On false nostalgia.

I like Midnight in Paris. It’s really meant to make you think about misplaced nostalgia. There’s a certain common human desire to think that the things of the past are inherently of a higher caliber, of purer, simpler days than the rotten rags of our contemporaries.

Rachmaninov is transcendent; Hans Zimmer, a demagogue. Piano music is a purer form of musical worship of God than Christian rap. Hemingway and Nietzche over Doctorow and Dawkins. [Disclaimer: these are made-up example opinions.]

There are the unabashed masses who follow the tides of the age, and the highfalutin aesthetes who follow the tides of *tosses pincurls* a whole generation or two ago. “They just don’t make ’em like they used to,” they sigh, as a record player they paid through the nose for croons out a scratchy Frank Sinatra number. I’m not talking about people who actually lived through these decades; I’m talking about people my age, recycling underappreciated jokes about Silent Cal and sitting through an entire Charlie Chaplin movie just so they could say they did so. It’s an inauthentic chase after the dubious authenticity of the past.

I have to confess — that poser whose portrait I painted in the preceding paragraph was basically me at the end of college (except the record player. Ain’t nobody got money fo’ dat.). I was hella sold on a romanticized version of the past that I had no temporal claim to. Tons of people my age buy into this fallacy of a halcyon history, and in falling over themselves to become culturally versed in yesterday’s news, they curate a taste in things that might reflect more the person they want to be (a person who doesn’t exist from a time that doesn’t exist. Ironically, I thought that was what authenticity looked like) than the person they are.

So Owen Wilson’s character in Midnight in Paris longs to go back to the 1920’s, but once he’s there, a woman he meets expresses the longing to return to a purer time as well: the Belle Epoque. I’m sure that there, there’d be people longing for a decade or a century ago. Where are we left? There’s nothing new under the sun. The present age is messy, corrupt, and the world system is broken beyond repair. But why do we believe that it wasn’t always this way? Yesterday and yesterday’s yesterday were like this too. It’s only the storytellers of yesterday who would have you think differently.

The subtle allure of pursuing the tastes of the person I wanted to be is hard to break. I am realizing more and more, though, that many of the movies I watched and the books I read yielded less enjoyment than I was expecting. I was disappointed when I finally admitted to myself that I hated reading Hemingway. Why? Because I wanted to be the kind of jaded, tough, worldly thinker that Hemingway was purported to be. I also thought Camus was a downer. And Kafka gives me slight indigestion. I wondered, do I lack taste? Am I inured to the drivel of the masses? So, stubbornly, I kept reading these authors for another few years.

I can see how someone can be stuck in this myopic cycle of misguided self-improvement for their whole lives. In chasing after the mythic “best self” — often rooted in what society, advertising, and pop culture tells you to value — we lose ourselves. And we waste our smackin’-dang time on nonsense.

The Greek word translated “world” in the Bible is kosmos (κοσμος). John warns the believers in 1 John 2:15–17, Do not love the world nor the things of this world. If anyone loves the world, love for the Father is not in him; because all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh and the lust of the eyes and the vainglory of this life, is not of the Father but is of the world. And the world is passing away, and its lust, but he who does the will of God abides forever.
The cosmos to you may be completely different from my personal cosmos. Maybe the world to some people is planning the most Insta-perfect fomo-inducing wedding. Maybe it’s getting the Nobel Prize. Maybe it’s winning the Boston Marathon. For goobers like me, maybe it’s convincing everyone around me that I’m someone much cooler, smarter, — er than I am.

How do we escape our cosmos, our tailor-made opiate? The opposite of the love for the world is the love of the Father. The opposite of pursuing the lust of the world is doing the will of God. The opposite of the fate of the world (passing away) is the fate of the believers: abiding forever.

Earlier today, I got a few easily avoidable questions wrong on a quiz. I was at first mortified. I am ashamed to admit, I tried sneaking a peek at other people’s scores to see whether I was being a lout or merely average; by the grace of God, I didn’t see any. I spent the next few minutes being miffed. Then, by the grace of God, I turned to the Lord. Since when did I care about quibbly nibbly micropoints? Am I here in medical school to land a residency at Mass Gen, or am I here because it’ll bring the Lord back sooner this way? Am I programming this machine learning app to get some accolades and prize money, or because this is the path the Lord led me to take? It seemed that the quiet root of ambition and self-seeking in me had sent forth a few new rhizomes these last few months. While my face was firmly pressed to the grindstone, my old man was coming up out of the woodwork, unchecked. Well, I’m checking it now. If therefore the Son set me free [from wanting to be someone great! From wanting perfect grades! From wanting to do everything myself! From wanting not to lose my temper! From pretending to be a good listener! From from from from], I am free indeed. I want to shout at the sky! I’m free indeed! Everything is in Christ, and Christ is everything.