Society Of The Self

Do you ever hear that voice in the back of your head that says that things used to make sense? Every time you see a headline or a comment thread to the effect of “we had it good and we lost it”, you’re hearing those echoes. It shows up in Boomer Facebook posts about how kids today don’t know good music or collective sacrifice and millennials sharing VHS filters on TikTok because it feels more real than HD iPhone footage. Underneath all the different content is the same feeling structure. Which we might call it cultural nostalgia, however the philosopher Christopher Lasch was never one to mince words and in the late 70s between Boogie Nights and bootleg jeans, he called it a culture of narcissism.

Lasch wasn’t just shit-posting on the 70s Twitter of community notice boards, his suggestion was that narcissism is not just a personality disorder, it is the default setting of late liberal society. Every era, he thought, produces its own dominant kind of fragile self. In ours, it is a self obsessed with its own reflection. Thick, boring forms of community wear away and in their place we got therapy‑speak, self‑help, curated images, and consumer identities. You no longer simply are a teacher, a neighbour, a joiner. You are a “brand of you” that needs constant work, feedback and validation. The self oscillates between grandiosity and despair: I am special, I am nothing.

It is not hard to see how that kind of self would be drawn to the past. If your present feels precarious and your future feels like a shrug, the only direction that promises any warmth is backwards like falling into a warm water bed with the electric blanket on. Nostalgia is what happens when the present feels uninhabitable and the future feels cancelled. To paraphrase Mark Fisher, it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of the current system. If you cannot picture any path out of the current set up, your imagination doesn’t just turn off or go to the Apple-beach-ball-loading-wheel, it turns around. You start replaying old styles, old politics, old vibes, as if you could somehow climb back into them.

You can see this running at every scale. There is individual nostalgia: remembering childhood as a time of simplicity and freedom, carefully editing out the boredom, the confusion, the lack of power. There is generational nostalgia: 90s kids forever circling back to Nickelodeon idents and the sound of a dial‑up modem as if that was a coherent world rather than a moment of weird transitional chaos. And then there is big‑picture political nostalgia: “back when things were [insert whatever country here] made”, “back when people respected authority”, “back when people spoke to each other on the street”, “back when we had real music and not this algorithmic slop”.

Here we can think of a Hegelian idea, best expressed by Slavoj Žižek, about the biblical story of the Fall. We usually imagine paradise as something that existed in a full, stable way and then got ruined by the Fall. First there was Eden, then there was the loss of Eden. But this is the wrong order. The Fall is what makes Eden into paradise in the first place. Before the rupture, Eden is just where you live. It only becomes “the lost good old days of paradise” once you are outside it and missing it. The wound makes the thing it wounds into something precious. In Slavoj Žižek’s words, “the Fall retroactively creates what you fell from.” The loss produces the object of loss.

Our cultural golden ages work exactly like that. The moment you feel expelled from a coherent social world, that world acquires coherence it never quite had while you were in it. The post‑war British consensus did not feel like a golden age to the people living under rationing, smog and institutional racism. The 90s did not feel like a golden age to anyone working three jobs and staring down the first waves of offshoring and precarity. Those moments become “when everything worked” from the vantage point of today, when so many things demonstrably do not. The more disjointed and fragmented the present feels, the smoother and more unified the past becomes in memory.

Which means a lot of the time, the thing being mourned never existed in the way it is now being described. That does not make the mourning fake. It makes it more interesting. Nostalgia is not a documentary about the past, it is a diagnosis of the present. When someone longs for the stability of communism, or the dignity of a single breadwinner wage, or the safety of a more “traditional” society, or an age when “men had their masculinity” they are telling you something about what feels missing now.

The temptation, especially from a liberal or technocratic angle, is to treat all that as irrational, backward‑looking delusion. “Things were obviously worse then, look at the GDP, look at the repression, look at the lack of choice.” That may all be true on its own terms, and yet it completely misses the point. You do not cure nostalgia by winning an argument about historical facts, you cure it by changing what it feels like to live now. Fix the present and open up believable futures, and people quickly stop romanticising the past. Leave the present stuck and the horizon closed, and they will keep reaching back, because where else is there to go.

Lasch helps us see how this loops back into the narcissism problem. A culture built around fragile selves and image management is always going to be tempted by fantasy versions of itself. The nation starts to behave like an influencer going through old photos to find the era when they got the most likes, then subtly retconning that period as “when I was really myself”. We end up with politics as aesthetics of restoration. Make X Great Again. Take Back Control. Return to some imagined normality where people knew their place, institutions were respected, youth behaved, the music was better, the economy smoother. You can plug in almost any content. The structure is the same.

So today we are a society of fragile selves, saturated with images, peering into the mirror of its own history and falling in love with a heavily edited reflection. It is a culture that feels its future has been downsized and outsourced, so it lives off retroactive paradises. It is not that nothing was ever better in the past. Of course some things were. It is that the thing we are clutching at now is often less a real period and more a fantasy of lost wholeness, conjured precisely because we do not feel whole.

What if the task is not to get back to whatever we think we fell from, but to notice how the feeling of having fallen is actively shaping what we think we lost. The moment you see that, you can start asking a different question. Not “how do we restore the good old days?” but “what would it take for someone in fifty years to not look back on our time as paradise?” In other words, how do we make a present that does not need to be mythologised in order to be bearable?