35 Minutes In

Nothing feels like rock bottom as much as realizing you’re 35 minutes into a YouTube compilation of 90s advertisements.

The moment is a little different every time. Sometimes it’s in the middle of a Stick Ups commercial — the one where the giant fish bone flies out of the garbage, a reality that imagines we’re placing SO MANY full fish skeletons into our garbages that we need a long-term solution — and sometimes it’s during one of the thousands of 1–800-COLLECT commercials that plagued MTV during the late 90s. The commercial doesn’t matter. It always happens — I snap out of a kind of catatonic state and realize I’m just watching the same shit I complained about watching when I was a kid and then I feel dumb and a little ashamed and then I just decide to go to bed.

And then a few days later, I throw another compilation on.

It’s absurd. I know it’s absurd. I’m a grown man watching commercials from my childhood for products that don’t exist anymore. But, for the first 34 minutes at least, it’s deceptively relaxing — there’s a sense of relief. It works, because there’s a specific frequency to these things — the voiceover cadence, the primary colors, the way every ad promises you’ll be cooler or happier or more complete if you just had this one thing — and my brain responds to it like a familiar song I haven’t heard in twenty years.

So I keep watching, and eventually I go to bed.

I ran across a tweet the other day (not linked, you’ll have to find it yourself) that said:

btw in your 20’s and 30’s you’ll start rediscovering the niche interests and hobbies you had as a kid. it’s very important you revisit them. your younger self was actually on to something.

Below that was a response:

facts. adulthood isn’t about becoming someone new, it’s about remembering who you were before the world told you who to be.

I ran across this tweet while a compilation of old commercials was playing in the background, so it landed with a bit of a splash. This year has pulled my mind in two directions: one side has been fraught with what I can only describe as terror as an oligarchy has torn apart social construct and promised a new world of uncontrollable hubris, all while managing our own crises at home; the other side has promised the warm comfort of nostalgic escape — a deep dive into an era I didn’t understand then and am only now beginning to piece together. This has meant a return to the music, to the media, and these stupid commercials of the mid–90s, a kind of “Happy Days” level escapism that I once found embarrassing and now find absolutely crucial.

And so those tweets connected. I see myself in them. We all do, probably: it’s a bit of justification for what has felt a bit like childish regression.

But here’s the thing about regression — maybe we’ve got it backwards. Maybe returning to the things that comforted us isn’t about refusing to grow up. Maybe it’s about refusing to forget what safety felt like in the first place.

The world is hard right now in ways I don’t need to catalog because you’re living in it too. Every day brings new reasons to feel unmoored, new evidence that the systems we thought were stable were actually just held together by shared agreement, and that agreement has been voided by people who never needed it anyway. So yes, I watch compilations of commercials where the biggest problem is whether your garbage smells like fish. I return to albums I loved at fifteen. I seek out the specific feeling of a Saturday morning in 1993 when the world felt small enough to understand and my biggest concern was whether I’d saved enough allowance to buy the Wayne’s World soundtrack.

This isn’t denial. It’s not even really nostalgia in the traditional sense — I’m not trying to convince myself the past was better or that we should go back. I’m using it as a reference point. A reminder that I used to know what comfort felt like without having to think about it, without having to construct it deliberately. And if I can remember that feeling, maybe I can build some version of it now. Not the same version — I’m not twelve anymore, and the world has changed in ways that can’t be unchanged. But some version. A groove that fits who I actually am instead of who I think I should be.

Because that’s the real distinction, isn’t it? What’s actually part of you versus what you think should be part of you. The interests you cultivated because they seemed important versus the ones that just… fit. I’ve spent years trying to care about things that felt like the right things to care about — the sophisticated or respectable or productive things. Some of them stuck because they were genuinely mine. Some fell away because I was just performing. But the stuff from when I was younger, before I knew what I was supposed to like, before I learned to curate myself for an audience — that stuff tends to be uncomplicatedly true.

Our younger selves were on to something. Not because children have some pure unfiltered access to authenticity, but because they haven’t learned yet what they’re supposed to want. They just want what they want. And somewhere in that mess of action figures and MTV and whatever weird thing you were into that made no sense to anyone else, there’s a thread of actual preference. Actual you. The trick is figuring out which parts are still true and which parts were just developmental — what you needed then versus what you still need now.

So maybe the 90s commercials aren’t about the commercials at all.

Maybe they’re about permission. Permission to return to something that makes no logical sense but does some other kind of sense that’s harder to explain. Permission to build a life that includes space for the things that comfort you, even if — especially if — those things look like regression from the outside. Because the alternative is what? Performing adulthood according to some standard that was always arbitrary anyway? Pretending you don’t need the things you need because needing them seems childish?

I’m 35 minutes into a commercial compilation again. The giant fish skeleton is flying out of the garbage. Someone is calling collect and saving a bunch of money.

I’m not trying to go backward. I don’t want to go backward. Now sucks, but Then wasn’t always that much better. I’m just trying to remember what it felt like to be myself before I learned it was supposed to be more complicated than that. The world is going to keep being hard. The oligarchs are going to keep doing oligarch things. And I can’t spend every waking moment braced against that or I’ll have nothing left. So I’m building something here — this small weird space where I get to remember who I was before I learned to be anyone else. A place to catch my breath. A place to remember what I’m fighting for in the first place, which isn’t some abstract ideal but the actual specific feeling of being safe enough to be yourself without apology.

This is how I stay in it. This is how I keep enough of myself intact to show up for the fights that matter — by protecting the parts of me that are still mine, that can’t be taken or leveraged or turned into someone else’s profit. So, with my sense of irony fully intact, I’ll keep watching these stupid commercials. I’ll keep making the playlists. I’ll keep returning to the things that teenage me loved before he learned to justify his loves. Not because I’m hiding, but because I’m remembering.

And when I come back from that — refreshed, centered, myself again — I’m better equipped to face whatever’s next. The nostalgia isn’t the retreat. It’s the foundation. It’s where I go to remember what’s worth protecting, and why I’m not giving up.