Staying Vs Leaving

A Tale of Two Cultures

Welcome back to the wasteland!

Here I am back with another topic, this one a light subject. We’re getting into summer, so let’s keep the streak going. I want to talk about nostalgia, but not as a negative or a positive, but in the contrast of something wider. Let’s discuss the culture of Staying Vs Leaving.

As you are certainly well aware, the culture of nostalgia has more or less turned into a joke by this point. Hollywood remaking ‘80s and ‘90s properties into Modern products has failed and continues to fail to greater degrees. No one can seem to understand what the audience wants anymore, not even the audience. The reason for that confusion is because the audience doesn’t actually want old things: they want the ecosystem those old things were allowed to be created in. I’m not just referring to demographics or time periods, but a very specific approach.

Now, of course nostalgia is real and many would argue is a big problem with today, but it’s really a symptom of a culture that doesn’t really have anything to offer outside of piecemeal experiences thrown out like chum in the water to satiate anyone who will chomp it up. This is a difference between the cultures of Staying Vs Leaving. This battle is best shown in the recent example of Pizza Hut Classic being created and trumpeted all over social media.

The above video talks about what exactly people miss about things of the past, and it is not just the IP or franchises or big bold neon and colorful text and logos, like every cynical executive (who lived through those times, mind you) would say it is. What they are missing is, as mentioned above, the climate that allowed those things of the past to be created and flourish in the first place. Yes, they do miss the franchises and the chains and the big glossy movies and production: but what they miss above all of it is the shared experience everyone had at the same time reacting to or enjoying those things. They want the framework of the culture.

So what is the difference between the Culture of Staying Vs Leaving and what does that mean? Let’s get into it.

The key takeaway is the difference in approach in how these things operate today. I’m not talking about ideology or cynical profiteering, but about what they say about the culture. The old way, the way of Big Fancy Cinemas, Pizza Hut Classic, inviting video stores, bright arcades, and shiny malls, was a culture of Staying. They wanted you there, to stay. They wanted you to stick around, and in the process this environment would invite others to do the same. In other words, exactly what third places are meant to do. You can quibble about their effectiveness or the like all you want, but that’s what they did. This is a feature of old real life communities completely lost today.

This means that all of that old era was linked together under the shared idea that we were all in this together and there were places to go where we can fit in together. As we well know by now, the purpose of art is the same as community: it’s to connect. A culture of Staying means a culture of connection, of sociability. It’s the purpose of all of this, really.

The opposite is what we have now: a culture of Leaving. As the above video states, this is a climate centered on individuality and alienation, of getting out as fast as possible to be left on your own. Swipe, scroll, pick something up, get in and out, consume, and on to the next thing. It is the antithesis of how it used to be, and it’s why no matter how many Ghostbusters, He-Man, Star War, or Marvel, movies or remakes that Hollywood pumps out, they will never hit the same, because they are being fed into a culture of Leaving. No one has the time or means to sit and Stay. We do not reward it, in fact we proudly thump our chests about how special and different we are from each other instead. The idea of Staying is not the cultural era we are in anymore, and we can’t pretend otherwise or think things can change as long as we continue to reject the reality that we deliberately chose.

The memories older generations have of that long gone era isn’t just of nostalgia, it is about the shared cultural experience of Staying that has been abandoned and subverted. When someone is celebrating a Pizza Hut Classic or the experience of a vinyl record, it is not just because those are old things they remembered and mindlessly prefer over “better” options. That might be the starting point, but the real underlying desire is that forgotten ecosystem, that community feeling of going anywhere and feeling like you belong there and so does everyone else around you.

Baby Boomers used to thump their chests about driving everywhere being freedom: but that isn’t what they had. It was in fact a safer society filled with others that had the same shared experiences. No matter where they went, there they were, because where they were was more or less the same everywhere which made talking and getting to know others simpler. They took this long gone era for granted and aren’t even aware it’s completely gone for younger generations. They were marinated in the Culture of Staying while they pined for a Culture of Leaving. They didn’t realize they were in a veritable sandbox of fellow children: not a wide open road of strangers and possible danger around every corner. They had community, and it was so prominent they didn’t even realize it.

In fact, I would argue this is what Zoomers who engage in old mediums are really after. This shared cultural experience is the only piece they can try to understand for themselves. These old products and forgotten mediums are the only windows left into the Culture of Staying they can find. They want what they never were able to have because what they have today is so much weaker. And every single person knows it.

It’s not just about physical media or expensive and shiny advertising or old IP, a lot of that sort of nostalgia is missing the forest for the trees. Every one of those things is part of a bigger cultural tapestry that was taken off the wall to be replaced with the digital one-push button world of consuming and moving on: the Culture of Leaving. No one wants to Stay, and that is why they can never feel at home or satiated with how things are and are always on edge and alone. They not only don’t understand the purpose of leisure, they have long forgotten how to live.

The Culture of Staying had more weight and felt more Real, which is why people are seeking it out without even knowing what it is. The culture of Leaving has been the standard for a long time now, but it was also the desired endpoint of those who lived decades earlier who lived in the old world. The streamlining and dumbing down of old things was to make them More Accessible and Easier to do, but all that did was degrade those same things and make us take them for granted. Streaming hasn’t made music any better. Netflix hasn’t made movies or TV any better. Digital eBooks haven’t made books any better. Always online consoles to download everything haven’t made video games any better. Apps and readers haven’t made comic books or manga any better. It just made them more convenient to consume: so we can Leave for the next thing on the list to consume.

You could quibble or fight about who is to blame for today’s ecosystem or what the best way to fix the problem is, but I suspect that will already change as more and more people begin to realize what they have lost. The increase in vinyl and Blu-ray/DVD sales, the creation of things like the above Pizza Hut Classic, the desire for more analog experiences, all signal an obvious change in thinking. You have to look at it in the greater scheme of things beyond product purchasing: it’s the desire for what those things represent (though yes, them being superior products and experiences is part of it, one can’t deny that). You’d have to be blind to not see the climate has changed quite a lot over just the last few years, and is still in the middle of shifting.

We have more Content than ever before, and yet we’re more bored and unsatisfied than we’ve ever been. That is solid proof that what we want isn’t something purely tangible or easy to express. It’s a specific cultural frame that we want: one that has more to offer than the next dopamine hit. We want what we once had, but better than it ever was before.

It’s important to realize the Culture of Leaving did not spring up because of the internet and phones. Technology itself didn’t lead us here. What lead us here was our desire to Progress past the Culture of Staying to make things more convenient, and the end result was something that is the complete opposite of what we once had. In essence, it was forgetting what mattered that allowed us to throw it away and replace that ecosystem with something inferior that we can’t admit to being so because we’ve talked ourselves into thinking Convenience is a Good Thing. However, “convenience” is not a synonym for “good”: it is just as capable of being bad for you as inconvenience, as we can see from how things are today.

We need something more than the bare minimum of consuming and moving on to the next thing. We’ve always wanted it, but we lost sight of how to get it back.

So let’s try Staying for a little bit. It can’t possibly be any worse, right? We won’t know until we try.

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