I subscribe to a newsletter called The 92. Every issue has a three-question poll, and every single time, I answer it. Not because I have to. Because it is a small, dumb, delightful trip down memory lane, and I cannot help myself.
The questions are not deep. Toy Story or Rugrats. Surge or Crystal Pepsi. The Trapper Keeper you wanted versus the one your mom actually brought home. Silly stuff. And I answer all of it, gladly, week after week.
What I am really doing when I answer that poll
Here is the part worth sitting with. When I tap an answer, I am handing a marketer a clean little data point about myself. My rough age. My cultural reference set. The fact that nostalgia is a button that works on me. Whatever a person can read into a Rugrats answer, they get to read it, for free, because I had fun giving it away.
And the marketer on the other side is not dumb. They could sell that data if they wanted to. They almost certainly have their own 90s-nostalgia products to sell. At a minimum there is an Amazon affiliate link sitting one click from my warm, fuzzy, just-remembered-the-Trapper-Keeper brain. It is a quietly brilliant little machine, and I climb into it on purpose every week.
It is not just one newsletter
The 92 is one example. My feeds are full of this. The 80s and 90s nostalgia accounts on Instagram and Facebook, the ones that post a photo of a cassette adapter or a Blockbuster membership card with the caption if you know, you know. I follow a pile of them. They cost me nothing.
Except they do cost me something. They cost me attention. And attention is time, and time is the one resource I cannot earn back. [Bobby riff: expand here on whether free is the right word for nostalgia content. The trade is real - my attention for their feeling-good - it is just a quiet trade. Is it a fair one? I think mostly yes, as long as nobody is lying to me. Worth pulling apart.]
Why it works: people pay to feel good
Strip all of it back and you land on something basic. People want to feel good. People will spend money, attention, and personal data to feel good. Nostalgia is one of the most reliable feel-good buttons there is, because it does not only sell you a product. It hands you back a version of yourself from a time before the bills and the back pain. That is a powerful thing to stand next to a checkout button.
[Bobby riff: how a real business uses this]
[Bobby riff: this is the section to build out later. How does a small business use nostalgia without being cynical about it? Not every brand has a 90s to sell. But every brand has customers with a past. The work is finding the genuine nostalgic thread - the founder's story, the town, the way the industry used to feel - and using it instead of bolting on a fake one. There is a SWFL angle here too: old Fort Myers, the shops people grew up walking into. And there is a line between warm and manipulative that is worth naming out loud.]
For now this is a note to myself, written right after I answered The 92 poll for what felt like the hundredth time and finally asked why I keep doing it. The short version: it feels good, and feeling good is the whole game. More on this later.