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Midnight in Paris: GenZ on "anytime but now"

PSYCHOLOGY, Sociology


“Well you know, nostalgia is denial, uh, denial of the painful present…And the name for this fallacy is called ‘Golden Age thinking.’... Yeah, the erroneous notion that a different time period is better than the one one’s living in. It’s a flaw in the romantic imagination of those people who find it difficult to cope with the present.” 


There are countless ways different people cope. And most times, it’s to escape the overwhelming present. It’s hard to sit with the current moment and the thoughts and emotions it may bring, so some end up distracting themselves every waking hour. (Read our article here.)


One coping mechanism we’ve relied on quite heavily is nostalgia. We’ve seen this a lot in the latest generation. We’ve seen this before in other generations. We’ve seen this in several historical time periods. We’ve seen this in Woody Allen’s classic, Midnight in Paris, where protagonist Gil Pender idealizes the 1920s as his own Golden Age. Hence, Golden Age thinking, a belief that a different time period is better than the present.


So why do we humans idealize other time periods, well-knowing those times had their own pitfalls? According to the Wall Street Journal’s Johan Norberg,


“Psychologists say that this kind of nostalgia is natural and sometimes even useful: Anchoring our identity in the past helps give us a sense of stability and predictability. For individuals, nostalgia is especially common when we experience rapid transitions…. Similarly, collective nostalgia—a longing for the good old days when life was simpler and people behaved better—can also be a source of communal strength in difficult times.”1

Sure, Paris in the 1920s was indeed free of “acid rain, global warming, suicide bombing, nuclear weapons, and drug cartels, the usual menu of cliched horror stories.” But Professor of Behavioural Science Nick Chater of Warwick Business School describes our “rose-tinted” view of the past is due to (1) the cognitive bias loss aversion,2 and a (2) psychological tendency to dwell on positive memories, and therefore recollect those most.3 Professor Chater explains how humans can view events like holidays as positive looking back, even though the actual experience may not have been, this idea that

“‘my life now doesn’t seem as good as it will look in retrospect.’”4

Chater continues, 

“The idea that everything is getting worse – declinism – is an old one. Even ancient Athens saw itself as having declined from a former, mythical golden age. So perhaps our minds are tricking us into thinking things are getting worse.”5

But is it really a trick? How do we discern whether our worlds are actually in decline from the preceding era? Is our generation really just a bunch of declinists who claim to be traumatized all the time? 


Now, of course it makes sense that GenZ is one of the most nostalgic generations at the moment. After all, we are in the anthropologically liminal time of adolescence (our entire Word for Thought theme); and as we are in this in-between of childhood and adulthood, it seems only natural that we long for golden childhood.6 It makes even more sense that nostalgic themes emerged and peaked most during lockdown, a period of a health crisis, media confusion, severe climate anxiety, and disrupted politics. We consume content largely around these “Golden Age” aesthetics that appeal so much to us.7 There are even Instagram accounts made just for posting around certain eras of the past. We are teeter-tottering between what once was certain to us in childhood, and the endlessly uncertain world of adulthood. 


Social trends in the media, fashion, television, art, and music that lean towards another past “trend” are taking off today. Examples include: the Y2K style, vintage clothing, older shows like Gilmore Girls as comfort shows, the “old money” aesthetic, and various music. According to a Spotify report, there was a 54% increase in “nostalgia-themed playlists” in the first week of April 2020.8 What’s more, look at the rise of Icelandic-Chinese artist Laufey, or Stephen Sanchez. Both having debuted around 2020, Laufey and Stephen Sanchez are artists that hold rich styles of the past. For the former, it is combining the voices and composition of jazz a hundred years ago with modern bossa nova pop.9 For the latter, it is creating an entire musical persona of a man in love in the year of 1965. The two have a combined number of roughly 36 million monthly listeners on Spotify, made up of mostly young listeners. The two even have a song together.


What’s most interesting about these two artists, however, is how they represent the tastes of GenZ. And here I cannot say it better than industry marketing and promotional growth media site The Drum:

“Gen Z love the idea of an old school product, but what’s key to remember is they won’t respond to old school values. They are looking for something more than just the past. So the answer? Embrace the tension. Merge old and new. Market to Gen Z using a mixture of comfort and inspiration.”10 

In fact, The Drum is not the only marketing company to educate marketers on the dual gravitation towards past and future of GenZ. So maybe our hidden power, while some think all we do is claim how traumatized we are, is our ability to bridge within this liminality. To connect, innovatively fuse the past and present for our own future. 

So perhaps this collective nostalgia, when balanced, isn’t so bad. 


“We all fear death and question our place in the universe. The artist’s job is not to succumb to despair but to find an antidote to the emptiness of existence. You have a clear and lively voice. Don’t be such a defeatist.”

- “Gertrude Stein” in Midnight in Paris


So maybe, in the face of our rapidly advancing civilization, of our uncertain future, like a wise woman once said, the solution now is to be an artist, not a declinist. To be a natural artist, bridge certainty and ontological unease, to use our voices, and make personal art from it. 





P.S. EXTRA ADDITION:

“But it’s the present, it’s…dull.”- Adriana, played by Marion Cottilard, Midnight in Paris


A valuable lesson in a later scene occurs when Adriana and Gil both travel back to la Belle Epoche. Adriana claims the ‘20s to be dull, and that the earlier period was certainly better–it was la Belle Epoche! Yet Gil, from 2010, believes the same about the ‘20s. Here we see the pattern of Golden Age thinking, but what would Adriana have done differently if she hadn’t stayed in la Belle Epoche? How would her life been affected by what we now call anticipatory/anticipated nostalgia? Would that anticipatory nostalgia still be considered some form of Golden Age thinking, an accurate matching of the present’s value viewed from retrospect as Professor Chater might suggest? 





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