Do you suffer from nostalgia?

Nostalgia is a mental disorder affecting between 80 to 90 percent of the population of the industrialized world. Nostalgia affects the memories and emotions of sufferers, making them believe certain things were better in the past.

Scientists divide nostalgia into two overlapping types: Type I and Type II.

Type I

Sufferers of Type I nostalgia believe that things like popular music, television, and society in general were better in the sufferer's teens and early twenties.

The causes of Type I nostalgia include, but are not limited to: mid-twenties disillusionment, selective editing of memory, confabulation, previous drug use (including alcohol), neural inelasticity, the general lack of responsibilities of those in their teens and twenties, and raging teenage hormones which amplify the joy of discovering and sharing cultural artifacts.

Type II

Sufferers of Type II nostalgia believe most things were better before they were born. The main symptoms of Type II nostalgia are listening solely to classic rock/oldies radio stations, glorifying past generations, wishing for "simpler times", and forgetting how much worse racism, sexism, disease, and crime were if you go back a few decades.

Sufferers of both types are prone to:

• Using phrases like "kids today" and "I hate hipsters".
• Criticizing modern fashion trends while thinking nothing odd about layered flannel, neon leg warmers, or bell-bottoms.
• Confusing personal preferences with objective measurements of quality.

Treatment

There is no cure for nostalgia, but it can be controlled. Treatments include listening to modern music, and looking at your high-school yearbooks to realize how stupid most things were then, too.