Nowadays people have a lot of nostalgia for the 2000s and 2010s. There's this sense that we lost something nice, and that things aren't the way they were anymore. That the world is worse now. That life isn't as fun anymore.
Certainly, they are right. Our current society is heavily oriented toward productivity, and many things we used to enjoy have been corrupted by commercialization and cancerous corporate interests. Social media and biased news have deepened political divides, pulling us apart. Algorithms automatically feed either the lowest common denominator content optimized for attention and engagement, or only what it thinks would interest you, sequestering people into isolated enclaves with little intercultural communication. Constant streams of information about a declining economy, declining world, declining internet, declining mental health, and declining society, coupled with a culture of irony that cringes at taking things seriously, have convinced us that everything is doomed, and we might as well not kid ourselves into thinking we can change it. After all, everyone's in their own little bubble, their own isolated enclave; and so no one can truly have the answer.
How did we get here?
From a Spiral Dynamics standpoint, at first glance, it's easy to say "We started out in an Orange-dominant society from the 90s, with it flourishing in the 2000s, and then continuing on into the 2010s. It then began to grow out of control, developing cancerous tendencies; now in the 2020s, it has corrupted everything we used to love. It's a classic case of Orange gone awry." However, this is only part of the picture.
Consider stage Green. What characterizes Green? 'Connect with community to experience shared growth, get back to the human, reconnect with what makes life meaningful.' It's easy to say "Oh, we're talking about Hippies, environmentalists, matcha drinkers, and the political left". But what's not as obvious, and perhaps not as easy to accept, is the existence of Green outside of these stereotypes. However, this is exactly what is needed to understand modern nostalgia.
What did social media look like in the 2000s and early 2010s? There was Myspace, Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr, Facebook, YouTube. These sites were made with the desire to connect people from across vast distances. To strengthen community throughout global society. And at that they were largely successful. As a result of the internet boom, global culture blossomed into a flourishing community, creating fashion trends, influencing popular media, and enriching daily life. We were one big community, living in the moment, experiencing shared growth, and connecting with what made life meaningful. Life was genuinely fun.
The nostalgia today is directed precisely at this - one global community, living in the moment, connecting with what makes us human, and having fun. This is, by definition, solid color Green - not Orange.
Which leads to the ultimate picture: a genuine flourishing of Green across global culture was eventually hijacked by cancerous Orange tendencies that were able to fester out of control, corrupting the very technologies, media, popular ideas, and institutions that formed the structural backbone of the Green surge. The nostalgia we hold is for this surge of healthy Green, now dismantled by a malignant cancer of the Orange vMEME.
I will not get into an explanation of the Orange cancer here, nor what the path forward is. Those are topics for another day and require more nuance. However, we can nonetheless take away something significant from this explanation of modern nostalgia: what we truly yearn for is not a "return to childhood innocence", which by definition is impossible, but rather a true resurgence of global community and a reorientation of our lives toward the human, the meaningful, and the fun of the present moment.