Somewhere between recreating our mum’s timeline, and attempting to relive an ‘incomplete’ childhood, we might be losing ourselves.
It is not particularly a shocker that we are in a cultural movement of collective nostalgia. And nostalgia slithers its way into almost everything, no? In the art world, renaissance techniques find their way back after centuries; fashion always circles back, taking little somethings from iconic archives; and music keeps returning to tunes from familiar eras, thanks to our parents calling dibs on the car radio. But now, it has built a home for itself in our everyday digital culture.
Scrolling on any social media app at this point of time in the world, will have you trapped in the churn of some or the other ‘throwback trend’. And over the past month or so, one might log onto Instagram for some inspiration (read: escapism), and will more often than not, stumble upon a ‘2026 is the new 2016’ reel of an influencer lip-syncing to a Chainsmokers song. But what is with the over romanticisation of the past, that we have all just obediently accepted as younger netizens? Is it just a fun little phase that has overstayed its welcome, quite literally, or does it run deeper than that? Let’s unpack this trend to make sense of the times we are living in, or perhaps, the lack of a defined one.
2016 is the new 2026 (?)
The most recent nostalgia wave centres around “bringing 2016 back”. It’s a feel-good, collective memory built on rose-tinted visuals : Snapchat filters, the lush life tiktok dance, and an endless parade of ripped jeans. On one end of the spectrum, Kylie Jenner has been posting carousels from what fans refer to as her peak “King Kylie era.” Closer home, Ananya Panday has shared glimpses of her pre-Bollywood life, along with that specific bikini that was everywhere ten years ago. And it isn’t just celebrities driving the trend, other users are jumping on the bandwagon too, digging through old archives to participate in this shared act of remembering. According to the BBC, TikTok searches for “2016” surged by 452% in a single week, with more than 55 million videos created using the platform’s 2016-themed filter.
However, the trend hasn’t gone unquestioned. The general rule of thumb is that nostalgia tends to surface after about twenty years, as culture moves in generational cycles. By that logic, last year’s obsession with Y2K aesthetics felt justified. A ten-year nostalgia wave, however, feels…premature to say the least. On Reddit, users have pushed back against the romanticisation of 2016, pointing out that at the time, the year was widely criticised rather than celebrated. So why, then, is it being revisited so fondly now? Psychologists would describe this phenomenon as a reminiscence bump. As mentioned in Science Focus, people tend to remember culture, and experiences most vividly from their teens through early adulthood, say mainly between the ages of 15 and 25. Seen through that lens, 2016 doesn’t have to be collectively outstanding to feel special. For many people now in their late twenties or early thirties, it fits conveniently within that memory-heavy window. A reminder of a time for most millennials where they didn’t have to pay their taxes, or worry about hiking up the excrutiating corporate hill.
For even younger users, the attachment works differently. Maybe it was just another version of the American dream being sold to the rest of the world, after all, most of what we now glamorise about 2016 came from there. But over time, we’ve all found our own ways of holding onto that supposed whimsy that was in the air back then. It’s probable that this year represents a distinctly pre-pandemic world. To be fair, the dissonance has to be jarring, right? This group of kids, had to just accept the fact that life as they knew it is going to shut down, and just restart out of nowhere after three years, with a whole lot of figuring out that needed to be done. For a sect that feels like its last few school years were chewed up and swallowed by Covid, revisiting that period offers a way to finally bask in the glory of their childhood, that felt rudely interrupted. In that sense, this trend feels entirely justified, but in a way where we have mutually agreed upon the fact that we all want to escape the times we are living in at the moment.
Coolpix is cool again
Another fixation feeding into this wider throwback obsession is the return of old technology. Famously referred to as the “analog renaissance,” it marks a recontextualised affection for media formats once considered obsolete. People are falling in love all over again with the crackle of vinyl records, the familiar startup tune of a Nikon Coolpix, and the deliberate, ritualistic relationship one has with a CD collection.
In the Indian context, this shift gained traction around two years ago when a reel posted by Instagram user @jaydeepgurow_07 surfaced and took over feeds. The video is just a raw Handycam footage of Mumbai set to the ’90s hit Premika Ne Pyaar Se. The reel went viral, sparking a wider trend that saw users dust off digital cameras to document the mundane. The content creator, Jay, mentioned “Before this reel, not many people in Mumbai and a few other cities, were making videos like this. And shooting on a handycam felt freeing, I didn’t overthink anything. Those cameras have a way of capturing moments and textures beautifully, it really made the audience feel something”.
