Nostalgia Devil

The Nostalgia Devil is an invisible creature. They prey on the people whose lives have been in a downward spiral. When you’ve been hurt so much by a system and an earth that doesn’t acknowledge your existence with anything more than a scoff whenever it’s reminded that you do, in fact, exist, you’re a prime target.

The Nostalgia Devil can see minds. In fact, they see minds differently than every other creature or monster. They see every swirling neuron, every spark powering every tiny light bulb. Some minds grow far too bright for them. Those minds are so overpoweringly loud and bright, with neurons swirling, sparking, screaming with energy and ideas, powering enough light bulbs to light Brooklyn. Those are the minds that the Nostalgia Devil cannot penetrate.

When the Nostalgia Devil sees a dimly lit, dark mind, they know that the vessel’s mind is weak. It has been worn down by the system. Years of neglect, beat down, bottled up anger and depression, disregard for the vessel’s emotions; all those things will slowly crack your light bulbs. And when they’re gone, they’re gone. Your mind grows dark. Your face grows a permanent frown. Your eyes grow dark, round rings under themselves as you peer at blue light through your eyelids for hours every twilight.

Your whole life grows dark. And that’s when they strike. The present is full of angst. Anger. Sadness. Anger at the system that’s pushed you down, the system that is engineered to crush every part of your soul; the system that resents and despises anyone outside the inner circle; the system that turns the people who never escape through their meat grinder into soulless god-damn zombies who work for their corporations and sour society with their rotten attitudes and brainwashed opinions. The system that will never care about you.

The Nostalgia Devil reads into minds like an English teacher reads into How to Kill a Mockingbird. Deep into the subtext; between the lines. They know what you think. They manipulate you and make you hide in your memories. Because back then, you were stubborn and full of blissful ignorance. The system churns you through as you age. When you’re a kid, when you’re young- you’ll always be your happiest. You’ll remember only the good stuff, because that’s just how your mind functions at that age. You remember how simple your life was.

And, well, while they might not sound like a devil, they certainly are. The more you peer into your past, the more you ignore the present. The manipulative mass-meat grinder churns you through easier. All the Nostalgia Devil does is soften you down and lube the blades as you get churned into the massive bowl beneath it with all the other people who’ve been turned into mindless meat mush.

If you think of the mass-meat grinder as one massive computer, think of the Nostalgia Devil as the CPU and cooling fans. The computer works just fine without it, but with less performance, less efficiency. The Nostalgia Devil progresses it along and turns the process into an efficient, mindless job for the computer. And if you’d really like to complete such a drab metaphor, the humans are just small, miniscule files. Kilobytes in a Solid State Drive with 2 Terabytes of storage.

The system’s computer is massive. If you add maybe 900 people with the same file size into the Solid State Drive and check the storage before and after, you’d see the most miniscule, insignificant changes. Eventually, you’ll realize that’s exactly how much these people care about you. Not just about the fact that you exist. Even if they associate with you or employ you, or you’re their customer: they will never give half of a flying f*ck about anything that you want. They will never make your life better. They care about themselves and the other, larger files in their SSD.

And that’s one system. One corporation. There are thousands of other systems, other mass-meat grinders in so many other parts of the Earth, in different states, countries, continents. Across so many oceans. And when you think of all those systems as computers too?

You’re just as insignificant. Thousands, millions of terabytes of storage. You’re nothing to them. All they care about is efficiency. The more cooling, the better. More devils. More pain. More anger, more sadness, more depression, more nostalgia. Even their Nostalgia Devils are just employees in the largest conglomerate office ever made. They work overtime, every day, in warehouses, offices, from home, from across the Atlantic, the Pacific, the Arctic… Do I need to carry on? They’re everywhere. It’s like trying to count how many snowflakes make up a blizzard.

The Nostalgia Devils are in their files too. And their file size is barely any larger. They’re just as insignificant as you are. All it means is that they’re even deeper into the system. They’re just as exploited as you are. The world is controlled by supercomputers and angry world leaders and billionaires. They want you to turn a blind eye. They want you to become burnt-out, angry, sad, and they want you to ignore what they’ve done. They want more nostalgia, they want more anger, they want more meat for their mass-meat grinders, so they can make subpar gray burgers to sell to customers just one rung up on the economic ladder. It’s an endless cycle with billions of grinders, billions of systems, billions of people stuck in nostalgia and stuck in their past. Nobody gets out.

If you hide in the past, you’re never going to escape your present.

Grow. You have to grow. You have to keep your mind bright. You have to find your way.

You have to change the world. You have to save it. You have to save all of us.

We’re all too deep in. And maybe you are too.

We can’t hide in our memories anymore. We have to change. For the better.

Or we’ll all become Nostalgia Devils.