That strong melancholy for the early 2000s

This happens to me from time to time; I fall into this sort of pit of really strong melancholy and just sit for hours wishing I could suddenly be kicked back 20 or 25 years into the past, at least if for a day, and recently I fell down the pit again when I found myself watching the anime Azumanga Daioh.

For those who don't know, Azumanga Daioh is an anime based on a manga which was published from 1999 to 2002, and it aired back in 2002. It's a perfect example of not only the anime of that time, but also more or less the culture and day-to-day life of back then. Rental videos, early internet, blocky cars, no smartphones, no internet everywhere, just life. From this, I just hopped on the nostalgia train.

I'm 23, I didn't really live in the early 2000s, but due to living in a rather insular city in a developing country, most of my childhood I was exposed to '90s and early '00s stuff, so I grew up watching '90s Nickelodeon cartoons and playing on a Sega Genesis, and I was still playing on a PlayStation 2 and listening to music on a CD or downloading it from Ares when the PS4 was announced.

I've just grown really tired of modernity; everything being digital now is truly harsh on me because I've always enjoyed analog stuff, and while I like the convenience, I certainly regret not being able to find and read comic magazines anymore, going to that one store to buy pirated PlayStation 2 games, or just watching The Simpsons on TV instead of doomscrolling through algorithm-driven social media feeds. I find it so ironic that these days we have everything within reach, be it music, a book, a game, a TV show or whatever, yet it all feels dull, because experiences no longer feel unique. I miss when I'd buy a game and play it for weeks because it was basically the only thing I had to play, and now I just sit here staring at my Steam library unsure of which of the thousands of games at my disposal I should spend the next 100 hours of my life into getting every last achievement. Similarly, I've grown really tired of socializing only through a chat app because a lot of people no longer want to just hang out for an hour to have a chat.

I like the convenience of modernity, but good lord, it feels like the human experience gets murdered day by day, and so I can't help but to look back two decades ago and sort of revel in the bygone beauty of an era which lasted too little, when digital stuff was just emerging and the world was still in analog mode and doing stuff actually meant something.

/rant