Growing up in Flanders, I attended a traditional boarding school throughout the equivalent of Junior High and High School. In the evenings, after completing our schoolwork, we gathered in a recreation room reserved for our grade. The room had one TV set, but viewing was strictly limited—certainly no chance to binge-watch anything. Instead, our binge behaviors manifested differently. We would obsessively play billiards every evening for weeks until group dynamics abruptly shifted us to Fussball, ping pong, or various card games, each obsession lasting days or even weeks.
The room also held stacks of current and older issues of Flemish equivalents to magazines like Popular Science and Popular Mechanics. Those pages were windows into another world—bright visions of the future filled with moon bases, Mars missions, supersonic travel, and gleaming technology. Reading these magazines sparked my imagination, convincing me that such a future was imminent. Looking back, maybe this type of immersive reading was also a form of bingeing—though no one ever called it that.
Lately, I've been binge-watching the TV series For All Mankind. Yesterday, one particular scene featured technology that transported me right back to that recreation room and those magazines. Suddenly, I realized why this show resonates so deeply: it triggers nostalgia for a future that never arrived—a future I genuinely yearned for. Back then, Concorde was still flying, and faster, more luxurious air travel felt inevitable. Space exploration seemed easily within reach. Yet somehow, that ambitious vision slipped through our fingers.
Reflecting on this made me think about George Gerbner's cultivation theory—the idea that repeated exposure to certain narratives shapes our perception of the world. Perhaps my immersion in magazines like Popular Science and Popular Mechanics cultivated more than curiosity; it shaped real expectations about the future. For All Mankind hits home so powerfully because it seems to map out all those expectations I dreamed of.
Those magazines didn't just entertain me; they constructed an imagined future so vivid that its absence now feels like loss. Strangely, my nostalgia isn't for the past itself but for an idealized vision that never materialized. I ache not for what we lost, but for what we never quite achieved.