Analogue

And other musings

More and more, people are adopting the aesthetics of a previous era. It's music. It's clothing. Why? it could be the simple fact that there’s a comfort and a familiarity with things we had as children. Maybe it's a response to ever more sleek, robotic and digital world not representing what people actually want.

As a millennial, I can tell you there was something nice about the pre-digital age. This is the mark of our generation—we're the last ones attached to that era. Those times were messy and imperfect, but they were authentic. That’s what being human is. The music on a record doesn’t literally sound as crisp and clean as it does on a high-definition digital stream. Photos shot on film can be discolored, grainy. These things are quite literally not as good as something we currently have, so why have those aesthetics come back in vogue? It seems everyone has a record player and film camera now.

It’s our subconscious way of recognizing the value of a past era. A time when we did things at a slower pace, with more painstaking care. Chatting it up at a local coffee shop is not the same as an anonymous conversation in a Reddit thread. That's not to say there's not sometimes value in a Reddit thread. Deep down I think we all realize that the digital world mostly leaves us lonely and detached. People express this feeling through vintage aesthetics, trying to retain a slim grip on the authentic, humanized, analogue world that’s slowly escaping us.