We sometimes catch ourselves saying stupid shit. We’ll be in the middle of a sentence, using our mouth to vocalize words, when we recognize that no one needs to hear what we’re in the midst of saying. Not only does no one need to hear it, but it is regrettable that anyone (including us) has to hear it at all. We still finish the dumb sentence, but harbor a sharp and small regret that we did. For example:
We were showing friends around the city the other day. We were walking around, pointing at things of interest, translating the occasional sign, and just generally being very charming - but occasionally we found ourselves saying things like “These sidewalks used to be narrower” or “That coffee shop used to be a couple blocks away.” Our guests - generous souls both - would acknowledge these statements with an “oh” or “ok” or a polite smile, but we knew in our heart of hearts that we had just offered them a truly inane and useless little fact. There was nothing to do with these remarks. Nothing to say in response to them. They just hung there long enough for everyone (ourselves included) to recognize that words, breath, and time had been wasted needlessly. We didn’t (as far as we can recall) say too much stupid shit - but stupid shit was indeed said and that stupid shit almost always involved three little words - “used to be.”
Now, there are plenty of good or at least understandable reasons to say that something “used to be” a certain way. History is mostly just a set of claims about how people, places, and things “used to be” and history has a few half-decent reasons to exist.
Polybius, way back when, would say that history is a means of learning from the mistakes of others. We read about what people used to do so that we don’t have to try it out ourselves. Or, as he puts it, history “alone makes us, without hurt to ourselves, real-life judges of the better course of action on every occasion and in every situation.” The reason you’d read, say, Daniel Defoe’s Journal of a Plague Year is so that you can learn not to live in England circa 1665 because there’s all sorts of plague bubbling around and the plague is real gross. Polybius was right. Daniel Defoe makes us better judges of being in places with bubonic plague. Don’t be in those places. History is very useful.
But we weren’t doing history when we said inane things about the past. There’s no instructional benefit to learning that a sidewalk used to be narrower or a coffee shop used to be elsewhere. It’s not like we said “these sidewalks used to be narrower in 1985 and were widened as a result of the valiant efforts of the United Walkers Union of Montreal who campaigned tirelessly for the widening of sidewalks.” A sentence like that would be maybe useful or at least enrich our guests’ appreciation of the sidewalk upon which we walked. We could use that (pretend) example as a jumping off point to talk about the (former) power of dedicated citizens to band together and change urban situations. These little details would maybe inspire a conversation about pedestrianism or something. A historical claim like that would have descriptive, explanatory, and potential motivational benefit. We’d all have been a little epistemically richer as a result of a full historical claim. But no. We said “This used to be not like this.” Like an animate box of hair.
History, more than merely instrumentalized for moral or political instruction, might also be helpful for drawing attention to the fact that a set of values or ideas have changed over time. “This used to be a gathering place for the Haudenosaunee to exchange goods according to a gift economy whereas it is now a place where landlords expense $56 for a ‘work’ brunch and complain about tipping culture as the kitchen and wait staff rush to convenience them.” Times change! History can offer us a narrative means of charting the expansion or diminution or alteration of certain values or systems of value. It can serve as a good start to understanding how and/or why certain abstract ideas or concrete behaviors have changed over time. It helps us hold alternative possibilities in place simultaneously. “This street used to be a lot busier” - an actual thing we said - is not a way to hold alternative possibilities together simultaneously. It is just nothing and we are sorry to have said it.
If we weren’t doing history, then were we doing nostalgia? Instead of trying to articulate something about this time and this place in comparison to the past, were we trying to say something about our relationship to a former time and a former place? Maybe trying to communicate some personal feeling about times gone by? Were we, like Taylor Swift, lamenting how our life in the city “used to be mad love” but now it’s naught but “bad blood”?
We were not.
Nostalgia - from where we’re sitting - is a bad narcotic. Despite what the scientists say, we’re pretty sure that nostalgia rots your mind. The indulgent longing for a vanished or idealized or wholly unreal past is harmful to individuals and groups alike. It’s an act of fantasizing and fetishizing a moment in time that, more often than not, sacrifices truth for sentiment, fact for false feeling. There’s a reason why the (deeply under-rated) sci-fi film Strange Days (1995) and the (wildly over-rated) sci-fi film Minority Report (2002) depict worlds in which memories are either used/dealt like drugs or coupled associatively with them.
