I heard on the radio last week that some ‘old fashioned’ sweets are making a comeback. The news immediately triggered memories of choosing sickly pink ‘shrimps’, blackjacks & fruit salads (always popular because you got lots for your precious pocket money!), and bonbons (guaranteed to dislodge any slightly loose fillings). Ah, nostalgia!
Then I started wondering why we regard the past so fondly? From repeats on TV, retro furnishings and fashions to cookery recipe revivals – we lap them up and reminisce about experiencing them the first time around (showing my age here!). So if they were so great in the first place, why did we abandon them in favour of the latest trends? And why do we now seek to recapture snippets of the past? Here are my thoughts.
Constant changes and improvements have enabled enormous progress to be made, affecting every part of life and business for those of us living in the developed world. While such changes satisfy our natural human desire for variety, they also eat away at another very basic need for security and stability.
Adapting to the speed of innovation is rather like riding a roller-coaster, exhilarating and a bit scary both at the same time! And even though it’s fun to do, we also need to get off the ride and slow down occasionally. But slowing down from life isn’t so easy.
Could it be that reconnecting with a time when the pace of life was more gentle is one way of temporarily switching off the seemingly never-ending rush of change? And could revisiting old favourites be an attempt to regain an element of control and find comfort in what has become an uncertain world?
What do you say? And how could you use this in your business?
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