It’s 2016 and Drake’s ‘One Dance’ is on the radio. Your mum’s picked you up from school and you’re scrolling on Musical.ly: Baby Ariel’s just posted her newest ‘Lean and Dabb’ dancing video and you double tap. You open Snapchat and send your streaks, nothing but a black screen and a red ‘S’ (or a selfie with the dog filter if you’re feeling cute). You’re wearing a velvet choker, skinny jeans and fake Fenty creepers to complete the look. To quote Zara Larsson, isn’t this the lush life?
Ten years later, it’s 2026 and life feels heavier, to say the least. Now you’re in your twenties, writing your dissertation, and the only connections you have left with your school friends are on LinkedIn. Trump’s kidnapped Maduro, Greenland may be annexed and even Musical.ly couldn’t stand the test of time. In The Netherlands, the government has issued leaflets urging citizens to put together emergency packages, with NATO head Mark Rutte claiming: ‘We must be prepared for the scale of war our grandparents or great-grandparents endured.’ The Doomsday Clock, a symbol of our proximity to a man-made end of humanity, has been set to 85 seconds until midnight: what a way to start the year.
In the midst of this, it feels ironic that there’s been a resurgence of content that characterised 2016 on social media. A prime example of this is Kylie Jenner’s feature on Terror Jr.’s ‘Fourth Strike’: whilst I found this hilarious at first, King Kylie is strategically getting her followers to buy the lipkits we all fell for in 2016 again. Celebrities are reposting their Snapchat filter selfies and Zara Larsson’s ‘Lush Life’ dance has gone viral on TikTok. Vogue has forecasted trends such as skinny jeans, millennial pink and bomber jackets to make their comeback. The phrase ‘2026 is the new 2016’ even has a dedicated Wikipedia page, referring to a social media phenomenon that evokes nostalgia for the year. But was 2016 really so much better in hindsight?
As Substack blogger Kate Kennedy argues, 2016 ‘was the last year the internet was actually fun.’ Think of a time before AI, Instagram ads and 67 – I still don’t know why that’s funny. Kennedy goes as far as to say that our nostalgia for 2016 is a ‘“grief response”’, thus our attempt to relive it is a kind of mourning. Perhaps we’re mourning a time when social media was purely social, before tech giants monitored every action and no one cared about what you posted. She also distinguishes the experience for Gen-Z and Millenialls: whereas we are reliving our early high school memories, they are romanticising the prospects of their early adult life. In 2016, there were brighter hopes for the future. Now, the dream of graduate jobs, home ownership and a war-free world have dissipated before both our generations’ eyes.
However, let’s take off our rose-tinted glasses and consider the flaws of 2016. For one, toxic beauty standards led to a significant boom of lip filler and botox, harming the self-image of many female-identifying individuals. Now, it’s trendy to get your filler dissolved and embrace the ‘natural look.’ More importantly, we must consider its political climate: in fact, it was a year of political turmoil. From Brexit to Trump’s first election, what seemed unthinkable became reality. However, the effects of these landslides didn’t quite shake the world yet: the UK didn’t legally leave the EU until 2020 and there was still a month left until Trump’s inauguration. Looking back, it was a liminal year, bridging a seemingly peaceful past and a turbulent future.
So, if you had the choice, would you travel back in time to 2016? If I could have reversed Brexit, that certainly would have made it easier for me to stay in the UK as a Dutch person. I probably would have kept some of the Musical.lys I made with my friends in the drafts and gotten a real pair of Fentys too. But I’m simultaneously proud of the woman I’ve become since the twelve year old social media fanatic. It’s easier said than done, but enjoying the peaceful moments the present has to offer is perhaps the best way to cope with our nostalgia for the past. Whether that be during walks in the Botanics, getting a coffee at your favourite café or spending time with the people you love, you’ll find that 2026 isn’t all doom and gloom. From there, we can slowly start to envision our futures with greater optimism. Repeat after me: I will find my dream job after uni! The world will keep spinning! This is a lush life!
Author: Fleur Kas (she/her)
qmunicatemagazine.co.uk 