46 Pics From The 1980s To Give You A Break From How Overwhelming Life Feels Now

Nostalgia, like most things in life, has its fair share of pros and cons. Longing for the past can be very healthy in moderation. On the positive end of things, it can empower you, lift your spirits, remind you of your values and roots, and give you resilience to face the challenges you face today.

In short, nostalgia can be a source of optimism, motivation, creativity, and even a way to socially connect with others.

However, if left unmonitored and unmanged, over-the-top sentimentalism can slowly consume your days and reduce the overall quality of your life in the present. You risk ignoring the positive relationships you could build and the opportunities you could take advantage of in the present because you’re so focused on the past.

As WebMD warns, if you let nostalgia take over and spend too much time reliving your ‘glory days,’ you might find it difficult to appreciate what you currently have in life.

So, it’s vital that you remember to keep your grip on the present and have at least a bit of optimism about the future.

A lot of different things, not just the totally awesome pics we’ve curated for you here, can trigger a wave of nostalgia. You can start feeling sentimental when you look through old photos, watch home videos, talk with your family or friends about the past, or approach anniversaries for important events like your graduation, birthday, or wedding.

Broadly speaking, there are two main categories of nostalgia: historical and personal. The former means that you’re probably dissatisfied with the present, and so, you’re yearning for a time in the past when society was different.

You might even yearn for a past that you never actually experienced. This is known as anemoia. For instance, some folks who were born much later than the 1980s might feel nostalgic about the decade just looking at these images.

On the flip side, personal nostalgia is fairly self-explanatory. It revolves around you revisiting your personal memories and the moments from your own life.

It sometimes feels like people are becoming nostalgic about more and more recent periods of history, without waiting for decades to pass. For instance, some young individuals genuinely miss the recent pandemic lockdowns, a time that, for many of us, was extremely stressful and full of fear and confusion. In the midst of the global panic, life ground to a halt.

“There was a simplicity to life. All of a sudden, you have no choice but to be where you are,” Toronto-based urban geographer Daniel Rotsztain told WebMD. The sense of togetherness and simplicity, however, quickly devolved into pandemic fatigue for many.

However, nostalgia can be useful in processing trauma.

According to Krystine Batcho, PhD, a professor of psychology at Le Moyne College, nostalgia can help people process and move on from traumatic experiences, like the pandemic.

“Nostalgia, the personal kind, has been associated with very healthy aspects of well-being such as empathy, compassion, forgiveness, social connectedness, belonging … anxiety reduction, continuity of self, [and] optimism,” she explained to WebMD.

Batcho told WebMD that nostalgia plays a role in maintaining emotional stability when you have to deal with conflicted emotional states. For instance, revisiting positive memories can counterbalance negative feelings.

“Nostalgia is an excellent choice for that. Because, by definition, it is itself bittersweet. And so, it’s one of the few parts of the way our brain and our mind function that tries to blend, or put together, conflicting forces, in this case, emotions.”

Meanwhile, Yağmur Karakaya, PhD, assistant professor of sociology at Yale University, pointed out to WebMD that memory is “extremely malleable.” And so, different groups of people experience events differently and can have different interpretive memories of the same events.

And so, you have some people who miss the lockdowns without work or studies, where they could binge-watch TV shows, play video games, exercise, or pick up random hobbies. In the meantime, others remember this period of time as deeply traumatic. On the other hand, you might feel nostalgia for your ability to weather any storm.

“Adversity in itself, while you’re going through it, can be an extremely negative, stressful experience. But if you come out the other end as a survivor, then, later in life, you look back at that longingly. Not for the adversity itself, but for the fact that you’ve overcome it,” Batcho mused.

The ‘OldSchool80s’ account on X (formerly Twitter) has been around since April 2009. Throughout the years, it has amassed a huge following of more than 301k internet users on the social network. According to the curator of the project, all of the pop culture reminders are “not meant to make you feel old.” The focus is on “just awesome nostalgia.”

The cool thing about the project, at least from our perspective, is that the curator posts images in their feed on the same day that they were published back in the 1980s. So, even when there’s a gulf spanning a few decades between us here and now in the 2020s and the 1980s, you can still feel a connection to the pop culture reminders, no matter if you’re freezing in February or looking to cool down in July.

Now, we’re turning the discussion over to you, dear Pandas. Which of these images made you the most nostalgic for your childhood or youth, and why? What do you think was the best thing about the 1980s, and what do you miss the most?

Do you think that life really was simpler in the past, or is it just nostalgia talking? Meanwhile, what do you do to make the most of your life in the 2020s, despite everything that’s going on in the world? Tell us what you think in the comments at the very bottom of this list.