The Power of Pre-Internet Nostalgia

How to Touch Grass

The episode explores the growing cultural wave of pre-internet and analog nostalgia, particularly among Gen Z, who long for a time before smartphones despite never having lived through it. Hosts Julie Beck and Natalie

Key takeaways

• Psychologist Clay Routledge defines nostalgia as a 'self-regulatory resource' that helps people navigate uncertainty and plan for the future rather than get stuck in the past.
• A 2023 survey by Routledge found that roughly two-thirds of Gen Z adults wish they could return to a time before everyone was 'plugged in,' despite having no personal memories of it.

Main topics

• Pre-internet nostalgia among Gen Z
• Psychological function of nostalgia

Notable quotes

"Nostalgia is, in psychological terms, what we call a self-regulatory resource. It helps us navigate life in important ways."

Conclusion

The episode reframes analog nostalgia as a constructive psychological

Transcript preview

Speaker 4 (0:00) If you have one word, it can be a noun, it can be an adjective, it can be any part of speech that you want, to describe your overall relationship to technology at this moment in time. Speaker 1 (0:11) Antagonistic. Speaker 4 (0:12) Complicated. Fraught. I Speaker 1 (0:14) think of it as an addiction. Similar to how I relate to, like, sugar or anything else that I sort of compulsively overindulge in. What's your word? Indentured. Speaker 4 (0:24) I was going to say reluctant, but maybe that's not right. Speaker 2 (0:28) very frequent user. Okay, that's a lot of words, but we'll take it. Speaker 4 (0:32) I'm Julie Beck, a staff writer at The Atlantic. And Speaker 3 (0:35) I'm Natalie Brennan, a producer at The Atlantic. Speaker 4 (0:38) This is How to Touch Grass. Speaker 2 (0:41) Have you Speaker 4 (0:41) heard the young people say touch grass? Switch to a dumb phone. This is the Speaker 2 (0:44) Nokia 2780. It's like a term, basically, which is like, get off your phones. Speaker 1 (0:49) Smartphones are evil. They're ruining society, and we need to just stop. 100 % disagree. Get Speaker 2 (0:53) off the internet and go outside and touch grass. I nominate everyone for the touch grass challenge. Go outside and touch some grass like I'm doing right now. Go, go, go. Speaker 4 (1:07) In this season, we'll be exploring the often fraught, always changing relationship people have with technology and the ways that, in this moment, the terms of the relationship are being renegotiated. Speaker 3 (1:20) Julie, the way that I would like to renegotiate my relationship to technology is that I would like to throw my phone in the East River. Natalie, you Speaker 4 (1:30) could throw Speaker 3 (1:30) your phone Speaker 4 (1:31) in the East Speaker 3 (1:31) River. Speaker 4 (1:32) Why don't you? Speaker 3 (1:33) It's not really just about my phone. I want to throw your phone in there too, Julie. But I can't take everyone's phone. So I think what I mean to say is that I yearn for a pre-phone era. Speaker 4 (1:48) I think we're not the only ones who have this fantasy. It's all over TikTok. Speaker 2 (1:53) What's the biggest trend of 2026 going to be? Analog. This past year, we've seen the rise of nostalgia. Switch from iPhone cameras to digital cameras. Here's how to actually be more analog in 2026. Speaker 4 (2:04) First, I want to say... Speaker 2 (2:05) Analog era is here. And while audiences Speaker 3 (2:07) say they want to go offline, Gen Z and millennials openly expressing their desires to break from an Speaker 2 (2:12) online world. I stopped using an iPhone three weeks ago and the effects have genuinely been profound. Speaker 4 (2:18) In the past few years, there's been no shortage of people advocating for reducing screen time. But another force that has been inspiring people to rethink how they use their devices lately is nostalgia. Speaker 1 (2:31) We can often feel overwhelmed in the moment and in the challenges we face today. It's hard to see past them. Nostalgia can't help us step outside of that moment. Speaker 4 (2:40) Clay Rutledge and his colleagues have been studying what's behind this widespread yearning for a time before smartphones and before social media. Clay's a psychologist who specializes in nostalgia, and he's also the author of Passed Forward, How Nostalgia Can Help You Live a More Meaningful Life. Speaker 4 (2:58) Clay, hello. Welcome. Hi, Julie. I see you've got an Atari poster behind you. There's some kind of video game that is too small for me to see what it is. What is it? Speaker 1 (3:09) On the shelf, I've got an old Nintendo, the original NES. Then I've got the Robotron arcade game, which is an arcade from the 80s and the Atari poster. So yeah, lots of video game nostalgia from different brands and decades. Speaker 4 (3:22) Oh man, perfect. Okay. It's a nostalgia museum at your house. Speaker 1 (3:27) It is indeed. Speaker 4 (3:30) Clay, just to get started, what is