The Pain From An Old Wound

Nostalgia isn’t always fun and lighthearted

“In Greek, nostalgia literally means ‘The pain from an old wound.’ It’s a twinge in your heart far more powerful than memory alone.”

This is Mad Men’s Don Draper, delivering one of the more iconic monologues in television history as he pitches his advertising services to Kodak. In the process of trying to secure a new client for Sterling Cooper, Draper reveals what truly lies at the heart of nostalgia. While seemingly happy on the surface, it’s actually rooted in feelings of pain, yearning, and loss.

I’ve been thinking about this scene a lot as my wife rewatches The OC this summer. It’s one of her favorite shows of all time, but I’ve never seen it. I remember it premiering in 2003, at the beginning of my senior year of high school. But while a lot of girls in my grade were obsessed with The OC, I never paid it much attention. I was more interested in Chappelle’s Show.

Here’s a quick summary of the show for those who are unfamiliar. The OC is about a troubled teen named Ryan Atwood who is taken in by his rich public defender attorney, Sandy Cohen. Sandy and his wife Kirsten have a teen son, Seth, who becomes Ryan’s best friend. Marissa Cooper is the literal girl-next-door and Ryan’s love interest. Her best friend is Summer Roberts, who also happens to be Seth’s longtime unrequited crush. The show is about the lives of these four youths and the assorted characters that populate their world.

The plot lines range from standard teen soap opera fare (Who is taking who to the big dance) to the more dramatic (Ryan’s alcoholic mother dropping in and out of his life, Marissa’s dad being arrested for embezzlement, etc). All of the action takes place within the wealthy enclave of Orange County, California, the “OC” of the show's title. I don’t think anybody ever called Orange County “The OC” before this show, but that’s beside the point.

So as my wife cycles through episode after episode on Hulu while I read on the couch or tidy up around the apartment in my typical OCD manner, I’m taking it all in for the first time. I thought I’d be able to treat it like any other show she watches that I have no interest in: as background noise. Instead, I find myself drawn to the screen by the potent pull of nostalgia. But it’s not the whimsical kind, the “HEY GUYS, REMEMBER THE ORIGINAL GHOSTBUSTERS!?” nonsense our culture so often runs on these days. It’s the classic Greek version Don Draper spoke of. I see it and literally experience an acute pain in my chest.

Why am I feeling this way? How can I be nostalgic for a show I’ve never seen before? I believe it’s because what I’m feeling has nothing to do with the show itself. It’s about the age and memories the show is evoking within me. Like the Carousel slide projector Draper describes to Kodak, The OC is a time machine. I watch it and I’m suddenly back in 2003, sitting with the feelings I had and confronting the choices I made that defined the subsequent years of my life.

The first thing that stood out to me about The OC was the clothes. Since trends are cyclical, Y2K fashion is now back in style. But seeing Instagram models in 2025 wearing the fashions of my youth never feels quite right. It’s like watching a kid play dress up and pretending to be a doctor or a cashier. You can tell they’re aping something that they saw somewhere else. Obviously, there’s none of that on The OC. The actors weren’t dressed up in Y2K style, with choices made through the careful research of a costume department. They were simply dressed in the actual style of the time. This is something no modern nostalgia-bait TV show or movie set in the early aughts could replicate. I didn’t feel this same ache when I saw Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird, also set in 2003.

But I watch Ryan talk to Marissa at a party, a party that’s only happening because someone’s parents are out of town, and suddenly I remember exactly what it felt like to pine for a girl in low-rise jeans and an Abercrombie tank top. I’m no longer in 2025 New York, I’m in a classmate’s basement in suburban Virginia during the first Bush administration, trying to work up the nerve to talk to a girl while Ludacris plays in the background. I don’t have to go searching for these memories or feelings when I glimpse a scene from The OC. They arrive of their own volition, an intrusive thought that’s been hovering in the background for the better part of two decades.

It’s also been revelatory to look at the actors themselves on screen. When you’re a teenager watching a show about teenagers, the actors meant to be your age appear to you as fully grown adults. It kills some of the suspension of disbelief. Ben McKenzie and Adam Brody (Who played Ryan and Seth, respectively) were in their mid-twenties when The OC premiered. When you’re 17, 25 seems like a comically old age. You can’t conceptualize what being that old feels like. You’re not even in college yet. What frame of reference could you possibly have for post-grad life?

But watching it now, as a 39 year old man, the main characters look like actual children to me. When you’re almost 40, 25 and 17 don’t feel that far apart. It all gets lumped into the hazy era of your youth, before you assumed the mantle of serious adulthood and all of its attendant responsibilities (Mortgage, marriage, children, etc). So I watch The OC now, and while I see a 25-year-old on screen, I can buy the fact that I might be looking at a high schooler. Because of that, I see my teenage self reflected in (Or perhaps refracted through?) these characters. It draws me into the show and makes these evocative memories more resonant.