Don’t get us wrong, nostalgia is often a temptation. The desire for a lost or imagined form of past simplicity or love or comfort or possibility has a certain magnetic draw, but it’s best to resist it. As Svetlana Boym notes, nostalgia prompts one “to be homesick and to be sick of being at home—occasionally at the same time.” It’s a fraught mental position to occupy privately and awful when shared publicly.
“Remember when…” conversations tend always to end in sad silence. Articles with headlines like “The internet used to be fun” or “Movies used to be good” might be factually accurate - but the nostalgic framing of those facts is troubling because nostalgia is just a re-invigorated, misguided, and destructive form of grief. It is less about mourning the past and more about annuling the present and future. The brutal emaciation of contemporary culture is an object lesson about the harmful effects of nostalgia. The endless stream of movies/books/festivals/whatever eliciting and profiting from boomer/Gen X/millenial nostalgia means that nothing of the present seems at all concerned with the present. We are living in times that do not concern themselves with themselves let alone look towards a better or decent future.
We were not nostalgic for narrower sidewalks. We were neither unhappy nor happy, wistful nor un-wistful for the former locations of still extant coffee shops. The only nostalgias we care for and endorse are a movie by Tarkovsky and a mixtape by Frank Ocean.
What, then, were we up to with our stupid words about what “used to be”?
In our own deeply flawed way, it seems we were maybe compelled to mark the passage of time. These weren’t emotionally weighty or intellectually meaningful marks - but they were still marks. Telling friends visiting the city that “that used to be the baseball stadium” doesn’t really serve them in any useful way, but it does sort of prompt them to see what we feel we see. When we walk around these streets, we can’t help but note the little and big changes. We see the past beneath or alongside the present. This isn’t, we don’t think, unique to us. The past experiences that mentally crop up beside present ones are - forgive us - phenomenologically difficult to bracket, experientially hard to ignore, for most folks who are willing or able to pay attention to their surroundings. So, alongside people for whom we care, we wanted to bring their sight into alignment with our own. We shared a passing impression. We wanted, we suppose, to bring their experiences a little closer to ours.
History, nostalgia, and dumb remarks about “what used to be” are maybe all attempts to reconcile ourselves with or orient ourselves towards the world as it stands. They each have their flaws. History tends to reinforce hegemonies. Nostalgia tends to promote myopia. Dumb remarks tend to corrupt the vibe. But they might also, on better days, serve as attempts to find common and shared ground with others. A shared story or feeling or sense of the past might, maybe, be a way of sorting out a viable communal future. If we can’t, say, agree that dinosaurs dinosaured around for a couple million years, then what’s the hope that we’re going to agree that fashioning an intricate series of tunnels is the only way to avoid the impending heat death of humanity that follows from climate disaster? If we can’t, say, lament together over the lost world in which education was taken seriously as a civil priority, minimum wage was a livable wage, and opportunities for a flourishing life seemed plentiful, then what hope is there that we can build towards these things in the future? If we can’t make meaningless remarks about our personal impressions of the past, then… well, probably something hinges on that, too!
On the flip side, maybe this whole post makes a strong case that with enough time, words, and (very dated) pop culture references one can turn even the slightest anecdote about a past experience into a tidy, little ideological package. In this case, one about the importance of collective, non-hierarchical cooperation towards a shared and unknowable future that acknowledges, redresses, and moves quickly beyond the assorted vagaries, injustices, horrors, and banalities of the past.
Or maybe we just like communicating with others even if we do not know what or why we’re communicating exactly at all? What about that?
Remember when Ooof! Bong! used to be good? Yeah, us neither.
Lol I'm just going to copy and paste my favorite part: History tends to reinforce hegemonies. Nostalgia tends to promote myopia. Dumb remarks tend to corrupt the vibe. -- Smart funny sad Also somewhat uplifting. How do you do this?
Wish I had the time (or the courage) to unpack this; there is so much to grapple with. I’m pretty big on nostalgia, and memory, and false memories, not to mention the good old days that were not so good after all. Good work on this one!