“Hey, do you remember ‘Doug?'” someone asked me last week.

Of course I remember “Doug.” I remember every show on Nickelodeon, the Spice Girls, light-up shoes and countless other ’90s phenomena. Is it because I have such a great brain that I’m able to harken so far back into the depths of my mind? No. It’s because my childhood was only a few years ago.

For years now, I’ve noticed that people of my college-aged generation (those between the ages of 18 and 25) love to reminisce about the good old days of growing up. This entails anything from themed parties to buying DVD sets of canceled children’s TV shows (and the buyer’s remorse that ensues). I find all of this pretty funny.

Let’s take two media examples: the show “The Adventures of Pete and Pete” and the Spice Girls. “Pete and Pete” has become a staple in any even slightly alternative student’s repertoire of memories because of its quirky, off-beat humor and frequent featuring of alt-celebrities like Iggy Pop, Michael Stipe and even Hunter S. Thompson. How great it feels to know that we alone stumbled upon this ancient gem! But really, the show ran until May 1996 (less than twelve years ago), and was rerun continuously until 2003. That’s less than five years ago.

The Spice Girls are another story. The cheeky Brits reached the height of their fame just a decade ago, with the release of “Spice World” – the movie that had pre-adolescent girls going crazy. Despite the fact that the group has never been out of the public eye in the UK since then, their fans, now roughly 20 years old, stepped back in time and collectively spent in the hundreds of millions of dollars (and pounds) to see them on the “Return of the Spice Girls World Tour” this past year.

Could these behaviors exist because marketers and merchandisers have conditioned us to want to buy, buy, buy? This is certainly a valid theory. For one thing, this certainly did not happen to generations past. For instance, TV Land, the pure nostalgia-based channel, premiered in 1996 and played shows like “The Honeymooners,” which originally aired 40 years before. Recently, however, the channel began airing episodes of “Murphy Brown” and even “Just Shoot Me!,” which aired as recently as four years ago.

Clearly, they’re onto something. But what? We always hear from Old Timers how we were deprived of a childhood; that MySpace and cell phones prevented us from enjoying the formative years of our lives, when we should have been climbing trees and playing stickball until sunset. If this is true, then maybe our gratuitous reminiscing is really just our vain clamoring to hold on to the last strings of our childhoods.

Or perhaps the opposite is true. Maybe our New Age has made us want to grow up so fast that we still feel like we need to be more mature. And what better way to be mature than to talk about how long it’s been since we were children. When all those B-list celebrities talked about their 1980s childhoods endlessly on VH1, maybe we looked up to them a little too much.

I guess my point is that it’s best to live in the here and now and enjoy where you are. And if you don’t hear ‘NSync again until you’re 40 years old, you’ll definitely survive.

– Jimmy Risolo is a sophomore communication studies major.