Sorry boomers, but changing Snickers to Marathon bars won’t bring your hairline back

Has our preoccupation with the past finally gone too far? Ryan Coogan says it has – and it’s about much more than renaming a chocolate bar

I’m sure we’ll be seeing Opal Fruits and Raiders backs on the shelves any day now (Wikimedia Commons/Alamy)

Is it just me, but has our penchant for nostalgia reached critical mass? Don’t get me wrong, I love yearning for a half-remembered past as much as anybody, but it seems to be all we do these days.

Endless remakes of films whose original casts are claiming their pensions; musicians copying the looks and sounds of people who retired before they were born; billion-dollar franchises based on characters who were first conceived during the Second World War. We even forced poor Hugh Jackman into a pair of yellow spandex pants to play Wolverine 24 years after his debut in the role, with the promise of further humiliations to come. It’s like we’re incapable – or scared – of trying anything new.

The latest entry in this parade of pointless pining? The Mars company has announced that it will be rebranding its Snickers bar as “Marathon”, which the elderly and decrepit among you will remember as the confectionery’s “original” name (although technically Snickers was the chocolate’s original name when it was first released in the US in the 1930s, and was changed to Marathon in 1967, allegedly because “Snickers” sounded too much like “knickers” for our delicate UK ears).

To be clear, it’s the same chocolate bar in the wrapper. Hell, it’s the same font on the label. It’s just the letters that are different. And yes, it’s just a marketing stunt, but it’s a stunt that really speaks to our total inability to get over the past.

What’s really baffling about this is that Marathon reverted to Snickers in 1990 – which, incidentally, is the year I was born. That means you’d need to be 40 at a minimum to have even a hazy recollection of the old branding, and realistically you’re looking at 45+ before the nostalgia really kicks in.

Is the midlife crisis crowd really the biggest audience for chocolate? Call me crazy, but when I picture sweets, I think “kids” – not some middle-aged, middle-management investment banker with bags under his eyes, disappointment in his heart and blood pressure medication in his desk.

Maybe not, but they’re certainly the biggest audience for complaining about how bad modern life is. It’s become such a staple for a certain kind of British identity, that no wonder companies are trying to mine it for profit. I’m sure we’ll be seeing Opal Fruits and Raiders backs on the shelves any day now, ripe for the enjoyment of glassy-eyed Gen Xers whose music careers never quite took off. Unfortunately for them, you can change the name on the label, but you can never make them taste as sweet as they did before you found out about taxes and divorce.

And it’s not just companies, either – it’s our politicians, too. Mawkish, superficial nostalgia is basically Reform UK’s entire platform. At this week’s party conference, Lee Anderson stood up on stage whinging “I want my country back” to a crowd of pensioners whose idea of “my country” seems to be mostly pieced together from bawdy seaside postcards and episodes of Heartbeat. The party’s about three months away from offering to build your grandma a time machine and reunite the Beatles.

But the truth is that reverting a chocolate bar to its old name, or dragging all your favourite actors out of retirement, or kicking immigrants out isn’t going to bring your hairline back. It isn’t going to bring back the version of the world you remember growing up in, because chances are that version of the world never really existed to begin with.

The past is gone. It’s a hard thing to accept, but unfortunately the flow of linear time cannot be reasoned with. The good news, though, is that you still have a whole future laid out in front of you (some of us more than others). You can make it whatever you want it to be, and you have all the time in the world to do it.

Because luckily for you, life isn’t a sprint – it’s a Snickers.