I am perpetually looking back on the past with love and melancholy. I am deeply nostalgic to my very core. I know how easy it is to miss what we can never return to, even if the present is something I am enjoying, and even if the past I am reminiscing about was not particularly positive at the time.  

I fear that this all-too-familiar nostalgia has a manipulative effect, urging us to believe that the past is somehow superior to the now — if not solely for the reason that we can never live in any moment more than once.

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While this is something I have explored endlessly in my own perceptions and personal experiences, it is also something I have noticed with regard to our cultural consciousness. There seems to be a general disillusionment with art and media today — an underlying notion that we can never live up to the art of the past, that nothing can be as good as it was. 

I disagree. I think this pessimistic view is just another way in which nostalgia rears her beautiful, ugly head. I draw your attention first to something generally familiar to members of Generation Z: Disney Channel. 

On YouTube, TikTok and Instagram, discourse on the subject widely looks the same. It is generally agreed upon that Disney Channel has become “absolutely trash,” or at least that’s how one of the newest shows can be described in the eyes of TikTok user “@joeyschwartz39.” User “@_nianation_” agrees, writing “[Disney Channel] fell off in 1000 different ways.” 

While some acknowledge that growing older may have something to do with the declining perception of the network, most argue that the new production is definitively worse. 

Maybe there are real, objective reasons as to why the programming has gotten worse — or maybe we’ve merely aged out of its target demographic. 

I personally don’t spend my time rewatching the shows I loved at 10 years old — not because I think the shows are bad, but because I know they won’t mean to me now what they meant to me then. I know it won’t be the same; my interests in media have grown and evolved as I have. 

On a Reddit chain entitled “Did Disney channel really get bad, or did you grow up?” commenter “u/DiamondBurInTheRough’ wrote, “I still liked [old Disney Channel] for the sake of nostalgia, but if I saw the same show on ‘new Disney’, and didn’t have the connection with it from my childhood, I’d … think it was terrible.”

More so than missing the old Disney Channel, we miss the versions of ourselves that we were when we watched it; we miss wanting to watch Disney Channel at all. Maybe the quality of programming has genuinely worsened, but analyzing this as truly impartial is impossible when feelings of nostalgia are inextricable from our opinions. 

The effects of nostalgia, however, are not limited merely to television or to children’s programming. Hollywood’s apparent obsession with rebooting old franchises is also a key consequence of romanticizing the past: see “Star Wars” (1977), “Rocky” (1976), “Jurassic Park” (1993), “Raiders of the Lost Ark” (1981) (the first “Indiana Jones” film) and so on. This also extends to shows like “Cobra Kai,” “Fuller House” and “Gossip Girl” — not to mention the ongoing live-action remakes of classic Disney movies. 

These new reboots are virtually guaranteed an audience — not necessarily because they are good, but because people are nostalgic by nature. A movie one remembers as good becomes beloved once enough time passes — or even, sometimes, when practically no time passes at all. We are constantly sold the notion that new media can emulate the experience we had when watching these stories for the first time. 

I think a part of the reason so many of these reboots fail to deliver is because people’s expectations are largely rooted in feelings of nostalgia — that is, a longing for memories that perhaps have been idealized in the time since. We paint the past in a consistently more loving, generous light. 

When I stop and finally take off my rose-colored glasses, however, I realize that the past, just like the present, is merely what we make of it. Though I too reminisce on earlier days, I also look forward to a future of new media and new memories — fodder for an abundance of nostalgia to come.