Forum post dismantles nostalgia for the 80s, 90s and 2000s: 'Years of rot'

Nostalgia for the 80s, 90s and 2000s: myth and business

Nostalgia is a lucrative business. And the eighties, nineties and noughties are its star product. A recent post on a forum made it clear: "The past was always better," it said, before going on to list a series of miseries that kill any desire to feel nostalgic. The discussion that trinc —with defenders of the Francoist legacy, Movida nostalgics and textbook sceptics— paints an uncomfortable picture of how we build collective memory. Because the problem is not fondly remembering an era. The problem is turning that memory into a political and economic narrative that does not stand up to even the slightest data-based scrutiny.

The myth of prosperous 1970s Spain

The first trap of nostalgia is the cut-off date. For some participants, the seventies were the last bastion of decency before the decline. "The good years were the 70s," one sums up. Another goes further and claims the eighties and nineties were nothing more than a transition between prosperous 1970s Spain and today's wasteland. It is a thesis that collapses on its own: the seventies in Spain were anything but prosperous. The 1973 oil crisis wiped out growth, and the country carried an industrial and energy dependence that left it at the mercy of any external shock. "Prosperous 1970s Spain" is an invention of those who confuse late-stage development economics with widespread wellbeing.

What the seventies did have was a dictatorship. And a censorship system that prevented calling things by their name. Idealising that decade is not an exercise in memory, it is an exercise in selective amnesia.

The data that dismantles the eighties paradise

The list of problems attributed to the decades from 1980 to 2010 is long: ETA terrorism, economic crisis, drugs, trash TV, educational decline. It is no exaggeration. ETA killed more than 800 people between 1968 and 2010. Heroin wreaked havoc on entire neighbourhoods during the eighties and early nineties. The LOGSE (Spain's 1990 education reform law) was passed in 1990 and its implementation coincided with a rise in early school dropout that took Spain two decades to correct. The 1993 crisis was brutal, with an unemployment rate above 20%. And 2008 was the final blow.

Was that paradise? It depends for whom. For those with a stable job and a paid-off home, probably yes. For those left by the roadside, not so much.

Nostalgia as a consumer product

There is a detail that gets overlooked in almost every discussion about nostalgia: the industry that manufactures it. TV series, music, fashion and even advertising have spent years selling the eighties and nineties as a theme park. It is no coincidence. It is a market. And like any market, it selects what sells and discards what does not.

What does not sell is heroin. Or unemployment. Or street violence. Or the job insecurity of the throwaway contracts that began to become widespread in the nineties. Nostalgia is a filter. And like any filter, it distorts.

The future will be idealised too

The interesting question is not why we idealise the past, but why we are unable to see the present with the same indulgence. One participant noted with a smirk: "In a couple of decades people will idealise these years." And they are probably right. Nostalgia is an anthropological constant. What changes is the object of nostalgia.

What does not change is the political use made of it. Turning a decade into a lost paradise is the most effective way to delegitimise the present. And, along the way, to sell a narrative that almost never matches the data.

Nostalgia is not memory. It is marketing with a soundtrack.