However, the true nostalgic trigger point of The OC isn’t the fashion or the narratives built around teen drama. It’s not even the SD picture quality, which brings back memories of watching TV on a glass tube instead of a 4K LED screen. What really hits home for me is the entire existence of Seth Cohen as a character. I see him, and I feel like I’m looking through a portal to a version of myself from an alternate timeline.

Back in high school, I thought of myself as an athlete. Or, more accurately, “athlete” is the personality type I attempted to construct for myself. I wanted girls to like me and find me desirable, so I built my identity around my spot on the football team. Never mind the fact that I wasn’t a very good player. I never even started one single game. I was just tall and I tried hard, and that was enough to keep me in the playing rotation on the defensive line. But I thought this was the only way I could get girls. My friends were great athletes, and they always had female attention, therefore I had to be an athlete if I wanted girls to look my way. The problem was, I don’t have a jock’s personality. I’m not tough, and I’m certainly not a cool guy. I’m a goofy dork with esoteric interests. In other words, I’m Seth Cohen.

When we first meet Seth, he’s in his pajamas, sitting on the floor of his parents’ house playing video games. It’s an image that made me laugh out loud when I saw it, because that was a position I frequently found myself in while I was in high school. Freshman year, I didn’t have a date for Homecoming. I didn’t even really know what Homecoming was, or that we were expected to secure dates to it. So I just stayed home and played the recently released Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2. I won’t lie, it was a pretty fun night.

As we get to know Seth, we learn that he loves sci-fi, indie rock, reading, and is constantly at war with his own self-consciousness. You can put a check mark next to all of those things for teenage me as well (Adult me still loves sci-fi, indie rock, and reading. Thankfully, I’ve managed to get my self-consciousness under control).

But here’s what’s so cool about Seth. He doesn’t run from these things. He leans into them. He fully embraces who he is and doesn’t try to act a certain way because it works for other guys. If he attempted to play the same bad boy role that Ryan does, he knows it would ring hollow. Instead, he confidently moves through the world as his sensitive, dorky self, and it works out for him. It only takes a handful of episodes for him to get close to Summer and kiss her for the first time. His self-awareness and sense of humor end up paying huge dividends.

As I watched Seth Cohen on my TV screen, one thought came to my mind:

“I could have easily been this kind of guy in high school.”

That would have been a much more accurate reflection of my real personality than the version I chose to adopt. I would have felt more comfortable in my own skin, and probably would have been more effective in my end goal of making girls look my way. I mean, that’s what worked for Seth, right? He stayed true to himself and he ultimately got the girl. I, on the other hand, pretended to be someone I wasn’t for the benefit of others and still ended up falling flat on my face. It was the worst of both worlds. If I had watched The OC senior year and picked up on Seth as a potential mimetic model, the next five or so years of my life might have gone much differently.

I say the next five years because my assumed personality as a wannabe athlete didn’t end in high school. I actually stuck with football throughout all four years of college as well. The full story is too long to get into (You can read a post with all of the details here), but the short of it is that I doubled down on football even though it wasn’t inherent to who I truly was. I loved the sense of striving that came with football, but I was not built for the game at all, either physically or mentally.

If I had to do it all over again, I would definitely still play football in high school. I had too much fun and made too many great memories with my friends to give that up. It also helped me cultivate a sense of discipline, without which I’d be lost. I wouldn’t make football the central part of my personality, but I would still choose to put on the pads. The answer as to whether or not I would still pursue football in college, however, is much less clear.

I don’t regret my college football experience per se, but with the benefit of hindsight I can see that I was out of my element and might have been better served taking a different path. I’m clearly someone who has an intense passion for the arts, and it might have helped to cultivate that part of myself earlier rather than spending my college years getting physically demolished and emasculated on a near daily basis. It certainly would have helped my self-esteem to dive into something I had a genuine passion and aptitude for in the middle of an extremely formative time.

I’m confident the end point would be the same. I still would have come to New York to pursue stand-up comedy. That dream had been in my heart ever since I watched Seinfeld for the first time at ten years old. But the path I took to get there would be different, and probably more enjoyable, than what I ended up subjecting myself to.

That’s what my OC-inspired nostalgia is really about, the old wound that’s being re-opened. I’m forced to look at an inflection point in my life and see a potential divergent path, one where I could have lived more authentically at an earlier age. I hear the theme song’s opening piano chords and I wonder what might have been if I had allowed my true Seth Cohen nature to come to the forefront instead of attempting to be someone I wasn’t. Maybe things would have been easier, or more fun, or I’d emerge from it with a clearer sense of self. Because this all exists within my imagination, the possibilities are endless.

However, I know there’s no going back. It’s interesting to think about, but you can’t change the past. There’s no point in dwelling on it. So I press play on the next episode, and keep moving forward.