Ever since I turned 14 in 2020, I’ve been waiting for the experiences that come with being a teenager in 2016. Mind you, I was fully 10 years old in 2016, but that didn’t stop me from fantasizing about attending a Chainsmokers concert in my galaxy print shirt, topped with a DIY flower crown. As I entered 16, then 18, and now 19, I feel as though my chances of ever experiencing an era like 2016 are slipping.
As I enter my last year of these so-called “teenage years,” I feel a sense of disappointment. I want to experience something that clearly doesn’t exist anymore. I walk around UC Berkeley campus with my Sony headphones, blasting “Colors” by Halsey, practically pretending I’m stepping out of a Tumblr dashboard circa 2016. However, all I feel is nostalgia for an era that I wasn’t really a part of. Instead, I’m faced with the horror trends of 2025 that exist in every corner of Berkeley, CA.
Going from unicorn Frappuccinos to Dubai chocolate, this is a frightening time I’m living in. 2025 is driven by consumerism, which is clearly noticed by the rising prices and sold-out collections of Labubus. In some ways, I yearn for a simpler time when Snapchat dog filters, Vine audios, and Beanie Babies were the greatest creations of all time. Now even humor is overrated and underwhelming, drawing inspiration from TikTok video edits and AI voiceovers. While scrolling on TikTok is enjoyable and stress-relieving, I miss when Vine memes and Youtube were my only sources of entertainment. Even more so, I hate that I wasn’t 16 when that era was ongoing. I’ve reached the pinnacle of adolescence and I still feel incomplete.
I believe that this feeling of nostalgia is further exacerbated by the fact that I grew up in SoCal, which was the central hub of the 2016 era. From King Kylie’s rise to the top, Alyssa Violet’s disstrack, and the beef between Logan and Jake Paul, Los Angeles was the center of it all. I think that living in LA, where palm trees seemed to reach the sky and the weather was always a solid 80 degrees, I felt like I was missing out on something that everyone had seemed to experience. As I drive through LA now as a 19-year-old, it looks the same as it did back in 2016, but it doesn’t have that same feeling.
While that feeling of being a teenager in 2016 is something I won’t ever be able to experience, I can only hope to experience something even better as I reach my early 20s.