Nostalgia & GEN-Z
Yesterday/
Love was such an easy game to play/
Now I need a place to hide away/
Oh, I believe in yesterday//
(Paul McCartney, THE BEATLES)
GenZ refers to all those young people emerging into adulthood over the last 10 years who were born between about 1995 and 2012. 1995 offers a great starting date for this cohort of humans because in that year the Internet was made public, democratised, and commercialised. This is a generation that has never not known the Internet, “wired” experience, and the human merger with portable devices like the iPhone. This has led to one expert opining: “Apple owns adolescence.”
One feature of GenZ that requires some observing and explaining, however, is their turn toward what can only be called a cultural nostalgia for the analogue over the digital.
What is nostalgia?
Nostalgia is defined as:
“…a wistful desire to return in thought or in fact to a former time in one's life, to one's home or homeland, or to one's family and friends; a sentimental yearning for the happiness of a former place or time” (Dictionary.com)
The first formal study of nostalgia, as distinct from general homesickness, is widely attributed to Swiss or Alsatian physician Johannes Hofer in 1688. Hofer coined the term “nostalgia” from the Greek word nostos, ‘the desire to return home,’ in order to describe a medical condition experienced by Swiss mercenary soldiers serving abroad. He characterized them as having a persistent sickening longing for their home and homeland. Hofer was borrowing an old Greek idea (the νόστος), which primarily refers to the journey home from war, particularly from the Trojan War. Nostos, return home, is the central theme of the great Greek writer Homer’s story of The Odyssey, which retells the hero Odysseus’ eventful journey from the Trojan War to his beloved home in Ithaca, Greece.
Amongst GenZ’s expressions of nostalgia suggest a kind of spiritual longing for a simpler, happier time when life did not appear so complex, confusing, fraught, and anxious. We may really be witnessing a spiritual expression of homelessness translated into a time, a time before their digital native culture existed. But it is nonetheless a deep spiritual yearning.
Nostalgia for old products
Vinyl albums – in GearNews.com I read: “Vinyl is Back in 2025 – And it’s All Thanks to Generation Z!”
GearNews tells us that for GenZ, 80 percent of those surveyed own an analogue record-player, and purchasing old analogue products like vinyl albums is just a cultural detoxing:
“For 50 percent of these young [GenZ] vinyl fans, their enthusiasm for an analog and physical medium is a kind of ‘digital detox’.”
The article adds: “For today’s 15- to 29-year-olds, vinyl is back.”
The return of the vinyl LP record that we grew up with stands for a return to analogue in a fast-paced incomprehensible digital world. It represents a form of escape and an attempt to return to home.
“More than 2,500 people in the United States, England and Germany were interviewed for the study. The results show that up to 76 percent of Generation Z regularly buy records at least once a month. And 29 percent consider themselves to be serious collectors.”
80s & 90s music in the shower
I have been shocked to live with GenZs myself. My middle and youngest sons respectively still live with us. I am always surprised when they jump in the shower and the tunes are turned on loud …. and they are playing the music of the 80s and 90s, from my era! (I feel like shouting: “Get your own music”).
Dumb Phones
There is also a trend toward slowing down which maps onto desiring different kinds of products that remember a time that was less “digital”, with some switching to stripped-down devices without Apps…. Nokia the phone company has responded and now positions itself as the “dumbphone maker”.
What does this mean?
What are GenZ feeling? Why are they nostalgic for a near past and its less than digital objects?
Actually, from a theological standpoint, they are very truthfully showing us some of the things wrong with contemporary culture, and why they feel they can’t find a home here. They are showing us what it is like to live through cultural decline in the West, how it feels to come to adulthood in a place experiencing the loss of common and agreed standards of beauty, truth, and goodness, and in a culture that can’t explain the potential for individual transformation and hope. Their soul-nostalgia might just be a sign that the old question – Can humans live without God? – finds an answer through them. No.
Where do you turn if you’re worried you are living through a Zombie apocalypse? You try to return home safely – to simpler, happier times. In other words, what GenZ nostalgia might show us is that our “digital natives,” our children and grandchildren, are trying to return to an analogue world that was slower and more predictable.
What’s this finally all about for us?
We must recognise what this kind of nostalgia represents: What GenZ are really looking for is a spiritual home, a culture into which they can fit and find a secure place of comfort and freedom from worry. That means they truly are spiritually soul-searching.
Barna research tells us GenZ is the most spiritually “open” generation ever. Our children and grandchildren are an open mission field waiting for us to remind them of simpler times and places when God and truth were more fundamentally accessible. They are telling us their digital devices are neither making them happier nor healthier, only more desperately anxious.
And their nostalgia says they are looking for a true spiritual home. This nostalgic yearning ought to be a wakeup call for churches especially. Time to break the bread of the real! Time to focus on relationship and community. Time to combat isolation and loneliness with love and group activity. Time to be much more public about Jesus and what he can do for any soul who is honestly searching.
— Craig Heilmann
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