Perhaps it’s also worth noting that, for the adults in the room, 2016 probably fell during those hopeful early adult years. “Many millennials were in late teens or early adulthood, a stage when people form their identities, become more independent, build deeper relationships, and start to picture their futures,” she says. In other words, the future was still full of possibility.
According to King, our sense of nostalgia for 2016 is less about wanting to actually regress and more about “trying to reconnect with a sense of meaning, continuity, and self-understanding that feels harder to access in the present.”
Millennials may feel particularly nostalgic for those early adulthood years because, well, the last 10 years didn’t exactly go to plan on both the global and personal scales. “It’s about missing a path into adulthood that was often interrupted,” King says. “Instead of growth and new choices, adulthood started to mean coping and surviving much sooner than expected.
“Now, 2016 stands out as a turning point, just before big changes began to reshape daily life and how people felt as a group.”
Of course, we didn’t know that a pandemic was coming to tear us even further apart ideologically and financially. That fear would become the governing political motivator. That technology would keeping pushing and pushing us toward becoming automatons ourselves. That reels and TikTok would become our only pastime and the dead-eyed thumb swipe our primary function. If you haven’t felt hope in 10 years, there are more than a few good reasons why.
“There is a quiet sense of loss wrapped up in this nostalgia,” says King. “People are not saying that 2016 was perfect. They are saying that life felt more manageable, more connected, and more human. The world still felt like something you could move through without constant tension or alertness.”
Perhaps that 2016 TikTok filter can help to bring back some of that hope we lost. “Nostalgia is not just about seeing the past as better, but about finding direction in the present,” says King. “It reminds people that meaning, connection, and hope were once easy to find. Even if they are harder to reach now, those memories can help keep hope alive for the future.”
A version of this article was previously published in Glamour UK.