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The Nostalgia Market
Today when we think about nostalgia, it evokes the feeling of a warm blanket. Perhaps one lightly sprinkled with melancholy.
But when the term was first coined by Swiss physician Johannes Hofer back in 1688, it was considered a disease. It comes from the Greek words nostos (homecoming) and algos (pain) and was treatest as an epidemic.
"French doctor Jourdan Le Cointe thought nostalgia should be treated by "inciting pain and terror."
Among the many treatments for this “psychopathological disorder” was the use of leeches, hypnotism, and some good old fashion shaming.
We’ve come a long way since then. Instead of a condition in need of dire treatment, nostalgia is now a lucrative business for marketers looking to capitalize on the rose-tinted glasses applied to the past.
The nostalgia business trots out TV remakes with middle age child stars and spawns social media accounts devoted to pictures of the ‘good old days’ all based on the premise that nostalgia has been shown to weaken one’s desire for money, making them more likely to part with their cash in pursuit of that neverending quest to reclaim their youth.
With the rise of the collectibles industry in recent years, flush with record prices and splashy headlines, there’s no argument that nostalgia is the most powerful force in all of collecting. No other emotion could cause grown adults to pay millions for trading cards, sneakers, or video games from their childhood.
It’s all about one thing: Recapturing memories.
In plenty of cases, these are aspirational pieces that they couldn’t afford as a kid, making it all the more important that decades later collectors can do their past-selves proud by finally snagging a cultural representation of an era.
The thing about nostalgia, however, is that it’s a moving target. Video games I consider nostalgic as a 23-year-old (MVP Baseball 2005 is the greatest sports game of all time) isn’t even on the radar of a 40-year-old who grew up playing NES.
It might seem as though nostalgia is incalculable, an emotion unique to each and every one of us. And while that’s certainly true — it all depends on your preferences — we can actually point to specific times in life that generate the strongest feelings of nostalgia.
A Danish study describing the “reminiscence bump” explains the out-sized real estate our memories from young adulthood take up in our minds compared to the rest of our lives. Other scientists have found that this bump aligns with key periods of life during which we begin to discover our identities and conceptualize our own self-image.
Hollywood is well aware of this phenomenon and uses it to inform their strategies surrounding movie remakes. By remaking beloved films 20-40 years after their original release, audiences are hit right in the sweet spot. The same kids who fell in love with Top Gun in 1986 are now adults with disposable income. Same goes for the Beavis and Butt-Head movie, which comes 24 years after the MTV show.
Slate wrote a great piece on the ways in which music from your teenage years is destined to remain your favorite.
“Music lights these sparks of neural activity in everybody. But in young people, the spark turns into a fireworks show. Between the ages of 12 and 22, our brains undergo rapid neurological development—and the music we love during that decade seems to get wired into our lobes for good. When we make neural connections to a song, we also create a strong memory trace that becomes laden with heightened emotion, thanks partly to a surfeit of pubertal growth hormones. These hormones tell our brains that everything is incredibly important—especially the songs that form the soundtrack to our teenage dreams (and embarrassments).”
Using this benchmark, the tides of the collectibles market come into focus. Collecting vintage ‘80s video games has been one of the largest categories to emerge recently — lining up perfectly with the reminiscence bump. The kids of the ‘80s are all grown up and running the world… and plenty of them have the disposable income that comes along with it. Just like a movie remake, the decades-long gap has allowed for adequate nostalgia buildup and led to a boom in the market.
The same can be said for sneakers — the big money is coming from adults who have carried around the memory of early Air Jordan commercials for decades. Going down the line, from comics to action figures and even VHS tapes, there’s no doubting the lasting effect of the cultural imprint period on consumer behavior for the remainder of their lives.
Taking all of this into account, I’m going to start saving up for whatever Tik Tok-based collectibles the kids of today will be returning for in a few decades.