Nostalgia, as we all know very well, is a powerful and bittersweet emotion. It’s like a time-machine that brings us back to simpler times. And so, perhaps no group is as vocal about their sentiments towards nostalgia as those who grew up in the ’80s, ’90s, and early noughties.
From memories of the iconic Walkman CD players that didn’t fit into any pocket to the legendary Tamagotchis that we lovingly cared for (but occasionally forgot to feed), many of these relics are hard to come by today. If you listen carefully, you can still hear the 1991 Sonic “Segaaa” soundbite in your head. It’s a good thing then, that online communities such as ‘The Nostalgic 80s, 90s & 2000s‘, step in with nostalgia-fueled memes as a way of keeping these memories alive. So scroll down and see which retro-nostalgic memes we handpicked for your journey down memory lane today.
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Peanut butter and jelly. Batman and Robin. Nostalgia and memes. If you’re like us, these two things go so well together that you can’t help but let yourself indulge in memes from the eras we miss so much. Whether it’s reminiscing about the sweet sounds of dial-up Internet, the TV shows we used to be obsessed about, or the fashion we used to rock – having a little laugh about how cringe everything was is a rare joy.
Then again, why do we love nostalgia so damn much? Well, for one, it gives us a sense of belonging. When we make fun of cringy things from our childhood or teenage years – those baggy shorts, my god – we are tapping into a shared cultural experience that connects us to others who grew up in the same era. It’s a way of feeling like we’re part of something bigger than ourselves. It’s a way to collectively pick on “MTV” for showing how great and punk-rock a TV channel can be and then suddenly turning its back on us.
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The ’90s, for example, were a time when access to pop culture was limited, making everything feel more valuable and exciting. Unlike today, where you can binge-watch a series in a few days and stream music instantly, you had to wait and work for it back then. Missing an episode of your favorite TV show was a disaster of the highest scale, and you’d spend the whole week obsessing over it until the next one came out.
On the other hand, this ’80s, ’90s & 2000s nostalgia can be cringeworthy for the current generation. Looking back, it’s easy to see how inconvenient and frustrating it was to have to wait so darn long for entertainment. It’s hard to imagine being excited about listening to a song on a tape that you’d recorded off the radio, or having to quote movie lines from memory because you didn’t have access to it whenever you wanted. In other words, the perfect fodder for memes.
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In order to understand better what makes communities like ‘The Nostalgic 80s, 90s & 2000s’ tick, We reached out to the page’s moderators who were kind enough to give us some answers. “We created the page to recreate those lost times,” we were told in an email by one of the group’s several moderators who all come from the ’90s.
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Besides trying to meme some of their most beloved childhood memories, the founders of the page, who are also responsible for the ‘Like ‘siriusly” page with more than 200,000 followers, wanted to make a community of like-minded individuals who enjoy looking at nostalgia with humor. “And it totally worked out. It’s a delightful experience to moderate a page that brings out vintage experiences and memories from childhood. Each and every meme is related to our [personal] childhood in one way or another.”
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Of course, moderating a page with almost 700,000 followers and memes flowing in each day is not an easy task – especially considering how nitpicky Facebook can get. “We make sure that [our memes] are what the members are expecting to witness in the group before giving approval to each and every post,” the representative of ‘The Nostalgic 80s, 90s & 2000s’ explained.
“Anything against the rules,” like ‘Post in English only’ (rule number 5), “will be taken down.” Just in the last month, the group’s moderators have successfully enriched their already stunning collection of nostalgic memes with over 1,600 posts.We can’t help but wonder how many of them didn’t make it to the cutting room.
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