The Nostalgia Pendulum: A rolling 30-year cycle of pop culture trends

Movie remakes might not be quite enough to make the 30 year number work. I feel like there is some confirmation bias here.<p>Consider &quot;Happy Days&quot;, made in the 1970s to celebrate the 1950s. The wave of mods and paisley jangle pop in the 1980s to celebrate the 1960s. All the &quot;Big Star&quot; sounding bands of the late eighties and early nineties celebrating Alex Chilton circa 1972.<p>I would guess the movies are a lagging trend, the real number is likely 20 years, approximately equating to mid childhood, early teens as being idealised and getting expressed in successful adulthood at 30 in pop culture by those who experienced those times in formative years.<p>That would put the first wave of 80s nostalgia in the 2000s[0]<p>Stranger things is more like nostalgia for early 2000s 80s nostalgia.<p>Edit: the twenty year rule? [1] [2]<p>[0] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.inthe00s.com&#x2F;archive&#x2F;inthe00s&#x2F;smf&#x2F;1342451842.shtml" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.inthe00s.com&#x2F;archive&#x2F;inthe00s&#x2F;smf&#x2F;1342451842.shtm...</a><p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;decades.medium.com&#x2F;how-1980s-nostalgia-ruled-the-2000s-69dbe3058dbf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;decades.medium.com&#x2F;how-1980s-nostalgia-ruled-the-200...</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.furious.com&#x2F;perfect&#x2F;culturecycles.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.furious.com&#x2F;perfect&#x2F;culturecycles.html</a>

The remake dates is a clever approach to quantifying the trend.<p>Nostalgia might be driving it in part, but I&#x27;ve also seen a lot of it driven by people who never experienced the era. Young adults fascinated by the era just before the one they were born into, just barely out of reach but still available to their casual awareness.<p>It&#x27;s not always the 30 year olds driving the trends out of nostalgia, sometimes it&#x27;s the 20 year olds pining for an idealized version of an era they never experienced themselves, but can easily intuit.

While I definitely recognize there’s a cycle, I also can’t but feel that old media is regurgitated because the state of what we are creating now. I don’t think we’ll be doing the same 20-30 years now with Marvel movies.

I&#x27;ve see this in ebay prices for vintage tech. Strong uplift in demand in the last 5 years for early Macintosh computers, as everyone starts to have nostalgia for their childhood and now has enough income to engage in the hobby.<p>I wouldn&#x27;t peg 30 years as the magic number, but roughly tech products have gone through a process of a slide into obsolescence in the first 15-20 years, followed by a resurgence in interest and price increase over the next 10+ years.

The nostalgia pendulum is real, but, but, in music and cars it seems there is no momentum after the 90s and the 90s fare worse than 80s and 70s and even 60s.<p>Back in the second part of the 90s we had already some 70-80s music revival nights. Plus groups like daft punk were already rediscovering 80s. Now it&#x27;s 2020, how many 2000 and 2010 music revival nights are out there? just some 90s. Plus the usual 70 and 80.<p>Cars? nothing really new after the countach I am afraid. Even hypercars look like racing prototype class cars with a bit more refinement. The delta, the countach itself, the giulia gt, have been restomodded or redone. What modern cars are likely to deserve such treatment?

Pop culture has only been a thing since mass media.<p>The Internet accelerated the existing fragmentations in pop culture that were really always there, but became prominent in the late 80&#x27;s&#x2F;early 90&#x27;s.<p>The fact that music from anywhere, anytime was downloadable (despite the industry&#x27;s attempts to stop it), combined with the fact you could chat with anyone from anywhere that had an Internet connection, was the beginning of the end of a mass pop culture. It was the beginning of &quot;bottom up&quot; control of the media. This morphed into streaming and social media, which continues.<p>So the 90&#x27;s is it. The only cultural phenomenon comparable in the 00&#x27;s and 10&#x27;s are game-centered. So there may be a bit of mass nostalgia about that popping up after the oncoming 90&#x27;s retro wave.<p>What would cause a return to pop culture is heavy regulation turning the Internet back into the TV of the 50&#x27;s through 90&#x27;s, which is not impossible. However I feel further saturation of current US political discourse into social channels is going to make what used to be pop culture and mainstream media an impossible thing for anything other than political discourse in the US. The countercultures and social bubbles are going to turn into essentially &quot;Internet gated communities&quot; that only come out into the mainstream to fight.

&gt;There’s a reason that the culture of the 1980’s is experiencing a resurgence right now.<p>I stopped reading right there. The first signs of 80s-nostalgia went off in the electro nostalgia in electronic music circles around the year 2000, just a few years later we had 80s-shows on mainstream TV in germany, nonstop.<p>The 80s-Nostalgia-Trip itself is running for 20 years now and normal nostalgia cycles can&#x27;t explain this phenomenon.

A curious movie trend with a 30 year interval also: 3D. 50’s, 80’s, 10’s. Though maybe the emergence of VR would render 3D movies obsolete by 2040..

If you find this interesting you might enjoy the larger social cycles proposed in [1] H.S. Generational Theory.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Strauss%E2%80%93Howe_generational_theory" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Strauss%E2%80%93Howe_generat...</a>

Flared jeans on their fourth cycle round.

I put that such a clear awareness of this phenomenon will alter the way it continues to happen going forwards.<p>i.e. this is so plain to see that it&#x27;ll somehow change its own dynamics.<p>this is specially accute due to political implications (e.g. campaing managers who understand this and thus instructed Trump to resemble Reagan&#x27;s rhetoric until the point when people somehow start to catch on to this manipulations by means of, for example, this and similar articles)<p>...but maybe I&#x27;m too generous (or optimistic) about the capabilities of &quot;the unwashed masses of people&quot;?

2017