We're all terrible liars

An infallible way to spot a boomer? Ask whether they're nostalgic: if they forcefully say no, jaw thrust forward, you're facing the most nostalgic specimen of the species. I know because that specimen is me. For decades I've declared that nostalgia gives me hives, with the conviction of certain ladies who swear they still have the same face as in 1978 thanks to mineral water and a diet and no sun, my dear. Vintage, I maintain with a rather knowing air, is a cemetery with a shop window; the past is a guest who doesn't know when to leave.

The boomer from the reflective middle classes is more willing to confess to high cholesterol than acute nostalgia. At least cholesterol has a certain clinical dignity, whereas nostalgia sounds old by its second syllable. We've turned youth into permanent citizenship. Saying «I miss it» would hand young people the keys to the present. We prefer to offer an apparently objective expert assessment: films had dialogue, coats lasted thirty years, tomatoes knew their job. The sincere boomer keeps concert tickets. The reflective one organises a retrospective, signs the catalogue and explains to the kids that the past helps us understand the future. Meanwhile, it helps him see himself with more hair.

This vanity has numerical witnesses. A British study of a hundred and fifty people born between 1945 and 1954 (The Mature Imagination and Consumption Strategies) found that 98% felt younger than their actual age; the recurring gap was twenty years. David Rubin's studies documented the reminiscence bump: after forty, a disproportionate share of memories from adolescence and early adulthood resurfaces. The phenomenon describes the distribution of memory, without assigning those memories a superior quality.

We take care of the promotion ourselves. Electing as a golden age the time when our skin was smooth and our metabolism cooperative So we call civilisation what was often just youth. Here our more sophisticated fear comes in: Robert Pogue Harrison calls juvenilisation the caricature of cultural neoteny: it assigns premature old age to the young and unripe youth to the old. The modernist boomer recognised a programme in it and turned into an artificial adolescent, terrified of obsolescence, where every wrinkle becomes a typo. Pascal Bruckner called the modern obligation to display permanent health and good spirits the «duty of happiness». Perpetual euphoria expels suffering, biological decay and a thoroughly justified melancholy. We add a clause: look well rested while fighting the calendar.

The point is that saying we only ever look ahead has become gruelling work, and we've absorbed old age too into the job of looking young. And here comes the worst confession: I'm furiously envious of the authentic boomers, the rough-and-ready provincial ones, my contemporaries at the sports bar and class pizza reunions. They exclaim «things were better when things were better» with the serenity of someone laying a trump card on the table. The intelligentsia mocks them, and in public I too adopt the mournful air of a doctor facing a hopeless case. Yet they possess a tragic stature and an ontological dignity that elude us: they have the courage of nostalgia. They accept that a season has ended and endure the ridicule. We organise a conference on the future of authenticity and keep the coffin behind the wardrobe, because we're fucking terrified of death. Woody Allen said he preferred the more convenient immortality of not dying to the immortality of his work. That's my generation's programme, and the rejection of nostalgia is its first commandment.

Politics takes «I miss it» and translates it into «we've been robbed». Then comes the cash register. Elton John's farewell tour grossed 939 million dollars; KISS took almost five years to say goodbye, including the pandemic break, and Cher almost three. Even our farewells demand automatic renewal. In 2015 Facebook launched On This Day, and the devotees I know are the age of my schoolmates, busy every morning exchanging faded photographs in «if you grew up in the Seventies you'll understand» groups.

The sincere boomer feels longing. The insincere boomer, the one who wants to be modern, meaning me, demands that nothing end. Grafton Tanner calls foreverism the anti-nostalgic regime that promises growth without change and life without loss. Here I am. Going back to 1985 bores me; demanding that 1985 continue, updated and wrinkle-free, is my vice. I want the Rolling Stones still onstage, the remake promoted to a reinterpretation and the little shop renamed a concept store. In 2016 Gina Pell proposed perennial for a mindset freed from age brackets; we immediately made it the new name for old, how sweet. Even sex gets restored. In our accounts it was casual, cheerful, emancipated. Memory cropped out Aids, homophobia, double standards, backstreet abortions and that provincial backwater of desire where so many suffered in silence. It knew Photoshop before Photoshop. We watch young people between an app and a chat and diagnose the twilight of the flesh: between 2007 and 2017, in the United States, recent casual sex among unpartnered young people aged 18 to 23 fell from 38% to 24% among men and from 31% to 22% among women. We mock our grandchildren, and here we become unfair, because Generation Z performs a similar operation but leaves the seams visible. John Koenig named nostalgia for a time never experienced anemoia. Inside it fit faded photographs, new Polaroids, Y2K tops, vinyl bought along with the turntable and series that re-edit the past like a cartoon: Stranger Things offers the Eighties; Bridgerton dresses in the nineteenth century while strings play Ariana Grande; Palm Royale puts 1969 through a sorbet-coloured spin cycle. These worlds forgo a certificate of authenticity. They are desires in costume, temporary refuges, repertoires to try out in the mirror, but their candour strikes me as superior to our pompous manner. Throwback Thursdays officiated the ritual with commendable clarity. Then came «how wonderful 2016 was»: Pokémon Go, the dog-ear filter, Snapchat, Messenger. The revival returned to TikTok in 2026. Laughing at it would be easy and vulgar. For a twenty-year-old, 2016 occupies half their conscious life. Ten years seem few to someone with a warehouse of decades who has already declared their adolescence a World Heritage Site. Generation Z gathers what the feed is about to swallow and manufactures continuity. We possess an enormous autobiography and deny our longing; they have only a few years, take a sweatshirt, a screenshot, a compressed song and get themselves a yesterday. Each generation cuts out its past. The social difference lies in the label: they write aesthetic, vibe, aura; we write quality, canon, collective memory and, in desperate cases, intangible heritage. They add a hashtag. We ring Unesco. At this point an Italian essay would summon Bauman, who, frankly, we're sick of: after liquid love, fear and modernity, someone give him a bathrobe. Young people, accused of living in an eternal present, show a more courteous relationship with loss. Their nostalgia comes with a label. Ours takes the lectern dressed as History. For years I said I hated it, because it was my counterfeit pass into the perpetual now. Today I admit the crime: I want the time when the future spoke my name. Young people miss 2016. They have 10 years of memories and call them Thursday. We have 50 years of memories and insist they coincide with the history of culture. Thursday, at least, tells the truth.