasn’t been doing as well. We’re forced to begin again without our beloved characters. That’s also probably why Marvel is bringing back Chris Evans, Robert Downey Jr., and others for the upcoming Avengers: Doomsday. Nostalgia is easier to sell.

Because nostalgia is easier and requires less mental effort, Kyla argues that “nostalgia encourages stagnancy, and we are in a cultural cycle that encourages that.” Examples for this cultural cycle are the Super Bowl ads and even the slew of remakes that populate streaming services. What’s old is new.

Nostalgia serves as an escape from the present. When our social media feeds are flooded with doom and gloom, nostalgia is a pretty convenient exit.

Hope Requires Effort

Hope is in opposition with nostalgia in a way. Where nostalgia uses our pre-established ideas, hope requires new paths to be paved.

During the civil rights movement, leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. had to hope (or dream if you will) for a better future, which required action. One must imagine that the desired outcome is possible in order to kindle a sense of hope. Nostalgia wouldn’t have worked to make progress.

Within the span of an individual lifetime, nostalgia can be quite tempting. I can be nostalgic for something that happened to me 10 years ago.

Generationally, though, nostalgia isn’t always so pretty. The University of Virginia, my alma mater, only began admitting women in 1970, well within the lifespan of many people I know. 

Nostalgia can be a trap, albeit a tempting one, that harkens back to a non-existent time where things were perfect. There’s a reason a certain popular political slogan elicits a sense of nostalgia that never really existed.

It’s much easier to be nostalgic about the past than to hope for a better future. Nostalgia doesn’t tax the brain all that much meaning it’s harder to be hopeful than nostalgic, which can lead to some weird places.

Nostalgia - Hope = Weirdness

Kyla outlines a sort of formula that results from this rising nostalgia:

“More nostalgia, less imagination, less hope - presumably sentiment dips, spending might get weird, people might throw all their cash into Dogecoin, nihilism becomes the forcing function for companies and investments, so on and so forth”

I think this is a pretty good estimation of what happens as nostalgia rises and hope diminishes. Nihilism takes hold. I have a pretty strong opinion when it comes to that branch of philosophy.

Our memory will take our past and bias it towards positive encounters, while the present is filled with negative information. Things seem bleak.

Nostalgia, thinking back on the past, is just a way to escape the bleak present. Another way to escape is to look to the future, which is where we bring in another major group from the Super Bowl ads: gambling. 

Gambling and prediction markets are huge nowadays, and they’re just another way to escape the present. Prediction markets are a way to bet on a given outcome; alternatively, they’re a way to bet on certainty. They can be like an imaginary crutch to help us limp along during these uncertain times. 

Cooking up a parlay is just imagining a future outcome you want to happen. It requires a sort of hope, but it’s one that is outside our control. I have no impact on whether or not the Knicks make the NBA finals, yet I could spend $100 on some hunch I might have.

As hope dwindles, we turn to these other external loci of control. You could bet on Jesus Christ returning before 2027 for example.

Much like nostalgia, gambling and speculation are another way to escape from the present to the future instead of the past.

It's Your Choice

If nostalgia is an escape to the past and speculation one to the future, hope then is being rooted in the present.

Hope requires that we don’t flee from the doom and gloom, that we imagine instead that things can get better. 

Hope demands that we invest in ourselves because it is worthwhile. How about cooking up a parlay for your mental and physical health, am I right? 

Corniness of that statement aside, it’s a worthwhile consideration.

There are those my age that wonder if investing in a 401k is worthwhile because of the uncertainty of the world by the time we retire. Hope pushes back against that idea and asks that we imagine a way for the world to get better. It asks that we have a hand in the shaping of a better world.

Don’t throw away your ability to hope because it’s one of the strongest forms of resistance you have. That’s kind of the irony of hoping: you either are or aren’t hopeful. The choice is entirely yours.

So, which do you choose?

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