Two years on, the appeal hasn’t faded. And it feels great, in all its rawness. But the paradox lies in the fact that a lot of the pioneers of this trend own the entire Apple ecosystem, that not a lot of folks had back in the 90s and the early 2000’s. So, why is it, that the generation that holds their digital world closest to them, are developing a soft spot for physical media?
Dazed and confused
Something far less romantic than the movement itself might be driving it: social media burnout. After years of involuntary scrolling, and hyper-curated feeds, many users are simply drained. And this return isn’t as organic as when it was happening twenty years ago, when a Nokia 1100, and an iPod Shuffle was the epitome of cool. Back then, people used CDs, or camcorders simply because that was what existed. There was no audience, no pressure to document the act of using them. Today, the revival of physical media is heavily filtered through aestheticisation. The act matters, but what is holding it all together, is that ultimately it’s going to end up on someone’s Instagram feed. This is where the cycle begins: once something is romanticised, it becomes stylised; once stylised, it becomes commodified. What started as a reaction against digital excess risks turning into yet another one of its very by-products. Physical media, too, may soon lose its humble accessibility, as argued by some content creators, critically decoding this trend.
The irony is right in our face. Many of these “only physical media in 2026” fantasies were born online, through posts, reels and declarations made for an audience. The foundation of the trend itself rests on showing, rather than actually living it, unintentionally. In trying to escape the digital world, we may have carried remnants of its logic with us ; turning even our attempts at slowing down into something that must be viewed by a rather imagined audience. It feels like a constant tug of war, between wanting to live less complex lives, while being tied down to the hyper- digital age the world has gotten so used to.
Prof. Sasikiran R M, who holds a PhD in Communication shares his opinion on these trends, he comments “Nostalgia is janus-faced. It is a wistful bitter-sweet look at what was. More often than not focusing on the ‘good-old-days’. But were the ‘old-days’ really good is the question that is important to ask, given our tumultuous history of dealing with huge sections of humankind. Now, coming to the return to analog in a hopelessly digital world, my sense of it is it’s a fad like any other social media trend and will wane. I still see everyone on their phones, deeply engrossed, including myself. The occasional return to analog will happen, but I think that’s more to cater to a social media trend. I would believe that such a return to nostalgia happened if I encountered it in the ‘real’ world, not as a ‘trend’ on the interwebs.”
We don’t necessarily miss those times themselves or, in many cases, we were too young to remember them clearly. What we miss instead is a brain that wasn’t constantly overstimulated, free from an endless overload of information, and a future that still felt unwritten. Psychologically, this longing is amplified by a couple of cognitive biases. The first, as self-explanatory as it sounds, is rosy retrospection. Much like the pinkish glow of a 2016 filter, we tend to look back at our past more fondly than it actually was. And the second being the telescoping effect. Change is inevitable, but for many, growing up has meant adjusting to a world that doesn’t quite feel like one they love. In response, time itself seems to stretch. Periods that weren’t all that long ago are experienced as far removed, shaped by how sharply life, culture and expectations have shifted in a relatively short span.
Still looking back
However, with all it’s performativity taken into account, it is still a ‘trend’ that does a good job at bringing joy into people’s lives. The whole idea of feeling like you are in a 2000’s rom com, as you listen to a Fleetwood Mac number on your record player might not be the worst thing ever. At the very least, these trends are relatively harmless ; especially when stacked against the wave of ‘brain-rot’ content that keeps finding its way into headlines.It is just the irony of looking for old ways to be “authentic” instead of creating new means, that gives nostalgia a bad rep in the eyes of the critics. Case in point is another throwback trend, which show how decades recycle each other, with Y2K pulling from the ’70s and the 2010s borrowing from the ’60s. Moreover, Instagram accounts such as @themodernblog, @90smilk, and @missreminiscee reflect how nostalgia has found a home online ; curated, and stylised. Although done tastefully, it feels like we’re stuck in a meta throwback loop, with very little from the present that we’re offering our future selves.
The creator of @another___kind, James Chester, on the significance of archives and nostalgia
Twenty years from now, what are we even meant to feel nostalgic about ; the act of feeling nostalgic itself? There is something undeniably beautiful, and even fun about finding comfort and a sense of belonging in the archives. But it matters that we balance that impulse with the act of leaving something behind of the time we’re living in now as well. After all is said and done, being remembered only as a generation that templatised rather than created doesn’t feel particularly cool. Art, fashion and culture need room to breathe themselves into life. That space can’t exist if we’re constantly peeling from the past.