My family’s most sacred moments are memorialized by candy — the gumdrops we shared on a road trip, the Junior Mint my brother sat on while we howled with laughter, the M&M’s we snuck into the movies via my mom’s purse. To eat these treats now is to remember instances of communal indulgence, my most cherished childhood memories.

The ritual of finding significance in sugar derives from my mother, a California transplant who misses nothing about her state of origin — New Jersey — but the sugarcoated confections she remembers from her youth and cannot find on the West Coast.

About two years ago, however, my mother discovered that Amazon could eliminate her fruitless searches. Now, within two days, she can receive three-pound servings of any dessert she coveted as a child right to our front door.

Those of us currently in college do not have to wait as long as my mom did to receive technological assistance in satisfying our craving for nostalgia. In fact, we can flirt with the past almost as soon as it fades out of the present. Spotify allows us to play “High School Musical” tracks whenever we want; Netflix shells out millions to offer up sitcoms from the early 2000s; fast fashion distributors churn out replicas of vintage staples like butterfly clips and cargo pants.

I, too, love indulging in nostalgia, but while it may be easier than ever before to languish in the romance of the past, we should be careful not to make ourselves the Nostalgia Generation. In order to ensure that our generational culture relies on innovation rather than recycling old ideas, we must resist the temptation to idolize that which evokes the past.

Take, for instance, Ariana Grande’s extremely anticipated music video, “thank u, next.” Even given Grande’s superstar status and high-profile relationships, much of the conversation anticipating the video’s release revolved around Grande’s apparent plan to reference four comedies from the early 2000s: “Legally Blonde,” “Mean Girls,” “Bring It On!” and “13 Going On 30.”

Amid the buzz following the video’s release, however, writer Gabby Noone tweeted: “trying to stay positive bc i love ‘thank u, next’ but there is something abt a nostalgia for the same 5 teen movies over and over in our modern culture that makes me sad for reasons I don’t know how to articulate.” Upon reading this take, I found myself agreeing with Noone; while I had loved the video, I ultimately worried that “thank u, next” relied upon a cultural crutch to garner commercial success.

I am not trying to be unnecessarily negative or take a public stance against Ariana Grande, but I do believe we must be wary of disproportionately valuing cultural products that reference or reboot.

Firstly, we are in a rapidly progressing society, and most works from the early 2000s do not reflect modern sentiments. By gratuitously affirming art produced when we were pre-pubescents, we do not leave enough space for new works made in a more progressive moment. For example, all four of the movies sampled by Grande focus on white female protagonists with heterosexual happy endings.

I don’t blame Grande for these one-dimensional representations of femininity and love, but instead assert that by constraining ourselves to the canon of early 2000s teenage rom-coms, we amplify narratives that have already received enough attention. In 2019, we should prioritize telling different stories, especially given our moment of cultural reckoning with damaging and exclusive representations of gender on the big screen.

Moreover, by worshipping the reboot, we give into a fundamental human urge to nestle ourselves into that which feels safe. The music, movies and other treats of our youth feel so good because they lie safely in the past, when we didn’t seriously worry about summer internships or participating in recruitment season.

The future — the unprecedented — contains our most unruly fears. Within that mess of anxieties, however, lies our great potential, a concept waiting to memorialize this moment and ultimately improve our world. We must fight for the new, even when we are terrified.

We are a progressive, dynamic and innovative generation, so let’s get out there and innovate — even if we stop to listen to the Jonas Brothers’ new single along the way.

Rachel Biggio is a junior in the College. Generational Gap appears online every other Monday.