Really enjoyed this. Beautifully articulated re: why some forms of nostalgia really hit you vs. the manufactured nostalgia that seems to be everywhere but rings hollow
Beautifully done, Peter. Few if any of us can scrutinize our adolescence "if only I had acted differently, more truly . . . " A sense of having been false to oneself, and therefore others, is tough. Several of my own regrets, substantively rather trivial, hinge on this sense of being false.
And the football essay that you linked, which I read when you posted it, is fantastic. Highly recommended.
Thanks. I know I’m not the only one who had this experience. High school is all about trying on different personalities. Sometimes it takes a few attempts to get it right.
I haven’t finished reading yet—very compelling so far though—but I have trivia!! There’s a word for nostalgia for a time you never experienced: anemoia. I feel it (but honestly the happy kind, not the Don Draper kind) when I watch Dazed and Confused.
I am going to be brutally honest man, this is a good heartfelt article that spirals headfirst into the ground at the end. I'm mid-30s, mortgage, two kids, and I was really with you through the first half of the article; I often have that same kind of nostalgia when I'm exposed to early-mid 00s teen media; but I really feel compelled to correct the pivot point of the article for you -- leaning into the sensitive nerdy shit wouldn't have worked either, or would have worked only equally well at best.
You can't compare your actual real life to a fuckin' OC character arc. Ridiculous notion. You weren't getting unlimited female attention because you were awkward, underdeveloped, not that impressive -- in short a normal teenage dude. It sounds like you were (as a whole package, being tall, a not-awful football player, and able to write this essay) probably even a good distance above the median teenage dude.
I was basically the nerdy scifi indie rock sort of guy in highschool, and pretty tall, and not impossibly spaghetti-spilling autistic, and ... well, it just went down pretty normally. I had friends, I had fun, I was awkward a lot, I ended up with a pretty cool gf for most of my senior year that went nowhere pretty soon after, and... well, it was just about normal. College was a very similar experience. It was part of becoming who I am today, and all that stuff, and maybe by the time I was 26 I was a real person.
But there's no special cheat code that unlocks "your life would have been an OC character and you would have been a cool enigmatic nerd if only you'd been ~~~tRuE tO yOuRsElF~~~
To restate my thesis, very silly to derive nostalgia from drawing life counterfactuals from OC narrative arcs.
I’m not necessarily saying I needed to actually be like Seth Cohen, but I needed to stop trying to be like my friends and more like myself, which was more in line with a character like Seth.
I do believe that people can read when you’re putting on a front, even if it’s only on a subconscious level. I think that if I had just behaved a little more naturally, I probably would have had high school dating experiences that were closer to my peers (Having a girlfriend, going on real dates, occasionally hooking up at parties) instead of what actually happened, where absolutely none of that entered into the picture.
Really enjoyed this. Beautifully articulated re: why some forms of nostalgia really hit you vs. the manufactured nostalgia that seems to be everywhere but rings hollow
Thanks! Did not expect the former to come from a Fox teen soap opera from 20+ years ago.
Beautifully done, Peter. Few if any of us can scrutinize our adolescence "if only I had acted differently, more truly . . . " A sense of having been false to oneself, and therefore others, is tough. Several of my own regrets, substantively rather trivial, hinge on this sense of being false.
And the football essay that you linked, which I read when you posted it, is fantastic. Highly recommended.
Keep up the good work.
Thanks. I know I’m not the only one who had this experience. High school is all about trying on different personalities. Sometimes it takes a few attempts to get it right.
I haven’t finished reading yet—very compelling so far though—but I have trivia!! There’s a word for nostalgia for a time you never experienced: anemoia. I feel it (but honestly the happy kind, not the Don Draper kind) when I watch Dazed and Confused.
Back when there were no cell phones and the weed wasn't psychosis-inducing
I am going to be brutally honest man, this is a good heartfelt article that spirals headfirst into the ground at the end. I'm mid-30s, mortgage, two kids, and I was really with you through the first half of the article; I often have that same kind of nostalgia when I'm exposed to early-mid 00s teen media; but I really feel compelled to correct the pivot point of the article for you -- leaning into the sensitive nerdy shit wouldn't have worked either, or would have worked only equally well at best.
You can't compare your actual real life to a fuckin' OC character arc. Ridiculous notion. You weren't getting unlimited female attention because you were awkward, underdeveloped, not that impressive -- in short a normal teenage dude. It sounds like you were (as a whole package, being tall, a not-awful football player, and able to write this essay) probably even a good distance above the median teenage dude.
I was basically the nerdy scifi indie rock sort of guy in highschool, and pretty tall, and not impossibly spaghetti-spilling autistic, and ... well, it just went down pretty normally. I had friends, I had fun, I was awkward a lot, I ended up with a pretty cool gf for most of my senior year that went nowhere pretty soon after, and... well, it was just about normal. College was a very similar experience. It was part of becoming who I am today, and all that stuff, and maybe by the time I was 26 I was a real person.
But there's no special cheat code that unlocks "your life would have been an OC character and you would have been a cool enigmatic nerd if only you'd been ~~~tRuE tO yOuRsElF~~~
To restate my thesis, very silly to derive nostalgia from drawing life counterfactuals from OC narrative arcs.
I’m not necessarily saying I needed to actually be like Seth Cohen, but I needed to stop trying to be like my friends and more like myself, which was more in line with a character like Seth.
I do believe that people can read when you’re putting on a front, even if it’s only on a subconscious level. I think that if I had just behaved a little more naturally, I probably would have had high school dating experiences that were closer to my peers (Having a girlfriend, going on real dates, occasionally hooking up at parties) instead of what actually happened, where absolutely none of that entered into the picture.