At 1:12AM, I made the mistake of opening TikTok for five minutes. Twenty-seven minutes later, I’m watching a grainy montage of middle school lockers with “Closer” by the Chainsmokers playing in the background, and the caption reads: “2016. We didn’t know we were in the good old days.” Somehow, this song I never cared about is hitting me harder than I expected, and I feel a strange, chest-tightening ache for the year when my biggest stressor was a math quiz and whether my friends would sit with me at lunch.
Why is 2016 everywhere? Why are we, at the ripe age of twenty-something, acting like retired veterans of life?
Apparently, we’ve decided that 2016 was the cultural peak. The era of Vine one-liners, early Instagram when a Valencia filter and a blurry sunset were enough, Adidas Superstars, Kylie Lip Kits and group chats that made everything feel super dramatic. No one was building a “personal brand,” no one was optimizing their morning routine on social media for content, and most importantly, the concept of being “performative” was non-existent.  Â
Was it actually better? Objectively, probably not. I was twelve. I had no money, no independence, and a deeply questionable haircut. But I also had no sense of a ticking clock.
Now that I’m in my last semester of undergrad, every experience comes with a quiet subtitle: Last first day of class, last reading week and the last few months where the people I care about are all within walking distance. It’s unsettling how aware I am of time. At twenty-one, I’m already sentimental in real time. I’ll be sitting with friends and suddenly think, I’m going to miss this, as if I’m pre-writing the memory before it’s even finished happening.
Maybe that’s why 2016 hits so hard. It represents a version of us that wasn’t narrating everything. We weren’t curating our lives for future nostalgia, we were just present in them.
The algorithm, of course, knows this and it knows how to exploit that feeling. Platforms like TikTok don’t accidentally resurrect “2016-core”. Nostalgia is engagement gold. It’s emotional, familiar and just comfortable enough to keep you scrolling. The more you linger on an edit of a high school football game set to overexposed lighting and a Drake song, the more your feed turns into a sentimental rabbit-hole, asking you: Remember this? Remember how good life was?
And when you’re in a transitional season, about to graduate, about to move, about to become something that sounds suspiciously like an adult, you’re especially susceptible. Nostalgia offers a temporary pause. A reminder of a time before resumes and rent and the looming question of “So what’s next?”
I don’t think we actually want to relive 2016. I don’t want to redo high school or resurrect my old wardrobe. What I want is the feeling of not being on the brink of something. Back then, the future was abstract. Now, it has deadlines.
At twenty-one, this is the first real ending we encounter. Childhood faded gradually, but university is abrupt. One day you’re here, complaining about midterms, and the next you’re ordering grad photos and pretending you understand taxes. Of course we’re nostalgic. We’ve reached the edge of a chapter that defined us.
So maybe we’re not “too young” to be nostalgic, we’re just old enough to notice time. Most of us grew up online. We have digital proof of every awkward phase: filtered selfies, screenshots of conversations we swore we’d delete, voice memos we forgot existed. Every now and then, Snapchat hits you with a casual “On this day, x years ago,” and suddenly you are reminded that the people who once felt permanent, now live quietly in archived chats and tagged photos. We can literally scroll back to who we were. The past isn’t fuzzy, it’s searchable and it feels aesthetic. It’s algorithmically packaged and delivered at 1AM, complete with a soundtrack.
But beneath the edits and irony, I think what we’re really mourning is simplicity, not of the world, but of ourselves. A version of us that didn’t feel the need to constantly anticipate the next milestone.
2016 feels safe because back then, nothing felt like an ending, but rather the beginning.Â
Now, as I pack up the last semester of uni, I catch myself already missing it. The late-night walks. The chaotic group projects. The comfort of knowing exactly where I’ll be in September. Maybe we’re nostalgic at twenty-one because we’ve just learned that time moves in chapters and this is the first one we have to close on our own.
I don’t actually want to go back to 2016. I just wouldn’t mind five more minutes before whatever comes next.