Boomerangs are back, rose gold has returned, wired headphones, and the glow of the Rio de Janiero filter are unmistakeable. What started as ironic nostalgia has quickly descended into something closer to cultural retreat.
It’s hard to ignore the fact that we are living in a politically uninhabitable world. 2025 was a year defined by fear, suffering, genocide and hunger. No wonder we are already so desperate to escape 2026 – it almost seems like things really can’t get that worse.
But against this reality of political instability, the return of the Snapchat dog filter seems less innocent that it appears. But beneath it lies an unwillingness to confront our crumbling political landscape. Instead, we have turned to what can only be described as nostalgic regression.
The resurrection of 2016 has become a coping mechanism for an increasingly frightening world. We are clinging to a past that felt hopeful, safe, and optimistic. Even if recency bias has clouded our judgement – 2016 actually wasn’t that great – it is surely preferable to the world we are facing now.
Take recycled trends: fashion was recently dominated by the Y2K trend, with pink leopard print filling our wardrobes, low-rise jeans making a comeback, and Bratz inspired makeup flooding our Pinterest boards. Look no further than our cinemas which tell the same stories, saturated with remakes and reboots.
But at what point does nostalgia stop being a point of inspiration, and instead starts triggering warning bells of a creative drought? We are no longer merely recycling trends, but are recycling entire years.
The revival of 2016 has been almost entirely catalysed by Tik Tok. Barely 3 weeks into 2026, people are already yearning for what are described as ‘simpler times’. The mannequin challenge has returned, Zara Larson’s Lush Life and Justin Beiber’s Sorry are trending once again, whilst former Musical.ly stars like Jacob Startorious and Baby Ariel are returning from the digital grave to recreate their iconic #crownme lipsync videos. With over 1.9 Million posts under the hashtag #2016, comment sections reveal a collective enthusiasm for this nostalgic regression.
Yet, beneath this excitement, lies something slightly more revealing. Comments like, “I wish the world was this amazing again”, “What a time to be alive”, “When we were happy”, all share an undeniable sense of defeat. We are so dissatisfied with the world we are living in, that we are attempting to crawl back into a safe nostalgic hole of wired headphones, Pokémon GO, Triangl bikinis, and fidget spinners.
How long will it be before this tunnel turns into Coraline’s well? This nostalgia will soon become disorientating. The line between reality and the past will blur whilst the present is quietly ignored.
The irony in this revival is hard to miss. Lean On by MAJORLAZER, the undeniable anthem of 2016 has resurfaced, and the irony in its lyrics are hard to ignore. The line ‘We were golden young’, quite literally, harps back to an era where everything was rose gold, while ‘We would only hold on to let go’ perfectly encapsulates of our desire to cling onto something that cannot return. There is something eerie about attempting to force a time gone by back into the present.
Much of this revival has been driven by millennials who were teenagers in 2016 . However, Tik Tok’s dominant users are aged 18-24 year olds. Most of us Gen Z viewers were around 10 years old in 2016. Our nostalgia is not for our own formative years, but a nostalgia for a life we were promised but never quite had.
And that is slightly more worrying.
We are craving a vision of youth we feel was robbed from us. Whilst I admit that I would have thrived as a Doc Martens wearing, choker clad 2016 teenager with dyed blue hair and a Starbuck’s frappuccino in hand, this desire comes from a place of anxiety. We are afraid to live in the world we currently inhabit, so we turn to recreating a version we imagine would have been kinder to us.
This fear does make sense – the internet is no longer an innocent place for “get ready with me’s” or Vines. AI and doomscrolling has made it feels like a haunted landscape of surveillance, hostility, and exhaustion. Perhaps the revival of 2016 reflects a desire for a more digitally innocent age. That means one without Andrew Tate, deepfakes and machinery replacing the arts.
It’s also no coincidence that online rhetoric now centres around offline living. We are living in the age of the digital detox. Open substack and you’ll find endless debates about reclaiming our lives off screens. As Gen Z, we’ve never really known a world without screens. The first iPad was released in 2010, when I was four. Since then, escaping the digital world has felt almost impossible.
So maybe this fixation on 2016 is really a desire for a time where we played outside more and when the internet wasn’t so cynical. As Olivia Allen in her Vogue article puts it, we are “searching for a soothing dose of nostalgia”.
But all that glitters is not (rose) gold. As Daisy Jones points out in her Vogue article, everyone seems to be forgetting that 2016 was a terrible year, calling it “the worst year of all time”. She reminds us that it was the year that President Trump first got elected, Brexit happened and many adored celebrities like Alan Rickman, George Michael, and Prince died. We seem to have conveniently forgotten this in the face of our nostalgic enthusiasm.
So, is 2026 really the new 2016? Not quite.
What we’re reliving isn’t a year but a carefully curated feeling, stripped of all its political turmoil. This nostalgia has become a form of collective amnesia where we risk turning a blind eye to the responsibility we have been handed, as Gen-Z to actively transform our world into a place we would like to live in.
Like all trends, 2016 will pass and we will be left to face our political reality once again.
