In the final chapter of Everything for Everyone, M.E. O’Brien interviews Alkasi Sanchez in Brooklyn, on May 2, 2072. Sanchez is an historian of the Mid-Atlantic Free Assembly, a group that formed after the the first New York Commune was created in 2052. Sanchez concludes with this message:

...I think we should be done with nostalgia. To totally refuse nostalgia altogether. The next twenty years are a chance to turn outwards, to be seriously facing all the rapid and exciting changes humans are going through. There are huge tasks that will require a vast amount of human ingenuity, creativity, and effort. Like rebuilding ecological systems, restoring biodiversity, reversing climate change. Or, life in orbit and exploration of the solar system is really just starting. Earlier, I mentioned the proliferation of human body modifications. I think that sort of thing is going to continue in the coming decades and get more and more common. We can finally start really thinking creatively about who we are in this universe, who we wish to become. Nostalgia is a toxin for that expansive visioning that needs to happen. We need to be done with nostalgia.

O’Brien & Abdelhadi, Everything for Everyone, page 239

Sanchez is a historian. They aren’t arguing for people to forget the past, or to disengage with it; quite the contrary. Rather, they are arguing that nostalgia—the sense that the past is a home we must return to—is an affliction when brought to the work of imagining change. As much so now, I think, as it will be in the future.