What if I wanted this?

The older I get the more I realize that as people get older they witness changes and pine for the good old days. It’s cliche for a reason, because it seems nearly universal. I get it. Things aren’t what they used to be. Younger generations than me (and they are plural at this point) have a language and experience that I cannot be a part of. I occasionally break through with folks where we are enjoined in common cause, like in our supporter-owned football club, or in some of the workshops and courses I deliver. But mostly, I can my peers living in increasingly agitated nostalgia. Things are not as good as they were before.

Is this the default setting? Nostalgia is practically a genre in art, culture, and fashion. But what is it called when a person of middle or advanced age writes or paints or composes about how THIS moment is amazing. How things that he or she wanted in the past have finally come to fruition and the new people in the world and teethings they are making and the places they are building or protecting are awesome? I remember when I got my first iPhone. It was like a childhood dream come true. Finally, the device of my dreams was here in my lifetime! I made the above image the lock screen. If you know, you know.

It’s not a pollyanna-ish sentiment I’m after. It’s not a carpe diem, or affirmation-based gratitude practice. There isn’t a word for it in English, which is why I’m reaching. Is there art to be made that features characters who grow old feeling like their experiences are the ones they have been hoping to have, that the demographics and the culture and the things that are happening are what they wanted all along?

There is a lack of this, eh? We all pine for a future we can’t have yet, an alternative we will never have, or a past that is gone. It’s hard to listen for the good things in the present in the monotonous moan of complaint in all that.

(Yes there is suffering. There always was. The “good old days” my generation pine for featured apartheid in South Africa, death squads in Central America, a hole burning in the ozone layer, residential schools in Canada, acid rain, and famine. I’m not naive.)