Genuine question: are you required to have peaked in high school to write for a teen drama?

I don’t have HBO, so everything I’ve heard about the show Euphoria I’ve heard secondhand. But after a celebrated first season, several articles came out criticizing the amount of sex and drug use in the second season. And this controversy isn’t new: Skins, a British teen drama named after a slang word for rolling papers, made all kinds of waves when it premiered for the same reasons as Euphoria: lots of sex, lots of drug use, and no attempt at discretion. The controversy reached its climax when MTV attempted an American remake, only to can it after one season due to accusations of child pornography.

But here’s the strange thing: I watched a few episodes of Skins. And I really liked it.

Why?

The reason I ask if peaking in high school is a prerequisite to writing for the Skinses and the Euphorias is because there’s a nostalgic quality to these types of shows. The gratuity of the sex and the drugs in these kinds of shows makes it feel like the writers are using these characters and plots to smile back on their younger days.

And again, what I watched of Skins, I liked. Which makes no sense. I have no reason to get nostalgic feelings from Skins. I’m not British. I was a teenager a generation later than the characters on Skins (2013-2017 to the 2007-2013 that Skins aired). I didn’t have a tight-knit group of friends in high school like the Skins Gang. The adults in my life weren’t criminally incompetent. And I definitely didn’t have the rampant partying, drug use and sex that made Skins so controversial.

But I think I figured out why. And do you know how I figured it out?

TikTok!

I can’t find the exact video (and judging from some technical errors a few posts ago, I couldn’t post it even if I could) but I was scrolling TikTok and I found the unthinkable: a video about nostalgia for the year 2020.

Yes, 2020. The year that the continent of Australia catching on fire and former President Trump firing the possible first shot of World War III was overshadowed by a global pandemic we still haven’t recovered from and more senseless murders of black people by police making global racial tensions explode. The year where the most nail-biting election in US history spun off into accusations of stolen elections and radicalized citizens breaking into the US Capitol and assaulting police officers. The year so awful, that Time magazine’s cover image for their December 2020 issue drew an X over 2020, something that it’s only previously done to condemn pitstains of humanity like Adolf Hitler, Saddam Hussein, and high-ranking members of al-Qaeda. That 2020.

Someone on TikTok was nostalgic for it.

And so were a bunch of people in the user’s comment section.

And this made me realize: the human brain is really, really dumb.

And I do mean the brain. What I’m about to talk about affects every human being on Earth, smart, dumb, black, white, rich, poor, religious, secular, and any other category you can come up with. Humans are obsessed with familiarity. There’s scientific proof for this: in the Scientific American article “Brain Seeks Patterns Where None Exist,” the author talks about illusory pattern perception, the tendency for people to see patterns in situations where there aren’t any. Researchers at the University of Texas at Austin put students through six different tests, including simulations of the stock market and asking subjects if they saw images in television static. Every student saw an image that wasn’t there or a pattern in the stock market that didn’t exist.

Our brains are so geared towards familiarity that it can cause problems.

The main reason addiction is hard to break is because of extinction bursts. Extinction bursts are a physiological reaction to a change in habits. Familiarity makes channels in the brain, and the brain really wants to stick to those channels. When you’re on the verge of changing your neuron paths, the brain will fire off one final blast of feel-good chemicals, trying to make you stick to your established neuron paths. This is why someone trying to quit smoking suddenly smokes a whole pack after a month of sobriety.

Stockholm syndrome is another way our brain’s preoccupation with familiarity can turn toxic. Stockholm syndrome is a psychological condition where the victim in a captor/victim dynamic develops a psychological dependency on their captor. This can be a hostage developing affection for their kidnapper, the abused in an abusive relationship staying in the relationship despite knowing the danger to their person, or abused children staying under their parents’ control even in adulthood, when they’re within their means to leave their parents behind and never return.

Our brain is so geared for familiarity that we grasp for familiarity, even when what was familiar was dangerous. Throughout the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Bible, the Israelite tribe repeatedly waxed nostalgic about their days as slaves to the Egyptians. I could dig around for Biblical references, but VeggieTales distilled all those instances down in a hilarious manner, so here’s that:

The Israelites longed for the days of Egypt. Those days included hard labor, living in a ghetto, and the wonton slaughter of their children. But given the choice between returning to their chains and the unknown of fighting for the Promised Land, many Israelites fell back on the familiar instead of God’s promise.

Domestic violence survivors can also suffer from dangerous nostalgia. After escaping their abusive situations, some survivors reminisce about the good times in their relationships, to the point they may be tempted to return to their abuser. These relationships may have included physical, verbal, or sexual abuse, gaslighting, or even attempted murder, but in the unfamiliar landscape of singleness and safety, the survivor’s psyche aches for familiarity, even though what was familiar was a life of walking on eggshells and dreading the next downturn in the relationship.

Now, you may be wondering what point I’m driving towards. I went from talking about teen dramas to talking about slavery and domestic abuse.

My point: nostalgia is always a lie.

Let me explain.

Before 2020, the worst year of my life was 2013. I went into the year being homeschooled when I desperately wanted to end middle school with my friends at my old school. I was a sullen, depressed emotional wreck. My parents heard about a church camp, and passed the word on to my youth group, and the week I spent at camp was unquestionably the best week of the year. Too bad such an emotional high led to such an emotional crash days after camp was over. I went into high school the same depressed, sullen emotional wreck I started the year as, and ended the year…you guessed it, sullen and depressed, with a bonus heap of disappointment that high school wasn’t nearly the adventure shows and movies had made it out to be.

And yet, when I found the “Top Hits of 2013” playlist on Spotify, I followed it. Liked the vibe, even. I nodded along and flashed back to the good times of 2013, a year I hated 360 days of.

Merriam-Webster defines nostalgia as “a wistful or excessively sentimental yearning for return to or of some past period or irrecoverable condition.” By its very definition, nostalgia is an idealization, a version of the past where anything negative is sanded off. The fact of the matter is, any time period sucks, and you don’t have to dig deep to find that out. Ask any civil rights activist or participant in Stonewall how fun the ’60s were. Ask any LGBTQ+ person how fun the ’80s were, assuming they didn’t die of an AIDS diagnosis the government did nothing to help with. Today, some people deem 2016 the last good year, but good luck telling that to anyone from 2016.

My point is: nostalgia is a coping mechanism. Humans are naturally resistant to change, and turn to what’s familiar when change comes a-knockin’. Heck, more research found that watching nostalgic shows or listening to familiar music helped people’s mental health during the COVID-19 pandemic. So, nostalgia isn’t automatically a bad thing. The danger comes when we get too lost in the rose-colored sauce. We can get myopic about the darker aspects of the past. In fact, entire political movements have sprung up with the goal of bringing the past to the present.

So, to conclude and to take words from a certain split-personalitied mummy-looking suit-wearing protagonist of an aight Disney+ series, embrace the chaos. To be comforted by the familiar is natural, to cling to the familiar and shy away from anything new is unhealthy, possibly dangerous. So run to the unknown. Remember: the past is nothing but the future that’s already happened.

I should trademark that. Until next time, dear reader.

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…but seriously, do you have to peak in high school to write for teen dramas?