As I announced earlier, I am working on a new website and a new book. The site will go live shortly, and I am writing the last content for the section called 'trends'. In this I describe a couple of typical human motives, like the free man, the involved man, and the visual man. I wrote about these before in my book. For the new article 'the nostalgic man' I made a first draft. I like it myself. Maybe you have more examples of products helping the nostalgic man now, earlier, or in the future. Let's see!

People long to earlier times enormously. To the time when their own brains were still growing, and when they interpreted and started to understand the world in their own way. Like the world was then, they could still understand it. It has been discovered that people, irrespective their generation, always have most memories from the period between 15-17 years. Not surprisingly, people often talk about ‘their time’.

The nostalgic man also is fondly helped by technology. People like to have physical objects they can have in their house. A house, also an example of normal (old) technology thus is not only there for safety, but also to cherish memories. After all, by saving memories, we can call back old emotions. The photo album and the video have exactly the same function: to relive old times. But also musea only going back an couple of years, books like ‘The image of ...’, or TV formats like ‘The feeling of…’, fulfill exactly the same need. And of course also the relatively new form of nostalgic experience: the buy-DVD from a certain year.

The nostalgic man will have a great period. We will be able to travel through the time of virtual representatives of our physical worlds without a problem. We can go ten years back, twenty years. or even one hundred years. We see reproductions of happenings of that time, which look so real that it feels like a deja-vu. But in that same time we can get new experiences. We look like we did then, we talk like we did then, and we even meet our friends we had then. And those friends haven’t changed at all! In reality these friends of course do have changed, but with the ‘youth-filter’ no one notices the differences any more. We will feel the same energy, and laugh like we did then. The world was so unconstrained. The world is so unconstrained. And of course in real life we did become older. And maybe, after two hours fun in the virtual world, we will have take a nap in the physical world. But then we will be very comfortably dreaming in our nice and soft bed. And in the mean time, our virtual personality keeps going if we want it to.

We travel through space and time, and anything you have ever experienced (or missed), you can alsways do again. This trend is completely clear.

• in Dutch