The Rot of Nostalgia
I’ve finished watching Pluto recently, and while the show only touches on human memory as a comparison point to that of a robot’s, it nevertheless made me think of the effect it has on the human experience.
The show presents robotic memory as completely perfect: not only is it free from the data rot of real life data storage devices, it also doesn’t have the same quirks as human memory. They have none of the lapses that the human brain has, none of the automatic sorting and distorting of our experiences that turn them into impressions rather than recreations.
The robots in the show don’t reminisce in the same way humans do. Some have their unpleasant memories erased, whether voluntary or not, and these deleted memories sometimes resurface hazily in the minds of some of the more advanced robots. These hazy, imperfect memories are probably the closest the robots get to how humans experience memory, but they never become sentimental in the same way we do. Is this an advantage they have over us humans, or do they suffer more because they don’t have the coping mechanism we were all born with: nostalgia?
The show never answers this because it isn’t really as important as the other questions it presents us—there is more to the shared experience of humans and robots than just the workings of their memory (there is also a mysterious killer robot that they have to deal with so urgency might have expedited the answering of these questions). But I got hung up on it anyway, especially because nostalgia has become something of a looming presence in this modern age that no one seems to want to live in.
Humans are creatures burdened with long memories. Memories held long enough wear away, like a cliff face slowly eroding to the crashing of waves below, leaving only the pleasant parts for us to reminisce, or the sharp edges that we keep to remind us of hardships surmounted and the pride that comes with that. Nostalgia, one could say, is memory as an affliction, the process in which memory becomes emotion rather than raw, perfect data.
I've long thought of nostalgia as a largely negative, poisonous emotion. It’s a sibling to desire and longing, to feelings that fester within you when you have no way to resolve them. Nostalgia is especially sinister because it is so potent, ripe for exploitation. There’s the elephant in the room, fascism, an ideology that is built on the bedrock of nostalgia, on an imagined past of glories and prosperity that act as a veil to a wicked fear of change.
We see our loved ones or even ourselves fall victim to spirals of bittersweet reminiscence and regret. Like many diseases, our susceptibility to it increases with age.
Nostalgia as a corrupting force is prevalent enough to be a common theme in fiction (is it bad that I immediately thought of Emet-Selch from Final Fantasy XIV instead of some other, more literary guy?), those wracked with nostalgia often cast as villains, eternal tragedians, or simply people stuck on a moment like a broken record.
The use of nostalgia isn’t always so dramatic, of course. Nostalgia is used in anything that involves money—so everywhere, really. Advertising, music, fashion, film and of course, games. My God do video games weaponize nostalgia. For as young as video gaming is as a medium, its use of nostalgia is so autocannibalistic that the snake in ouroboros might feel self-conscious.
As much as I rag on nostalgia, I realize that my own allergy to it isn’t the healthiest thing in the world. My avoidance to nostalgia is akin to how so-called stoics try to to detach themselves from passion—it’s in part a way for me to avoid being hurt by feelings I have no control over, instead of having to face it. You might find the arguments I outlined against nostalgia to be perfectly reasonable, but they don’t show the whole picture. To me, just thinking about the past hurts.
When I discarded my feelings of nostalgia, I threw my memories away with it. I have vaulted away a lot of my past and left it to gather dust as I moved on with my life, and I found myself forgetting so many things that should be precious to me. Maybe I haven’t even really forgotten them—I’m just too afraid to face a past where I felt more bitter and alone. This isn’t really any better than being wracked by nostalgia, I’m just running away from my memories.
“Ang hindi marunong lumingon sa pinanggalingan ay hindi makararating sa paroroonan,” is a Tagalog proverb, one often attributed to our national hero Jose Rizal (but I have my doubts; I can’t really find a good source). It translates to “those who do not know how to look back to where they came from will never reach their destination,” and I find some nuance in this old cliche that, growing up, just sort of passed through my system.
I understand now that the proverb is about the value of facing your past with clear eyes, neither turning away from it nor captivated by its glow. One has to glean the truth from the past, reverse the rot of nostalgia, to truly move forward.
The hard work of examining the past with a clear-eyed view isn’t something that comes naturally to people, though—we have an entire profession of people who do that and we don’t even respect them at the best of times. Still, it has to be done, and if you need a little courage to face your own past, just know that the alternative is another remaster of your favorite game from childhood, forever, a little worse each time.