Nothing ages you like watching teenagers romanticize an era you lived through.
A week ago, while doomscrolling on TikTok, I found a video made by someone currently in high school talking about wanting to be a part of the class of 2019–2020. As someone who was a freshman in high school in 2016 and graduated in 2020, I felt, as the kids say, chopped and unc. I’m not that old! I’m 23 and have my whole life ahead of me. But for some reason, younger people and teenagers are romanticizing Thrasher T-shirts, Hydroflasks, and SoundCloud.
One thing I won’t lie about is the upside of being a teenager in 2016, because it really was that cool. The internet was still around, but not everything was online. We still spoke to each other at school. We still had community — not niche microtrends and aesthetic cores that replaced actual personalities. No AI, just a lot of us listening to Flower Boy by Tyler, the Creator, watching Stranger Things, and coming to school in Adidas sneakers. We also had the Mannequin Challenge, Kylie Jenner lip kits, and teenage girls being secretly Wattpad famous (well, at least I was) or on stan Twitter.
But there were also downsides to being a teenager in 2016. The idea of being “woke” was brand new, online cancel culture was on the rise, and school shootings were becoming increasingly common. I feel like younger Gen Z doesn’t remember when us older Gen Z were using our free period to protest gun violence or even know who David Hogg is or what March for Our Lives was. So why do we hold onto times that never really belonged to us, even if we know they weren’t that great?
Decadology is the cultural study of decades and what makes a time period culturally relevant. For example, the fifties didn’t start when the calendar said January 1, 1950. The fifties started when World War II ended, and the fifties ended when JFK was assassinated in 1963. The eighties started in 1981 with the launch of MTV and ended with the dissolution of the USSR in 1991. The nineties ended on September 11, 2001, and the 2000s ended (in my opinion) when the United States assassinated Osama bin Laden, while others argue that the 2000s ended with the 2008 recession.
It got me thinking about the time periods I romanticize.
I fuckin’ love the ’80s.
Yep. I love big hair, Madonna, legwarmers, the mall, Back to the Future, and The Lost Boys. I aspire to be Kelly Kapowski. One of my favorite shows to come out in recent times is Mentiras: La Serie and Stranger Things. I’ve had the biggest crush on Steve Harrington since 2016. But even I know that my runaway world that comprises Aquanet hairspray, Walkmans, wicker furniture, and Steve Harrington doesn’t always mean the ’80s were that simple — no matter how fun Miami Vice was or how hot James Spader was. The AIDS epidemic killed thousands of people, tensions with the Cold War were rising, and hatred was normalized.
The one thing decadologists can agree on is that the 2010s ended both culturally and numerically in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
COVID-19 halted our way of life and greatly impacted our sense of time. This is why it’s so hard for me to believe that it’s almost been 10 years since I was a freshman in high school. It’s why so many people are shocked that the things we grew up with as children are almost as old as the children romanticizing them. Staying inside for a year and a half altered so many facets of what life was before. And for young people who don’t remember what life was like before the pandemic, or were too young to fully embrace a pre-pandemic world, wanting to go back to a simpler time that never really existed — or an experience you were promised — is a form of escapism from current events. The sense of community and interconnectedness before the pandemic doesn’t really exist anymore, and what’s possibly left of it isn’t glossed over in DeLoreans, poodle skirts, or BlackBerry flip phones. There has never been a more well-documented moment in time than now, so even if our brains wanted to rewire themselves to idealize the past, we will always have evidence of how things truly were.
What is so wrong with wanting things to slow down in a world that’s rapidly progressing to the point where the world is starting to become unrecognizable?
Not to age myself, but I grew up in a time before the iPhone — with nineties technology, low-rise jeans, vampire media, and boy bands — but I didn’t grow up pre-9/11. Yet I always find myself wistfully wishing for a time before TSA and the War on Terror. A time that never belonged to me. Maybe the 1980s is my 2016; maybe my mother thinks I’m crazy for wanting shoulder pads to make a comeback. I genuinely believe that “Jealous Type” by Doja Cat should be the song of the summer based on its ’80s production and overall aesthetic. If the current culture is reflecting the values of the ’80s, we might as well fully commit to the hairspray and the heartthrobs.
Maybe I’m no better than the class of 2029 — disillusioned by nostalgia for a time that slips away the second I try to hold on to it, so I never have to be fully present.