Nostalgia-Core (or "The Craft of Doing Nothing")
pokémon and the power of selective memory ☼ nostalgia as a coping mechanism for a critical self ☼ pre-processing my thirtieth birthday
I want to eat Pokémon. I want to eat Pikachu and Squirtle and Charmander until I transform into a petite animal that shits out fireballs and pukes pools of lightning. There is something about Pokémon that has been possessing me as of late, more often than usual, perhaps as fervently as the franchise did when I was a child. Every time that I watch the anime with my partner over breakfast, a nostalgia—and a yearning for that nostalgia to transform my life—overwhelms me.
The nostalgia does not only arrive at the sight of Pokémon. It also arrives when I listen to the timid hum of the street outside as the workday recedes to the evening. It arrives when I think about returning to the house I grew up in and our family room with a once-white carpet and a table covered in crumbs. It arrives on Christmas Eve. Over a long holiday without work. When I find myself on a Saturday afternoon with nothing to do.
If there is one thing I am the most nostalgic about, it is the experience of having nothing to do. Summer nights stretched out by television programs and mornings spent kicking a soccer ball on a field, over and over again, with no intended goal. When was the last time we found ourselves ripe in the bliss of nothing: doing nothing, thinking nothing, wanting nothing?
It seems like the older we get, the more there is to do, think about, and want—maybe there is a point where the wanting regresses, since most of the older people I know seem to be happier with themselves than their less mature counterparts, but alas, I am only turning thirty next year, which is another way of saying that I am not very old and have less responsibility compared to others (no children, no mortgage, no pets, a partner who cooks and cleans more often than I do 😬). However, in the scope of my life, I am the oldest I have ever been, which is another way of saying that, although I have very little responsibility as an almost-thirty year old, I have a lot of responsibility compared to my fifteen year old self. For example, there are almost twenty different “to-do” items stuck in a mundane note on my phone. Some of those items have been there for the past week, some the past month and some the past three years: get the scalp cream from the pharmacy (1 month), create more tiktok videos (2 months), submit health insurance claims (2 weeks), tailor your clothes (3 years), work on poetry book (1 day), organize trip for mom (1 month), practice djing (5 months), get flu shot (3 months), switch PW manager (1 week), finish claudia’s gift (1 month).
When I look at this list every week and realize that I have only added to it, I wonder how it is that there are so many things for us to do. I sit inside of the weird thought that everyone everywhere has too many things to do. That living, as an action, requires a lot of things to do, and everyone who is alive has to take care of these things, independently. We work, exercise, organize and go about our little tasks (or let them fester on growing notes), all at the same time. When I say this, I do not mean to be the gen-z millennial hybrid saying life is so hard! I don’t want to work! Why do I have to do this! I am less overwhelmed than I am curious: How do we manage the business of living?
As probably seen on a Bed Bath & Beyond sign, there is power in perspective. A trend on TikTok highlights the power of gratitude by replacing “I need to” with “I get to,” where creators film mundane aspects of their lives and reframe them in the light of an opportunity, as opposed to a task. Other creators capture little moments that might be considered hassles—like waiting 20 minutes for a taxi to arrive or having to wake up early for work on a Monday—and present them with the intro “what a privilege it is…”: what a privilege it is to not know what to eat for dinner and get to choose, what a privilege it is to feel tired after traveling in an economy seat. These videos jolt recognition in the brain like little hard candies filled with gratitude, reminding us that much of what we experience as stress can be transformed with the trick of insight.
Yet perceiving life’s tasks as little gifts, as opposed to requirements, is not a disappearing act. Life is busy. There are many things to do, and there will continue to be many things to do. While it makes me excited to think that it is a privilege to be alive, that I get to go buy a cream to heal the weird rash on my scalp because my scalp is a healthy, living thing, the yearning to do absolutely nothing still stirs in my gut whenever I encounter anything nostalgic. Every time I see Pokémon—on cards, on TV, on keychains around Mexico City—I think about the days in which Pokémon was my sole purpose, in which building the perfect team of six was the only thing on my mind, the only goal I had for months on end, and in that thought, I yearn for a time in which I can allow something as simple as Pokémon—an obsession unrelated to productive output or getting somewhere advantageous (material, monetary, social), unless that somewhere was the Elite Four—can overtake my life.
