Where does your interest in retro things come from?

[brentw]

Nostalgia definitely plays a role in my love of 80's-90's aesthetics.

But then, when I was a kid I really enjoyed the 50's aesthetic, which was way before I was born.
I liked watching reruns of 50's-60's TV shows. I loved 50's rock and roll, the look of 50's cars, etc.

And then later I became enamored with 20-30's art deco style.
The old pulps, radio dramas, and early comics of that era.
I just seem to enjoy old aesthetic styles in general.

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edit:

Just made an odd connection.

I love 80's aesthetics, that was the decade I was born in.
I love 50's aesthetics, my parents were born in the late 50's.
I love 30's aesthetics, my grandparents were born in the 30's.
I also like 1890's Americana (Think Red Dead Redemption 2.) and that's the decade my great grandparents were born in.

Weird. It's not like any of them were as obsessed with those years as I was, or kept things of that style/era around that might have influenced me.

 

[kriko313]

I wanted to write a long post, but I think I can sum it up in two sentences:
I find it soul crushing to be a victim of the current age. I want to do things that belong to other times.

 

[punishedgnome]

I'm 38, it's not retro stuff to me. I'm just into the same shit I've always been into and the world changed around me.

 

[Laonji]

I was born in the 2000s so by the time I could understand stuff I had missed the early internet and I wasn't alive during the 70s-90s so looking back at those times through music and art etc its really interesting. I also hate the modern world and the bland aesthetics, there turning everything into a airport and into flat squares, there doing it to my home town and now my college.

 

[hyprstorm]

I think my interest with retro stuff was because when I was younger my older brother would show me his nintendo 64 and we'd play starfox 64 on it. Eventually other family members started donating their old consoles and games, my dads coworker gave me his Gameboy along with a bunch of games with the little booklets. It was a pretty cool hobby for a while but I started to get disinterested in video games and more into music, which is what helped me find vaporwave which led me down a rabbit whole of a ton of new electronic genres I've never heard before. It could also be because of youtube videos and the fact that we never had the newest console growing up.

based n64 and gameboy player

 

[LincolnJames]

I'm 38, it's not retro stuff to me. I'm just into the same shit I've always been into and the world changed around me.

More or less my story too, though I was, for a period, very interested in the latest tech. It was such a leap forward from what I used (and could afford) that it was a real trip. Though it didn't take long for me to yearn for older tech.

 

[kswiss]

The retro asthetic just helps with me when navigating life, just right now. Found this forum bc of disovering the genre vaperwave specificly as some music I wanted to further listen to, and getting an account here to engage with others who have at least that in common with me was why I dig this

 

[Rikstah]

Is there a specific reason you're interested in retro media, old internet, or other retro content? Did your interest start with anything in particular?

I was born in the late 80s, I think its just getting older / living a more serious and settled life that makes you long for simpler times. The interest in retro stuff is really nostalgia the simpler times of youth.

We tend to muddle up the idea that the preceding decades were simpler when most of it is just the life stage we were at (being a young teen is a hell of alot simpler than making your way in the world post college). But then again, Gen Y were the last ones to observe the world going from analog to completely digital, in a way times really were simpler and more fun.

 

[cynthiune]

I wanted to write a long post, but I think I can sum it up in two sentences:
I find it soul crushing to be a victim of the current age. I want to do things that belong to other times.

this sums up my feelings pretty well. the trends and things now are so depressing to participate in. they are all fads, over in a month, or designed to get you to buy into something. absolutely exhausting to try to keep up with. plus, the communities that stick around them are usually distasteful in some way, either toxic as hell or just annoying people (not always but typically)

These posts kiiiind of answer it for me. I actually have zero interest in specifically retro things or nostalgia. I just think that so many modern iterations are legitimately worse than their predecesors. Windows XP for example is simply better than Windows 10 to me, so I use Windows XP instead. Luckily I don't do a lot of computer stuff and the games I like are old too. But I use a lot of older things almost exclusively for that one reason. Any other reasoning is covered above.

 

[LincolnJames]

I use Windows XP

 

[elia925-6]

Because some things before the outsource of production to China had better quality like cameras and last a lifetime compared to mass produced junk today.

