Barely a month has passed since we made our flustered entry into 2026. But it seems like the verdict is already in: your honour, we’ve had enough. Bring back 2016. Tastes were bad, but times were better. You’ll find this nostalgia in the vines and 2016 outfit inspo reels on your Instagram feed. It’s in the colourful return of Zara Larsson’s Lush Life. Many influencers I follow, from pop culture satirists to the guy who sings ballads about the Louvre heist, are posting pictures of themselves from ten years ago. My generation on Anglophone social media have decided to fall back in love with fidget spinners, Snapchat filters, and sappy Tumblr quotes.
2016 is childhood. It’s an aesthetic. It’s kitsch. It’s embarrassing, therefore sincere. It’s collective. It’s everyone’s “last normal year”, because, so it goes, the first Trump presidency ruptured the timeline and the American timeline is universal. And above all, best of all, 2016 is gone forever. The past is the absolute elsewhere. If it were not so, we couldn’t have shaped it in the exact likeness of our longings. If we could actually have 2016 back, we would no longer make it our cathartic refuge.
Was 2016 really so great? You’d have to be sufficiently affluent and unperturbed to enjoy that year as a paradise lost. The 2016 divide would be nonsensical to those for whom the world has always been on fire. As for myself, I was in my early teens in 2016. My feelings towards it are fond but illusionless, and the year doesn’t stand out among the others. I was semi-familiar with the pop culture references that the trend reminisces today, but not raised in it. China’s 2015 military parade lodged itself more intimately in my political memory than Brexit and Trump did in 2016. What it’s making me see is that the trend exists only in a depersonalised and depoliticised memory. There you have an aesthetic, a utopian field of signs.
But this is nothing new. We’ve always been nostalgic, and its utopias have always been consumable. No matter how jaded we are with Disney remakes, they just keep coming, in the hyper-real image of our childhood. Studio Ghibli aesthetics are nostalgic: already, generative AI has pushed out numerous stylistic replicas. 90s Britpop is nostalgic, and it still sells – ask anyone who got an overpriced Oasis ticket in 2024. Cottagecore is nostalgic: a quick Pinterest search shows us the quaint white curtains and garden paths of a pre-internet pastoral, with its tactful amnesia of the real labours of country life. Post-socialism is nostalgic: I’ve seen the inert left-wing melancholia that is best pictured in vintage Sputnik pins and revolutionary internationalist posters. It goes with the embarrassed awareness that we’re wistful not for the past our grandparents lived, but for its unrealised ideals, now safely buried in a dead future. In nostalgia, there is a present futility that we dance around by being self-conscious, ironic, and entertained.
Last term my college hosted a 1920s-themed black tie dinner. The cheerful email reminded us that we, too, are in the hedonistic 20s, living through economic recession and authoritarian ascent. Happily for us, there would be live jazz in the bar afterwards. It was a great night, I committed to the bit. There I was, dancing Lindy Hop with my friend. I wore qipao in homage to the fashionable Shanghai ladies of exactly a century ago. We took pictures on a thrifted 2000s Fujifilm camera.
Yet inevitably, this was accompanied by the wry knowledge that the 1920s, too, were nostalgic. Europe’s traditional Right lamented the passing of religion and order. The Nazis were nostalgic for a mythical Germany of the pure-blooded Volk. Revivalist right-wing nostalgia today is sellable and iconographic, from MAGA hats to algorithms that push St. George’s flags and trad wife content to the right audiences. We’re buffeted on all sides by nostalgia of every kind. Absent-mindedly, industriously, we produce a great desire for pasts, and create desirable pasts to match. Then we buy them up.
The thing we really don’t know what to do about is the future. Late-night conversations with friends my age reveal the uneasy suspicion that we’re incapable of creating a future – individual or collective. We speak anxiously about graduating Oxford and the job market, about wasted potential, about the daily injustice that descends on others in our phone screens and not ourselves. It’s easy relief, especially now, to miss the 2010s. Through the cringy filters, it emerges as an innocent time where many futures felt possible.
Now that we’ve arrived, we’re convinced that we’re living – and responsible for – the worst possible one. Is the 2016 nostalgia trend not just pop culture brought back from the dustbins, but endlessly recycled facsimiles of lost hope? Is the power to multiply and consume our one truly democratic cultural power?
There’s something reassuring about the nostalgia that tells us our best years are behind us. Agency lost in the present regains dignity in an uncomplicated collective past. If now is the time of monsters, they’re happy we’re distracted. But it’s also the now that demands action and imagination from us. I’d like to think that the present, narrowing between desirable pasts and inconceivable futures, is still ground enough to stand on. Nostalgia gives us much-needed relief and fun, as long as it’s not paralysing. If the future struggles to be born, we need to start preparing for a livable one.