That yearning makes me wonder about many things. If, and when, will we be able to do absolutely nothing? If there is no other phase in our lives—aside from childhood—that is unbusy, then how do we begin to live a little less busy in the phases we have left? Is that nostalgia real in the first place? Is there something magical about thinking less, doing less and wanting less that is exclusive to being a kid?
Of course, as kids, we did do things and think things. We also wanted things, many things: dogs, dolls, Jim from the seventh grade and our high school mechanics teacher. We cried and went through our own traumas. It is not that we were these balls of bliss floating inside of life as if it were a bubble. Nostalgia itself can be considered a miracle born from self-selective memory, in which we idealize the past to construct coherent life narratives that protect us from trauma. It is our mind's means of mending over the ugly, the same way our bodies heal cuts and tears.
However, there is something else about this nostalgia that goes beyond selective memory. Even if I know that the bliss of childhood is a trick mirror, there is a hunch I have that things might make more sense—across the board—if I am able to access the mindset I had as a kid. If I am able to stop thinking about the future and outlining how to get there by erasing everything on my to-do list and playing a video game instead. It just feels like, as adults, we have been doing things, thinking things, and wanting things for too long. By looking at nostalgia in the eyes, I might learn something.
Sometimes, when I study the gigantic list of things I want, need, or get to do, I lose track of the plot. The story that all of these tasks tell me is muddled: what does buying antifungal cream have to do with writing a book? What does creating an Instagram Reel have to do with my day job? Nostalgia is not only a mechanism for healing past trauma but also a way of bridging the past with the present. By linking our past and present selves with the power of a memory—or more often, the residue of many—we create a bridge between the two, forming a continuity in our identities that helps us mitigate feelings of disconnect and overwhelm. In other words, nostalgia is nature’s remedy for existential anxiety.
Personally, this tracks. What interests me the most about Pokémon is not Pokémon itself. Rather, it is the idea of being able to pause life, to take a break from everything I think about as an adult and follow my infant instincts instead. To remember who I am and see the life in front of me. These infant instincts are almost always present-focused: stare at the sky, play a game, listen to your partner talk about what he wants to do to his hair for the seven hundredth time, because there is so much here in the present, so much color and joy and love, that it would be a shame to skip over it.
The art of skipping over is, in many ways, a survival mechanism. At a certain age, we learn to navigate life with a temporal compass—we learn that if we do X we will get to Y, or that in order to get to X we first need to reach W. Without the ability to plan and think ahead, society would rip us apart. Our temporal compass helps set ourselves up for success, however, I fear that many of us live with that compass on overdrive, spending more time in the process of getting from one place to another than we do in any one place itself.
Nostalgia helps us reconnect with the present. It helps us feel the fabric of life that is not stitched by a series of conditional to-do’s. It helps us notice what we might be nostalgic about when we are seventy looking back on thirty, or ninety looking back on seventy. It helps us experience things as they are—not as they might be or could be, based on what we do now.
If I am being honest with myself, I am writing all of this in response to the pressures of growing up. Next year I will no longer be in my twenties, and although that carries no implicit meaning, considering age is just a construct, society adores that construct, so I find myself with a handful of emotions in need of processing. Excitement, doubt and confusion. Insecurity, fear and hope.
There are only a few months left in the year, and these next few months will be busy: visitors, holidays and a big surprise I will share in the next newsletter (🥰). There are goals that I have yet to complete, like finishing the first draft of my book, that I expected to check off in 2024. There are others I have yet to complete, like becoming a published author, that I expected to check off by age 30. Although I understand, intellectually, that there is no such thing as being behind your own life, the anxiety I feel around these goals has led me to slot the majority of my free time this past week towards working on them, cramming my calendar into such a tight schedule that I am, no doubt, driving myself to the point of overwhelm, all in an attempt to catch up.
Catch up to who? To what? To where?
When I glance at Pikachu’s round face, I think about the plump little eight year old me that used to lay on the floor and play Pokémon Yellow for hours. I think about all of the little details I’d like to revisit, if only we could teleport back to a point in time and watch ourselves live, notice everything that life entailed. I think about how I will want to do the same thing when I am older, thinking back to now. How the only person I have to catch up to is myself, the person sitting here, writing this newsletter, looking at my partner, whom I realize I have projected my anxiety towards over the past few days. How I want to hug him and hold him, the same way I want to be hugged and held.
How the only place I have to get to is here. ☷
With love,
Your favorite capybara ~ AKA Travis Zane
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