This weekend I saw on the TV an exhibition football match, where the “Golden Generation” of Romania played against some other world stars. People who were on their peak 30 years ago gathered for a last hurrah, filling Romania’s biggest stadium wall to wall. I then realized why nostalgia always sells. It’s because the world around us peaked about 20 years ago. Who knows, maybe the world ended in the year 2000 and we’re just in the shitty purgatory, like in “Wristcutters: A Love Story”.

As a coincidence, I was reading yesterday about nostalgia and then it struck me: We live in a world so bad, that nothing new can top the existing masterpieces. There are no more classics being filmed, written, played or developed. Sports have become all about the money, putting aside competition for the sake of higher profits and players becoming playboys more interested about supermodels and supercars than about achievements. The gaming industry turned into a franchise-churning money pit where kids throw their money in for lootboxes, while playing the same thing over and over. Music and film spiralled into a vortex of mediocrity that keeps spewing bad and/or rehashed content, promotes bad people and excretes dump after dump in chase of bigger profits. People comment nowadays “Can we bring this back? This music? This feeling? This vibe. The world needs more of this.” on Static-X videos on Youtube.

The modern world gives us less reasons to be happy each day. And when this happens for a long time, we start to go back to square one. To the basics. When movies weren’t just political agendas and when even commercial music was good. Back to a time when summer vacation was three months instead of one HR-approved week in Florida. Back when things were affordable, we weren’t bombarded with negative news at every step, music was good, humour was raunchy and we didn’t get “cancelled” for . And depending on one’s age (and tastes), we start moving backwards in time.

Back when Chester Bennington was alive.

Back when Kurt Cobain was alive.

When Viktor Tsoi was alive.

When Martin Luther King was alive.

When James Dean was alive.

When your childhood’s best friend was alive.

But there will be no other Chester, no other Kurt, no other MLK, no other Starcraft. So we’re just left to reminisce about the olden days.