As of late, I’ve been caught up, like many of my comrades, with the fanfare of Stranger Things 2. Whenever I hear the soundtrack, particularly ‘Kids’, I find myself thrown into this specific feeling; ‘Kids’ captures the general tenor of hanging out with your best friends, riding bikes, staying up late, maybe finding your first love; it’s at the intersection of great potential, discovery, and the courage to wonder. This song is everything I love about childhood, despite having no semblance of what it was like growing up in the 80s.

My fascination with how Stranger Things tackles the feeling of childhood goes beyond nostalgia. There is something inherently inspiring about this distilled feeling of childhood that I no longer feel. I experience this ineffable feeling when I watch movies like Perks of Being a Wallflower, Boyhood, and Me, Early, and the Dying Girl. My suspicion is that I long for the phenomenology that manifests itself in childhood. Childhood experiences are more meaningful because they are relatively newer. Stranger Things captures this feeling quite well. In season one, the first time Mike calls Eleven pretty after dressing her in a disguise for school, we feel the weightiness of this moment both for Mike and Eleven. Life, in its every experience and manifestation, feels ever more consequential when you’re younger, making its indulgence ever more satisfying.

That is to say, however, even the pains of life benefit from this form of magnification. The anxiety we experience in the face of retrospectively trivial matters, especially upon rumination as adults, is what we often refer to as ‘immaturity’. Perhaps it is true that immaturity tends to breed dysfunction in society, and the wisdom of age serves to enrich one’s life, but the term ‘immature’, in my opinion, is far too dismissive of what is really at play. It’s not accurate to say that life progressively become less exciting as we age, but it is fair to say we lose valuable perspective, and I argue that the reason for some of our dissatisfaction with adulthood is this loss of perspective.

Late adolescence and early adulthood is an especially cruel period in our lives because we remember, so wistfully, the wonderment and optimism of a world we wish to discover in our childhood – one that we can idealize perhaps with the same naivety and innocence we embrace as children. Juxtapose this dream with a cold, brutish world of mundanity, absurdity, and meaninglessness, and we apprehensively march towards an insipid future of unanticipated predictability. You might say that it is precisely the unpredictability of the future that induces this neuroticism, to which I say, it is the juncture of neuroticism and wonderment that manifests the adolescent tension between the child’s phenomenology and the adult’s absurdism. We used to dream of a future that was our own and not imposed on us by an indifferent universe; instead, we fear the prospect of already knowing what our greatest pleasures feel like.

It is this kind of terror, among many others, that I feel when watching Stranger Things 2. For a moment, I slip away into the show’s pre-pubescent coterie and pretend as if I am experiencing life alongside them; whether it’s fighting Demogorgons or having their first kiss, neither feels more significant than the other. But it would be irresponsible to leave my analysis at mere catharsis. I know I romanticize childhood; I wouldn’t necessarily want to re-indulge in ignorance when I have much regard for the wisdom I’ve acquired through my experiences. It is true that one day when I’m older, I may look at this current period of my life – perhaps at my writing of this piece – with the wistfulness I now reserve for my childhood. In the words of Andy Bernard from The Office, another favourite show of mine, “I wish there was a way to know you’re in the good old days before you’ve actually left them”; we’re always in the good old days, I’ve come to realize.

I can’t escape the crushing anguish of having what once excited me descend into the miscellany of banal experiences. I miss old friendships that I thought would last forever. I miss that romance that filled me with an impervious optimism that percolated into every aspect of my life. I miss the feeling of discovering, for the first time, the things that truly make me feel fulfilled. I miss the familiarity and comfort of an old school or my first job. But I know that I will also miss the days I’m currently in – the days that for now, are unfamiliar and uncomfortable.