Do we understand it enough to help?
By CJ Fant
In his aptly titled book, The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, John Koenig created new words and expressions for complicated and unnamed feelings we often experience as humans. One such word, anemoia, is defined as “Nostalgia for a time or a place one has never known.” Koenig derived this word from the Greek anemosis which is used to describe a tree that, battered by wind its whole life, has bent and grown backwards.
Recently Axis sat down to talk with three different teens about smartphones. To conclude this conversation, we asked the students a simple question: if you could go back in time and choose a childhood without smartphones, would you? Two out of three gave an adamant yes.
While the perspectives don’t necessarily speak for their generation as a whole, these students are not alone. There’s an entire cottage industry online devoted to fueling this anemoia. Videos of high school in the 90s find odd purchase on social media sites. Vinyl is experiencing a revival, hitting its highest sales numbers in decades thanks to artists like Taylor Swift (who perhaps releases too many to keep up with). Polaroids and disposable cameras have seen a resurgence in popularity, with some social media apps like “Lapse” trying to simulate the experience. Even the flip phone is rising from the grave, like a specter strangely obsessed with the 2000s.
Of course, this type of nostalgia is nothing new. Five years ago, modern pop music just sounded like it was ripped straight out of the 80s, and, now, the baggy jeans and grunge-esque music of the 1990s is making a comeback. As Solomon in Ecclesiastes so bluntly puts it,
What has been is what will be,
and what has been done is what will be done,
and there is nothing new under the sun.
Is there a thing of which it is said,
‘See, this is new’?
It has been already
in the ages before us. (Ecclesiastes 1:9-10 ESV)
As adults who maybe lived through the actual 1990s (or whenever), it can be a surreal experience to see tweens and teens pining after a period of time we embodied. Our lives weren’t perfect then. We made mistakes. Life was hard, and we probably wished we could go back to a simpler time, like the 1960s or the 1300s or something.
Think about the Christmas music that’s played every year, from Nat King Cole’s “The Christmas Song” to Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas Is You.” It’s all an attempt to place listeners back to a time and place where they were kids, experiencing the magic and wonder of Christmas for the first time. It’s a recreation of a real childhood experience.
But this is what makes modern teens’ anemoia so unique.
They’re feeling a pull toward a childhood they never knew, a childhood they never had, a time they never experienced.
We would argue the root of this stems from the object at the center of this entire resource—and arguably the most significant progression in communication since the printing press—the smartphone.
It’s easy to forget it’s only been 17 years since the first iPhone was released. Gen Z and Gen Alpha are the first generations for whom smartphones were truly present throughout their entire childhood. They’ve never really known a world without the smartphone, and just like any significant, world-changing technology, they’ve grown up in its shadow.
To help capture this idea, we need to talk about Subway Surfers.
Subway Surfers is a mobile game where the player runs forward endlessly (it’s in the genre “endless runner”) surviving a series of gauntlets by jumping, dodging, and sliding. Not unlike arcade games from the 80s, it’s designed to become so difficult that players are destined to fail. You can get better at it and improve your high score, but you can’t ever “win.”
Sometimes, when a video posted online isn’t quite flashy enough to capture the viewers’ attention in the two seconds before they swipe away, people will just shove some footage of Subway Surfers underneath the “boring” video to make it more engaging and keep the viewer watching.
This strategy of splicing informational videos with Subway Surfers has become a meme of sorts, often mocking the shrinking attention span of Gen Alpha and “Zoomers.” And while it may be true that we live in an age of distraction, it’s also worth pointing out that these young minds were often handed these devices at young ages by people who didn’t know any better. Teens can’t help that they grew up in a world where their ability to focus is seen as so compromised, it’s meme-worthy. But what if what they’ve lost goes way beyond their attention spans?
Teens have never known a world without social media influencing and gamifying their friendships. Many have never been free to be truly unavailable, nor have they known a world where they’re not constantly at risk of being filmed or being asked to share their location.
They’ve also likely never experienced the draw and mystery of love without the corruption of ever-accessible pornography.
It’s a loss they know and what’s more, it’s a loss they feel. Memes about Subway Surfers (and Gen Z’s dislike of so-called “iPad kids”) point to a desperate self-awareness of their habits and behaviors. Like the trees bent back backwards by the wind–like anemosis–the winds of technology have forced the eyes of teens backwards in time, to the past.
Parents and trusted adults can acknowledge this feeling and even lean into it as a discipleship opportunity. Provide chances for your teens to set down their phones, to disconnect, to really live like it’s 30 years ago. Obviously, as a culture, we’re all pretty dependent on our smartphones, but that doesn’t mean you can’t put them away every evening, at youth group, or just for dinner on Tuesdays.
It’s important that we are modeling a healthy relationship with technology to the next generation, while also encouraging them to learn how to have healthy relationships themselves. Teens and their parents may both long for a simpler time in the past, but all of us live in the right now.
Returning to Ecclesiastes, while not a command nor a promise, Solomon gives a way of thinking about this:
Say not, ‘Why were the former days better than these?’
For it is not from wisdom that you ask this. (Ecclesiastes 7:10, ESV)
There’s nothing new under the sun, even the desire to live in a different time.
We can sit on our hands and wish for a world that no longer exists, or we can get up, and work to make the one we live in right now the best it can be for the next generation.
CJ Fant is a writer, video producer, and semi-regular podcast host at Axis. He’s worked with teens for his entire professional career and has a deep desire to bridge the gaps between generations to kickstart discipleship and inspire a deeper love for Jesus. He also loves keeping up with the ever-changing landscape of culture, with a particular focus on music and video games. CJ is also rapidly approaching 3000 hours played in Dota 2.
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