John-Hughes-ation of Our Times
Have you ever watched a John Hughes film and thought, if only life were that simple. A world where you could stand outside someone’s window holding a boombox above your head, blasting a cassette mix tape to confess your love, and no one would think you needed serious psychiatric help. The bittersweet charm of films like The Breakfast Club or Sixteen Candles don’t endure because the world was ever really like that, but because they capture a longing for a past that feels idealised even to people who never lived it. This is how nostalgia works. Like a John Hughes movie, it isn’t about what actually happened or how things really were. It is about the “what if” of lives we didn’t quite live, moments we never quite reached, selves we never quite became.
Before John Hughes was pulling us in with melodrama, the psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud wrote about distinction between mourning and melancholia. Mourning accepts that something is gone and allows the self to reorganise around that absence. Melancholia refuses the loss and keeps the object alive inside the psyche, sometimes in distorted form. Nostalgia often resembles this second structure. It is not the pain of losing what was, but the pain of something that never materialised in the first place. A longing for a memory we never actually had. If we read nostalgia in this Freudian frame, the thing that is refused is not only the loss but also the possibility of life after the loss, the survival that allows us to build new futures. Nostalgia keeps the past insistently alive, but only in the version that will never threaten to change.
That ambivalence is important because nostalgia is not inherently despairing. Psychologists studying the emotion often find it to be pro-social. It can strengthen bonds, build communities and orient people towards the present or even the future. It has historically overlapped with the experience of homesickness, suggesting not just a yearning for a literal place but for a boundary of familiarity, safety or possibility that feels lost. Nostalgia doesn’t have to trap us. It can tell us what we care about.
But when nostalgia becomes political, it gets riskier. Political nostalgia regularly preserves a fantasy rather than a fact. It operates like the plot of a John Hughes film for entire nations: the world once made sense, life was simpler, communities were coherent, hierarchy was benign. In reality, these pasts rarely existed. They are defence mechanisms clinging to absence rather than genuine history. Slogans like Make America Great Again appeal to exactly this curated fantasy past, a cultural script polished until it glows. It is a collective melancholia where the refusal to mourn national contradictions becomes a demand to return to an imaginary golden age. This is how nostalgia can halt political imagination: the world is prevented from becoming what it already is because we are trying to shrink it back into a version of itself that never quite happened.
But this doesn’t just slow down progress, it erodes our ability to believe in the future. In the absence of a credible tomorrow, nostalgia becomes the dominant emotional architecture of culture. The past is repackaged as an endless stream of retro fashions, reboots and curated moods. Much of it is nostalgia-by-proxy, borrowed memories sold back to people who never lived them. Stranger Things, for example, targets viewers nostalgic for a version of the 1980s that is mostly an 80s curated through neon signs, Stephen King references and synth soundtracks. Even John Hughes gets absorbed into the aesthetic. A jacket here, a mixtape there, a sense of simpler emotional terrain where crises could be resolved in a single school day. Nostalgia becomes an aesthetic consumable, a comfort loop designed to soothe us without actually changing anything.
Yet nostalgia can also behave like emotional feedback. It tells us what we lack in the present and what we still haven’t built. It can strengthen relationships, prompt self-reflection or reveal what forms of belonging we wish existed. The problem is when it becomes the main way of relating to time, a constant low-level emotional hum that replaces curiosity with yearning. Nostalgia can function like anger or fear, a background state that becomes easy to manipulate.
Even the Hughes fantasy participates in this dynamic. The idea of romantic sincerity performed through grand gestures lives on not because life was ever straightforward, but because we want to believe that complexity can be dissolved by a single moment of courage. It is a fantasy of emotional adolescence, where change is avoidable and clarity always arrives on schedule. This is an extremely seductive fantasy, and easily becomes a way of keeping the world suspended in time.
The Portuguese philosopher, Fernando Pessoa gets to the emotional core of all this. He wrote of nostalgia not for the past but for the unrealised. Nostalgia for what never was. The longing for impossible things precisely because they are impossible. The regret of not having become the version of ourselves we imagine in the corner of our vision. As he puts it:
“The feelings that hurt most, the emotions that sting most, are those that are absurd - The longing for impossible things, precisely because they are impossible; nostalgia for what never was; the desire for what could have been; regret over not being someone else; dissatisfaction with the world’s existence. All these half-tones of the soul’s consciousness create in us a painful landscape, an eternal sunset of what we are”
This is strange feeling of watching the self unfold towards a horizon that keeps receding. It’s not dramatic. It’s simply the structure of being alive. A John Hughes montage for a life that never quite happened.
If nostalgia is only treated as pathology, we miss its diagnostic power. It signals the gaps in our lives, the forms of stability or meaning or connection we still haven’t created. It is tempting to reenact the fantasies, to reach for the past, to perform the scene with the boombox and hope it restores a vanished version of ourselves. But nostalgia is more interesting when it points us towards futures we have not yet imagined, the ones we might be missing. The task is not to return to what never existed, but to recognise what those fantasies are trying to tell us. They reveal the shape of the worlds we still need to build.