the point of being nostalgic about anything? Speaker 1 (3:36) So nostalgia is, in psychological terms, what we call a self-regulatory resource. It helps us navigate life in important ways. We don't know the future. It's uncertain. And so it can also be a great source of anxiety. Nostalgia can help us step outside of that moment. and say, you know, there's a bigger picture. Right now, maybe I'm experiencing stress or loneliness, or I just went through some difficult challenge, but my life is full of other types of experiences. And if I had these more fulfilling experiences in the past, then I should be able to have them in the future. Speaker 4 (4:09) Yeah, I asked you about the past, and you immediately started talking about the future. Do people tend to misunderstand nostalgia by assuming, as I did, that it's about the past? Speaker 1 (4:21) So nostalgia, the dictionary definition is something like a sentimental longing for the past. When you present it like that, then it makes sense that people would assume, well, nostalgia might even be people getting stuck in the past or looking to the past too warmly and not dealing with their present realities head on. Turns out that when people engage in this kind of nostalgic reflection, in a lot of ways, they're talking about their issues today and they're thinking about... tomorrow. So nostalgia actually has this very forward-looking, unexpected, hopeful quality. We often are looking for specific things that can help us with particular challenges and anxieties we're facing. And I'm articulating this as if this is happening at some deliberate or conscious level, because I'm talking about more of the scientific study of nostalgia and what we've learned from that kind of empirical work. But in reality, of course, this is just happening almost unconsciously. People are often using nostalgia without even realizing it. That Speaker 4 (5:23) makes sense to me when it comes to, you know, my own life and my own past experiences, right? But Clay, what about nostalgia for a time from before you were even alive? There was a stat from a survey you worked on that really struck me, which was you found that 60 % of Gen Z wished that they could return to a time before everyone was, quote, plugged in. And the other generation said that, too, but they actually lived through that time, whereas Gen Z has no actual memories of a time before the Internet existed. So was that surprising to you? It Speaker 1 (5:56) was. When we first... found that, I was pretty surprised because most of the work, the research and nostalgia, including the research I've done, it is focused on autobiographical memory. But to your point, what we started to discover with that survey is people actually have a longing for the past that predates them. Now, of course, if you study art and culture more abstractly, we've long known that people have favorite eras that they're interested in, whether it's the architecture or the music or the fashion. So we've known there's this aesthetic nostalgia that's historical, but what we were surprised to find is that young adults have so much to look forward to in the future. And we typically think of youth as very future oriented, but the majority of them were saying that they longed for a time really before modern technology, but really before they were alive. And then since that survey, We've just done more and more surveys finding that around two-thirds of Gen Z adults say they're nostalgic for a time before they're alive. Speaker 4 (6:56) Right. So this seems like a little bit more than just a, like, we're bringing low-rise genes back, right? If they're saying they would like to live in the past. I mean, how common is it for generations to yearn that way for a past they never actually knew? Or is something about this unique? Speaker 1 (7:14) Yeah. There's not a... a lot of research or really any research in previous generations when they were the same age as Gen Z. But we do know from our own work, in general, people tend to become nostalgic when they're going through major life transitions or disruptions or when the world feels particularly chaotic or uncertain. Regardless of whether you're, you know, 20 or 60, sometimes there are sources of cultural inspiration. that people want to draw from in a more shared bank of memories that aren't just your own, but are the memories we share as a culture. And here's the key thing, I think, and this is the case with Gen Z too. It really isn't the case that people want to live in the past. You start asking people, would they give up all of the modern advances? They say no. What they're saying is they have a sentiment for some aspect of the past that they think that we're missing today. I think there is something about Gen Z in this, you know, as digital natives who grew up in this era where this major transition from the analog world to the digital world that seems to be sparking a particularly potent