I’ve been around a lot of Zoomers lately, and it’s making me feel outrageously old. Even though the age difference is only about a decade, the culture gap is shockingly large. It’s not so much that I’m the cranky old man who doesn’t know what TikTok is, but they don’t know or care about much of the culture that my brain was soaked in.

It feels like there is an unbroken chain of culture from early television to the 1990s, and then the cultural transmission starts to break down. Not only was I exposed to much of the programming that Gen X-ers were brought up on, but huge swaths of daytime cable were filled with the shows and movies my Boomer parents and their parents watched as well.

Heck, there’s something of a direct line to radio and vaudeville in there if you’re feeling generous.

There isn’t a clean generational divide where Millennials are one way and Zoomers are the other, but you can see the dissolution of the monoculture accelerate during this period as the internet rose to prominence.

But drop down a generation past the Zoomers, and you can see that the culture gap has become a canyon. Sure, sure, parents are still showing their kids “Star Wars” and “Sonic” — brands are eternal after all. But there’s absolutely no reason for Generation Alpha to watch old Warner Bros. cartoons or episodes of “The Beverly Hillbillies” unless their parents forced it down their throats.

Why watch the mediocre old stuff when there’s mediocre (or worse) new stuff that’s algorithmically recommended, right?

All of that is to say that I’m in my feelings about approaching middle age, and I keep finding myself tempted by the siren call of nostalgia. The thought of watching shitty ’90s sitcoms makes me smile, and I know that’s brain poison.

I don’t actually want to watch “Step By Step;” I just want to remember what it felt like to not have to go to work and pay bills. “Kenan & Kel” isn’t going to make me feel less sad just because I remember liking it when I could still drink orange soda without my stomach rebelling against me.

Unfortunately, I think the sucking void of nostalgia also impacts how I think about video games. The Marios and Zeldas obviously hold enormous sway over my emotions, and many of my favorite games of recent years are hearkening back to the games that excited me as a young person. I’m looking at you, “Baldur’s Gate III!”

I don’t want to become someone’s uncle who thinks that the only good game is “Crystal Castles.” I don’t want to be the baited by nostalgia for the rest of my life, but the heart wants what the heart wants, right?

There are new pieces of media that move me, but nothing can make me feel the way I felt when I was a teenager discovering my tastes. Becoming old, at least in my experience, means losing a sense of novelty and earth-moving excitement.

To be middle aged is to know what you want better than ever before, but never be able to hit those same highs from your youth.

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Image credit: Paolo Chiabrando