Musical.ly. The iPhone 6 (with a home button). YouTube collabs. Slime. These are all trademarks of what some people call the best year of their lives: 2016. In terms of pop culture and how colorful the world felt overall, this is the year that people have come to remember a decade later. But is living in a time that we will never have back a good choice? Or is our nostalgia a sign of how disheartened we have become as a society? Trying to recreate the years that have already passed is the main reason why things are not how they used to be, and why we have struggled to get back there.
For many people in Gen Z, 2016 was our middle school years. Those years were defined by carefreeness and the lack of responsibilities we all had. Even for most adults at that time, there was a positivity in the air that is lacking today. Still reveling in the Obama Hope Era, America was proud to have a president that represented our country well. This allowed us to decenter politics and live our lives to the fullest. People united over catching all the Pokémon on the Pokémon Go app or watching the top YouTube creators collaborate on silly food challenges. It seemed like you could connect with others just by walking outside, but now that is far from the case.
Following the election of President Trump in November of 2016, our daily lives have become much more political. The breaks from worldly affairs that we used to enjoy are nonexistent now. The unity that we had as a country seemed to chip away with each year of his presidency, resulting in the loss of hope and connectedness. The solution that most people have found to this problem is by remembering times when our lives were supposedly better. It is hard to blame anyone for missing what seems like a better time, but at what point does reminiscing do more harm than good? Almost every day, I encounter a video or article glamorizing a pre-COVID time. When it was 2016 or 2019, we weren’t looking back on how good 2013 was. We didn’t even conceptualize if we had it better a few years prior; we just lived. Current trends are a reminder of how different the world is, with global events on full display across social media. At the heart of the nostalgia for 2016 is the resentment of division that our country now faces. The events of the past decade have further separated the far left from the far right and in some cases more than that.
Most people who miss 2016 do not solely miss the pop culture moments. They miss a time when we were more unified. The nation is much more politically fueled, and there is less space for people to be complacent when it comes to current events. By living in the past, we are missing out looking towards the future. Nostalgia might make us feel like we are being more present, but the start of this year has proved it has become more of an escape from what we have faced in the 2020s so far. Bringing back 2016 has allowed us to take a break from the start of Trump’s second term and has let us temporarily ignore our realities. If we keep living to recreate a “better time” we are fated to miss what we have in front of us. Instead of trying to relive 2016’s cultural moments, we should realize what truly made that year good. We should use our complaints about the current state of our world to figure out where it all “went wrong”. While it is not a crime to celebrate 10 years since our favorite year, to get back to that, we need to learn how to come together. If we do, the fun challenges, trends and joys will follow suit.