Remembering Without Becoming Stuck
On Nostalgia and the Work of Futuring
written by Ashley Mozingo, MBA | Essay Series, 2026
I wonder if in 2036, will we still be fixated on only throwing 90s and early 2000s parties.
A renewed cultural fixation on revisiting the past—particularly through cycles of digital nostalgia—raises a question that extends beyond trends or personal preference.
Remembering is not optional. Memory sustains identity, preserves lineage, and grounds communities in continuity. It holds histories that would otherwise be erased, distorted, or overwritten. Cultural memory is often the only archive marginalized groups possess.
Nostalgia can serve two roles:
Grounding — preserving identity, culture, and continuity
Containment — keeping attention anchored in what’s familiar instead of what’s possible
When nostalgia becomes dominant, it can reduce people’s capacity to imagine alternatives.
Nostalgia offers emotional refuge. It simplifies complexity, softens historical edges, and renders the past as a coherent narrative rather than a contested one. Digital platforms, designed to reward recognition and emotional resonance, naturally amplify this dynamic. What people already understand is easier to share than what must be imagined.
But we must imagine.
We must.
If you have a child, a parent/guardian, or have awakened in a new day, you must.
What I notice in this moment is not an excess of care for the past, but a growing absence of attention toward what has not yet been shaped. We are fluent in recall and are less practiced in projection. We know how to revisit what was, but we hesitate to collectively imagine what could be.
So we loop.
Remembering should be a foundation, not a destination. When a culture dwells too long in retrospection, it risks outsourcing its future to whoever is willing to design it.
Periods of rapid social, political, and technological change can often intensify nostalgia. Uncertainty drives people toward what feels stable, legible, and emotionally secure. This response is understandable. It can also delay necessary work: rethinking economic structures, redefining civic participation, and imagining social systems that respond to present realities.
“Futuring” or “Future-ing”, so I’ve dubbed it to make it an adjective, is not prediction. It is a form of responsibility.
Who is this world being built for?
Who is missing from its design?
What values are being embedded?
This is slow work. It does not trend easily. It does not compress well into spectacle.
To remember forward.
The future, like memory, is a collective project. If it is not actively shaped, it will still arrive.
My point, if I were to wrap this concern cohesively, is to acknowledge that remembering remains essential. It guards against erasure and repetition. However, when cultural life becomes primarily retrospective, it risks surrendering creative agency. In this sense, the task is not to abandon nostalgia, but to place it in proportion to imagination.
The past can inform.
The future must be authored.
Essay Influnced by:
Social media, “2016 is the new 2026” Data mining trend.
