No one should be defined by their interests, but sometimes a person’s passions can help you get to know them better. Shervin, from San Jose, is a writer, photo editor, and a Lyft driver. He’s also an ’80s enthusiast. But his interest in the decade—the American version of it—has a lot to do with the fact that he simply missed out on the whole thing.

Shervin was born in 1992 (“I used to really hate that I wasn’t born in ’89, to say I technically was around for the ’80s,” he says), and his parents brought him to the United States in 1998. The whole family missed out on the American ’80s—and the ’80s in Iran were nothing like it.

For Iranians like Shervin’s parents, who had experienced a freer, more liberal Iran in the 1970s, the ’80s, were a restrictive, fearful time marked by the rise of the Islamic Revolution. Shervin notes: “When you bring up the ’80s to somebody from Iran, they are probably not going to have great memories. But when you bring up the ’80s with somebody in the US, they’ll go on and on about how great it was.”

Young Shervin began attending school in California, where he quickly realized he was in the dark about all things American ’80s—MTV, Miami Vice, and Members Only jackets. And his parents didn’t know about any of these cultural artefacts, either.

But the idea of looking back, of waxing nostalgic, already felt familiar. “Growing up, my parents were always reminiscing about the way things used to be. A time before things got difficult in Iran.”

For Shervin and his parents, “Home didn't really feel like a place. It felt like a time. I think it’s probably true for a lot of immigrants. They leave their home country in search of a better life. They’re never really able to recapture that magic that they had in their home country.” Adjustment and assimilation can be difficult everyday realities. It follows, then, that many immigrants who face the difficulty of adapting to life in a new country might enjoy casting their minds to a more settled time.

As Shervin’s interests in ’80s-era America grew, so did his interest in sharing those interests with his parents. At some point, the connection between his love for that decade and his family history clicked for him. “When I was in high school, somebody asked me, ‘Why are you so interested in the ’80s?’ It wasn’t until something like twenty-five years later [after we came to America] when I started to really connect the dots.”

Recently, though, Shervin has reckoned a bit with the intensity of his interest in the past. He’s dialing it back, even just a little—or at least living with an awareness he didn’t have before.

“A lot of people associate me with things from the ’80s, the classic cars. And for a long time, I had no problem with that. I sort of believed it too. I said, ‘Well yeah that's that's kind of who I am.’ That shapes everything about me. But nostalgia can be bad for you too. When you are so attached to an era from the past, you don’t allow yourself to live in the present, and I had no idea was really doing that to myself.”

Regardless of his own experience, Shervin believes there’s a lesson from this country’s past that should be heeded: “If you really start looking back, everyone is an immigrant in America. The only difference is we’re just new here. And I’m proud to be an immigrant. I’m proud to be Iranian-American.”