Doomed to nostalgia

A sizeable chunk of my Thanksgiving break was spent in the family minivan, traveling with my parents to visit my brother and sister-in-law in Columbia, Mo. \nTo help while away the long hours, we listened to the CD version of Bill Bryson's memoir of his childhood in the 1950s "The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid: A Memoir." The book wasn't bad -- some parts were more amusing than others -- but above all, it reinforced my impression that no generation has been so prone to nostalgia as the baby boomers. Sure, people always romanticize the past, but did past generations spend nearly as much time waxing rhapsodically about their childhood snack foods, for example? Bryson, to his credit, doesn't ignore the dark side of the '50s, yet he cannot avoid the conclusion that those days were happier, more hopeful, more genuine, more innocent than our present. I'm not entirely convinced -- but then again, I wasn't there.\nIt did get me wondering, though, whether in 30 or 40 years our generation (or, perhaps, "your and my generations," depending on who's doing the categorizing) will be similarly infected with the nostalgia bug. And I don't mean simply talking about the past -- VH1's ridiculously popular "I Love The (Decade)" shows are about kitsch rather than nostalgia. I mean longing for some (real or imagined) golden time in our earlier lives. Will we ever say, "Ah, the '80s/'90s/naughts, those were the good old days"?\nAccording to research on nostalgia in the fields of advertising and marketing, the answer appears to be yes. A 2004 Journal of Advertising study by Darrel Muehling and David Sprott found that, based on a survey of 159 undergraduates ages 18 to 35, "personal thought patterns are, indeed, inspired among those presented with an ad containing nostalgic cues ... (and) that those who experienced nostalgic thoughts tended to exhibit more favorable attitudes toward the advertised brand than those who did not," according to a Nov. 30, 2005, Washington State University news release. \nBut why? In a 2003 Journal of Consumer Behavior article, Morris Holbrook and Robert Schindler suggest that "via a process called nostalgic bonding, a consumer's history of personal interaction with a product during a critical period of preference formation that occurs roughly in the vicinity of age 20 (give or take a few years in either direction) can create a lifelong preference for that object."\nThus, like some tragic genetic disease, it is only a matter of time before nostalgia is bound to manifest itself -- to grab hold of you and make you soft on whatever junk was around at age 20. Holbrook and Schindler particularly highlight movies, movie stars, fashions and music. So for you youngsters out there -- freshmen and sophomores, mostly -- be prepared to get misty-eyed over James Blunt, the Black Eyed Peas' "My Humps" and Webstar and Young B.'s unspeakably awful "Chicken Noodle Soup." \nOf course I can make fun of you -- music was so much better when I was a kid.