Vintage Nostalgia and Existential Dislodgment

Walker Percy on Old Coca Cola Signs

In Lost in the Cosmos, Walker Percy wonders why people buy vintage. Why do people surround themselves with old Coca-Cola signs and antique furniture? Why do we buy retro clothing? Is it just aesthetic preference? Or is it because these objects serve as artifacts that they hope will impose meaning on a disoriented and dislodged sense of self in a disenchanted world?

His conclusion: People buy old things not because the things themselves are inherently meaningful, but because they hope these objects will stand in for the meaning their lives lack.

Percy argues that in the modern age, the “self” experiences a profound loss of identity and purpose, detached from traditional frameworks of meaning (like religion, community, or stable cultural myths). In this existential vacuum, the self struggles to know itself, and so it seeks meaning externally. A life without symbolic weight floats above reality, so we buy objects that carry a historical aura.

The nostalgia of “vintage” feels like it embodies a past that was coherent, ordered, or authentic, even if that coherence is romanticized. By surrounding ourselves with artifacts, we subconsciously hope to borrow meaning to anchor ourselves in something real and enduring. Percy argues that this as a semiotic strategy: we treat objects as signs that point beyond themselves to a more meaningful time or identity, hoping to anchor our floating sense of self.

But Percy is skeptical. The “lostness” of the modern self—trying to recover meaning, not through transformation, or faith, or genuine self-knowledge, but through curated surroundings that mimic the appearance of meaning, will suck the meaning from the objects.

The empty self is vampiric. It will empty the world of meaning before it will find meaning for itself unless it finds meaning beyond the world.

*This is taken from an upcoming lecture on the Quadrivium and Astronomy