Future Nostalgia: What Does it Actually Mean In Terms of COVID-19 and College Seniors

Pop princess, Dua Lipa, released her incredible sophomore album Future Nostalgia this morning, full of love-struck ballads like Levitating and Love Again and fun dance bops like Pretty Please and Hallucinate, and of course – my favorite single, Physical.

Critics have already rated it as the best album of 2020 so far, in terms of a cohesive pop album and a breakaway from the curse of sophomore slumps. But in this day and age, what does Future Nostalgia actually even mean? A seeming oxymoron to begin with: Future (looking forwards towards what is it come) and nostalgia (a longing for what has passed), how can we celebrate or even to begin to understand what future nostalgia even means in the era of COVID-19?

For many of us young adults, we have been laid off from our jobs. For many of us college seniors, it means we don't have the last semester of fun in college that we were promised. I teeter along the fine line of both of groups, having graduated a semester early and having been able to secure a job soon after I did so. But in these unprecedented times, the company I had signed up to work with was not prepared to economically handle such a global disaster, and I was laid off a month and a half after I started.

Enough self-pity, for now. I suppose it's what I deserve after feeling so cocky that I had a job in the middle of this crisis: I was so happy that at least I'd gotten a job before the rest of my friends that I started to feel superior towards them. I never cared that I didn't get to have the Senior Week of Fun that comes before or around finals. I never allowed myself to feel sad that I was losing an extra semester with them because I rationalized it that I was saving money, and an extra semester of stress and academic assignments that I didn't want to do.

It wasn't until tonight, when I'd nearly finished a bottle of red wine after being stuck in my apartment in New York City for close to two weeks, that I was texting a close friend of mine who I had lived with during my final semester of college that I began to realize just how much I was missing.

During my final semester, and what she thought of as her penultimate semester, we lived together on one side of our suite, sharing a bathroom and a thin wall. And we believed that we were also sharing quarters with a ghost that came in the form of our Harry Styles cut-out, a gift she had gotten for another friend of ours living on the opposite side of the suite, off of a sketchy website. There were many moments during our time living together where we actually believed said ghost was haunting us: one time when we were in our common room doing homework and all of a sudden we both heard this weird jingle. How whenever one of us couldn't sleep at night, we might happen to hear a strange rustling of noise by the front door and immediately accuse the ghost.

Those memories weren't memories to me when they were happening – they were real experiences. I laughed so much my sides hurt when we recounted our experiences with the ghost with each other, even though it became downright freaky. But it hurt tonight, when I was drunk off of red wine, when my friend recounted an experience that I told her about and couldn't remember.

Realistically, I know that experiences become memories and memories get forgotten but I never thought it would happen so soon. After all, I'm still technically a college senior, I just happened to finish classes ahead of everyone else. Why should that mean I've already forgotten precious moments with my former roommates? My former friends?

In the short time it's been since I've graduated college (two months as opposed to two years), my friends have already started drifting apart and COVID-19 has wrought havoc upon the world. It feels like millennia ago I was laughing with my friends about the stupid ghost in our suite, about our random roommate turning down the heat when we were freezing and turned it all the way up. I remember those nights we would come back to our dorm, stumbling drunk, and the night I was so wasted I took the Brita filter out of our fridge and attacked my friend with it.

But at the same time, I don't remember it. Not the way I did, when I was still living in that dorm, and we would bring it up to make each other laugh. The same way I don't remember my friend mentioning the experience of me hearing some dragging noise. How vague is that? But why don't I remember it, if I clearly told her about it?

And it's now that I begin to finally feel pity for the college seniors, whose final semesters have been taken from them. Whereas I felt that my world was ripped right out from under my feet when I found out I had been laid off from my job, I'm just now beginning to understand how they must feel to not be able to live out these final experiences and say these last goodbyes that I could. I don't remember my final week living in the dorm with my friends, but I have videos and social media to prove that I was prepared to say the goodbyes I had to. These seniors never will.

It might feel trivial, mourning the last senior semester of college. Especially in the backdrop of everything that's happening, of individuals who are affected by COVID-19. But I have always told my friends and my family when trying to help them through a hard time that pain is pain, and you are valid to feel pain. I am pained that I have been laid off and I have been cut off from my friends and coworkers in this time of social distancing. I am pained that I don't remember my senior semester as much as I wished I could. I am pained that my friends aren't going to be able to have the fun experiences they paid and signed up for.

And I am pained for the world, in the state we are in.

Future Nostalgia, then. What does it actually mean? Is it an awareness that the time we have on this Earth is short and we need to enjoy it as much, in the moment, as we can? Is a fun, bold, timeless honor to the pop-stars who have trail-blazed before us? What should future nostalgia mean to you?

To me, it's a perfect, conceptual pop album by an icon in our time. It's also a lament to the college seniors who should be on campus right now, studying for midterms and worried about a haunted presence in their suites. An ode to the times I took the Brita filter out of the fridge and sprayed cold water all over my friend, because I was drunk. The times when we were stressed out and depressed, demanding hugs from each other, while we were studying in the common room over homework that hardly matters now. The times when we would pregame with White Claws and cheap beer before going out to the local bar that everyone went to (if you went to our college).

An ode to the pranks I pulled: when I hid behind a piece of furniture in our dorm and jumped out at random times to scare my friend. An ode to the mornings after when we ate carbs and nothing but carbs, trying to suffer through Friday hungover. An ode to all of the silly TV shows we binged together, bundled up in blankets, laughing because we were in the presence of one another.

To the juniors right now, who are wishing this was their final semester – I know how you feel. Trust me, I know how much you wish this was your final academic semester of college. But enjoy this, while you have it. Savor the memories while you can. If you want to, document them in the form of diary entries or take photographs.

Because you might realized that all along you were burned out, and that when you leave, you have no recollection of the good times anymore.