 

[Andy Kaufman]

Being born into a poor family outside of america in the 90s I just happened to still experience a lot of the 80s and 90s stuff. Trends and tech took longer back then to go international and because we were poor we were usually behind on tech anyway (be it computers, internet or gaming consoles) so I already grew up 5-10 years behind the curve. Thus it just came naturally to me to appreciate older tech.

 

[Descarte Yee]

Old good, new bad; except I say that with all sincerity.

 

[deepfreeze]

I'm more interested in old hardware than media. It comes from the feeling that nothing works as well as it used to. Things are ostensibly more efficient but also fragile, disposable and proprietary. Everything from dishwashers to airline tickets are now just trojan horses for bizarre and predatory monetization schemes.

 

[VHSMARONITE]

To be honest, it was poverty. I grew up in semi-third world conditions, so the only "luxury devices" we could actually afford were usually 10-20 years obsolete. That, and I didn't get too much exposure to current-gen gaming outside of friends' houses. Books and library computer games were pretty much all I had. Most of the home media my family owned was old public domain cartoon collections and bargain bin DVDs from the early 2000s. My favorite cartoon channel was Boomerang, and I could only watch it at my grandma's, as she was the only one in my family that owned cable TV. I don't say this to garner sympathy, because I wouldn't have it any other way. My upbringing freed me from many of the traps that others in my generation fell into at an early age- and it gave me a significant appreciation for the old, obscure, and the forgotten. In a way, this appreciation for the customs and traditions of yesterday has been monumental in my rediscovery of my faith, and my appreciation for old media/tech.

 

[JihyoParkXX]

I like the retro future aesthetic. Somebody else probably stated it here somewhere, but the retro tech aesthetic does come in part from the designer's vision to create something that looks futuristic. Everyone was trying to outdo each other by incorporating more wild colors and designs that prioritize form rather than function.

Think about it, the 2077 of Cyberpunk that people in 2020 imagined looks the same as the 2019 of Blade Runner people in 1982 imagined. It's about a future we think it's cool to have rather than the one we're on track to have.

 

[CROWN_VICTORIA_VR-FOUR]

For me I think it's because as a little kid, I didn't interact with too many other kids, meaning I spent most of my days watching TV. I grew up in the 2000s, but most of what was on TV was reruns of movies and shows from the 80s and 90s, so to my 5 year old brain, the technology, music, and styles of that time became "what should be normal". I would even watch reruns of Seinfeld with my dad everyday after the news. On top of that, alot of elements from the 80s and 90s persisted into the 2000s, reinforcing my preconceived notions.

I think things changed around 2007-2008, I remember tape based media officially becoming obsolete, and alot of technology starting to go into the direction of minimalist white/black/gray boxes.

 

[PizzaW0lf]

My interest in retro stuff comes from the moments when I'm dissatisfied with things going on in the present.

Also I just really love analysing and learning history.

 

[remember_summer_days]

I'm not sure. I remember crying deeply even when I was a child about the passage of time, that one day I would have to leave my parents and that everyone I knew would die, I legit was like 8 when I started crying about such things. When I was like 12 I remember thinking about how the cartoons I watch and enjoyed are all irrelevant because they will be erased by the passage of time, and even then I had a feeling of nostalgia for stuff I've already seen.

I don't know why I got interested in vaporwavy stuff specifically, it just sort of clicked. I was starting my first year of college and well, I did not take college well. I was still somewhat depressed but mostly resentful. I think I got a youtube recommendation for the 'Remember Summer Days' vaporware compilation, ( which I just realized is my user name lol, I guess it stuck in my subconscious) and immediately fell in love with the aesthetics. It was a time when I found myself musing and feeling bad about how much I screwed up my high school life, I had a sense that my life was over and all that was not over was looking back on my past and feeling nostalgic about it. So thinking about my lost future. It was addicting really. I wanted to escape my reality so it was easy to romanticize 'better times' like the 80s. I guess a time when people in general had a sense that their life had a direction going for it.

But what I felt is nothing new and it's a usual feeling nowadays, both the far left and the far right have adopted 'retro' aesthetics as a sort of meme-war propaganda.

 

[jaedaen]

Because I'm fucking old.