We’re Drowning in Toxic Nostalgia

Our country didn’t get worse. It got more equal. That’s the point.

Scroll your Facebook feed for five minutes and you’ll find it: the old commercial for a product that no longer exists, the bucolic Americana neighborhood where it was always summer, the post lamenting that gas was 99 cents, houses cost under $100,000, and everything was just simpler then.

Some of it’s real. Some is AI slop. But toxic nostalgia is everywhere.

Facebook has the oldest demographic profile of any major social platform, per Pew Research — 73 percent of Americans between 50 and 64 use it, and more than half of those 65 and older. So when the nostalgia machine cranks up on Facebook, it’s aimed at a very specific audience, selling a very specific feeling: something precious was taken from you, and you deserve to have it back.

Some of it is harmless enough — the warm-glow feeling of a childhood McDonald’s commercial, the Gen X apartment nostalgia about the days when you could rent a decent place for $500 a month. The 1950s. The 1980s.

Nostalgia memes on social media

Everything was cheaper and simpler and better. If only someone hadn’t ruined it.

Here’s the thing about that $500 apartment for those old enough to remember those not-so-halycon days: the federal minimum wage was frozen at $3.35 an hour from January 1981 until April 1990 — the longest stretch without a raise in American history. By the end of that decade, the $3.35 had lost 30 percent of its purchasing power to inflation. The apartment was cheap. The wages expected to pay for it were catastrophically lower. What passes for nostalgia online is often just selective innumeracy.

But here’s the thing we can’t ignore: Baby Boomers actually did have it better in some meaningful ways. That’s real. Inflation-adjusted analysis found that Boomers paid an average of $3,519 for a year of public college. Today it’s $9,750 — a 177 percent increase. In 1970, a student working a minimum-wage summer job could earn nearly twice their annual tuition. By 2020, that same summer job covered less than half a year of public university costs. The housing story tracks the same way. So some of the nostalgia is grounded in reality.

What happened to the generations that followed is also real. Gen X and elder Millennials didn’t inherit the boffo Boomer deal — we inherited the hangover. Tuition kept climbing every year after 1980 with no corresponding increase in public subsidies. U.S. home prices have risen 415 percent since 1985, while incomes rose just 255 percent — a gap that closed the door on homeownership for millions of people who watched their parents buy starter homes on single incomes. The dot-com crash wiped out early-career savings for many. And then the 2008 financial crisis hit at exactly the wrong moment — peak debt, entry-level jobs, unemployment that topped 10 percent nationally. No cushion. Wages for typical workers barely budged for 40 years in real terms even as productivity nearly tripled — all those gains went up the income ladder, not across it.

So the economic anxiety driving nostalgia online isn’t manufactured. People got genuinely squeezed, and the memes about cheap apartments and affordable groceries are expressions of something true about how hard it is to build a stable life now compared to generations ago.

But what this tantalizingly toxic nostalgia doesn’t provide is an honest accounting of why things were more affordable — union membership at its peak, heavy public investment in higher education, a progressive tax structure that actually taxed the rich (imagine that), and a safety net that hadn’t been systematically dismantled over 40 years of austerity politics.

The nostalgia trap ignores all that. It keeps the cheap rent front and center and erases the policy that made it possible.

What replaces it is a sometimes subtle implication: the country got worse when it got more diverse — when more people won the full rights and privileges of being Americans. There’s a them responsible for the loss of an us. That generational decline is a demographic story, not a policy one.

That’s where the harmless shifts to sinister. And the sinister messaging is coming directly from the Trump administration.