Why are people nostalgic for 2016?

In recent weeks, Instagram and TikTok feeds have seemingly turned into time machines as people openly yearn for a simpler, more colorful era of the internet. The social media trend has people reminiscing about ten years ago, when everyone was obsessed with Snapchat filters, VSCO girls ruled, and the internet was generally less toxic.

‘The golden age of memes’

This year kicked off with 2016 “making a comeback” as celebrities and regular users “flood Instagram with throwback posts reminiscing about what they viewed as an iconic year for popular culture and the internet,” said NBC News. Nostalgic posts trotted out the memories, with people unearthing “hyper-filtered photos of themselves a decade ago.” The trend has resurfaced “grainy images of açai bowls and sunsets,” along with skinny jeans, choker necklaces and “Snapchat filters that put flower crowns and dog noses on our faces,” said The New York Times. It was the era of the “short-form video app Vine, Pokémon Go and Kylie Jenner lip kits.”

The “2026 is the new 2016” trend can be traced back to an “ironic Gen-Z joke that turned into a sincere movement” known as the Great Meme Reset, in which TikTokers “pined for the good old days, before the web became infested with AI-generated brainrot,” said Forbes. The Meme Reset proposed that social media users “reset” the internet by “posting classic memes to drown out low-effort engagement bait” and spark a “comeback for forgotten trends.” 2016 was chosen as the “golden age of memes, right before the perceived decline.”

Pining for yesteryear

The internet’s “gaze backward to the not-so-distant past” is the latest example of the “acceleration of nostalgia online,” where trends can “burn bright and die fast, making the landscape of just a few years ago feel like a foreign country,” said the Times. The pining for 2016 also “plays into a recent cultural obsession with so-called millennial optimism,” the mindset of those who came of age in the 2010s. This attitude is “potent among millennials themselves,” but also older members of Gen Z who “recall little of the era or arrived on the tail end of it” — and whom “some older generations accuse of taking too rosy an outlook.”

On the surface, the trend “seems like a celebration of fashion and music,” but it really has more to do with 2016 “sitting at the intersection of nostalgia and structural change that we didn’t know was happening on the internet,” said Kate Kennedy, the author of “One in a Millennial: On Friendship, Feelings, Fangirls and Fitting In,” to the Times. While some people are “simply nostalgic for their younger years,” much of the trend is about the “perceived innocence of 2016 compared to the internet today,” said Forbes. The internet wasn’t as “bright and cheerful as it’s being remembered,” but it wasn’t “quite as gamified and monetized as it is today” either, and had more casual users “posting selfies and sharing random thoughts with their followers, just for the sake of it.”

Still, as this trend got popular, some people posted videos “denouncing the idea of making 2026 the new 2016,” said Know Your Meme. Users quickly began “pointing out bad things that happened in 2016.”

All this “Coachella-flower-crowned nostalgia elides” that 2016 was “chock-full of horrors, too,” said Andrea González-Ramírez at The Cut. The year had a bevy of low points and heated controversies, including Brexit, the mass shooting at the Pulse nightclub, the police shootings of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile, and a Zika outbreak. Even if the “VSCO filters were cute,” the “vibes in 2016 were pretty rancid.”

It was also the year that President Donald Trump was elected over Hillary Clinton, signaling a major shift in the political atmosphere. The world has become a “scarier, more challenging, and more divided place over the past decade,” said González-Ramírez. But in many ways, including the fact that “Trump is back in office pursuing his agenda more aggressively than in his first term” and “high-profile law-enforcement shootings are dominating headlines, we never left 2016.”