I was at Costco yesterday, and noticed a strange pattern. In the book & DVD section, everything there that I was interested was just repackaged & complete/extended/special edition of things from my childhood. Calvin & Hobbes, Dilbert, All the Peanuts , Ruldolph & Frosty Christmas specials. Every MASH episode & the original movie, Get Smart (so not just my childhood, my parent's early adulthood too). If Grandpa was still alive, he could finally understand every possible reason behind the war that he survived.
This stuff is all on my Amazon wishlist, but I think there's something inherently insidious and distracting about all of it. Will my path to greater understanding and potential enlightenment be derailed by the continual consumerization of my past?
Do any of these products enable me to relive my past? And even if it did, doesn't that mean I'm no longer living in the present? No longer connected to my family and my daughter's development? And speaking of her, what will she be nostalgic for when she gets older? Her first iPhone?
Frank Zappa once said that the world will end not from any war, but from nostalgia. People will take two steps, miss the first one and be immobilized until they die.
