Can nostalgia say more about the future than the past? Why don’t tech billionaires live in a house like the one from Totally Spies? In this episode, Sithara and Jaume read too deeply into the return of future-facing 2000s microtrends and their unfulfilled promises. You can also listen on Spotify and Apple Podcasts! Subscribe below to get these in your inbox whenever a new one is out… In this episode, Sithara talks about the origins of nostalgia, which should interest you if you’re the 1 listener we have from Switzerland: Nostalgia was coined in 1678. It was used to describe the pain that a sick person feels because they’re away from their native land — homesickness basically, but really making you sick. Nostalgia was sort of seen as this sickness of the mind. Right. Also it was sometimes referred to as the Swiss disease. :-) We define some types of nostalgia… There’s reflective nostalgia, which is when you try and rebuild fragments of your memory that you actually remember. And then restorative nostalgia treats the past as a better place and ideal that we need to get back to. …and then we apply them to some of the recent 2000s microtrends that are all over TikTok, like the 2000s Yoga Mom aesthetic. Jaume has a theory about why we’re so hungry for hyper-niche nostalgic visions of the future: We’re struggling a lot to imagine a future these days, so I think from both ends of the political spectrum, everyone’s looking back, right? It sort of feels like we have a wall in front of us and the only way is back. But we’ve just burned through all the “looking back”s possible, and none of them has granted us a solution. So now we’re cherry picking. We also discuss how niche microaesthetics could function as ways to digest our issues with the present… You can see the 2000s Yoga Mom as a criticism to the clean girl and frutiger aero as a response to the monopolistic internet. It’s a way of looking at the past to question the present. Frutiger Aero 2000s Yoga Mom 2000s Tuscan Mom Utopian Scholastic 90s Cool Curly Girl And here’s what we read… * B.J. Hartmann and K.H. Brunk, Nostalgia marketing and (re-)enchantment, International Journal of Research in Marketing, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijresmar.2019.05.002 * None, D. T. J., None, D. V. K. M. & None, M. D. K. (2025). Digital Nostalgia Marketing: How Past-Centric Ads Affect Gen Z Consumption. Advances in Consumer Research, 2(4), 4279-4291. * Brown, M. G., Carah, N., Tan, X. Y. (Jane), Angus, D., & Burgess, J. (2024). Finding the future in digitally mediated ruin: #nostalgiacores and the algorithmic culture of digital platforms. Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, 30(5), 1710-1731. * The Hours Have Lost Their Clock: The Politics of Nostalgia by Grafton Tanner * Girl on Girl: How Pop Culture Turned a Generation of Women Against Themselves by Sophie Gilbert * Not a book/article, but the Rowan Ellis video “The Politics of Ugliness” * Our obsession with nostalgia is driving a trend revival spiral by Lauren Cochrane Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support our work! This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit furtherreadingpod.substack.com
