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You’ve definitely seen the reel. Grainy footage, a Justin Bieber chorus sneaking up on you, and a bold declaration: 2026 is the new 2016.
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For a split second, you don’t roll your eyes. You nod. Because something about it feels… correct.
Not going to lie, there really was something in the air in 2016 — a lightness we didn’t know we were living inside. Music felt communal. Pop culture moved at a pace you could keep up with. People dyed their hair without turning it into a personality thesis. We used the Vegas filter unironically. iPods lived at the bottom of our bags,wired earphones were permanently tangled. Funky accessories were bought for fun, not resale value. Flash mobs happened, and for a brief moment, strangers collectively agreed to be awkward in public.
What people are really asking for now isn’t a return to skinny jeans or specific playlists. It’s a return to how things felt.
Over the past year, nostalgia has stopped being just an aesthetic and started behaving like a coping mechanism. Look-alike contests draw hundreds of people who stay longer than planned. Someone posts about a five-minute cigarette break meetup and suddenly there’s a crowd. Digital cameras from our teenage years are replacing iPhone photos, not because the quality is better, but because the process feels slower and more intentional. Even the viral “analogue bag” trend, irony fully acknowledged, points to the same impulse: a desire to touch something real.
What we’re really witnessing is a quiet recalibration of our relationship with technology. Not quitting it, but questioning it. Old iPods are getting expensive, which says less about vintage value and more about ownership anxiety. A generation raised online is realising how little of its life it actually owns. Years of photos, music, memories — all locked behind logins, subscriptions, and cloud storage. Miss a password. Miss a payment. Lose a piece of yourself. The idea of a digital dark age no longer feels dystopian; it feels… plausible.
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At the same time, social media has become an increasingly tense space. What once felt like an escape or a way to find community now often feels performative, divisive, and exhausting. We still log on, but we’re also looking for exits. Hence the return to analogue hobbies like scrapbooking, crochet, journaling. The renewed appeal of CD players, physical cinema trips, and actually leaving the house to experience culture instead of streaming it alone.
So were we actually happier in 2016? Maybe. Or maybe we were just younger, less self-aware, less post-everything. Pre-pandemic, pre-burnout, pre-constant optimisation. Time felt stretchier. Life felt less like content.
Maybe 2026 doesn’t need to be 2016. Maybe it just needs to borrow its ease. Less documenting, more doing. Less curating, more living. Less online, more together.
And if that’s the future we’re quietly inching toward —sign us up.
We’ll bring the iPod.
Also Read:
Cuffing Season: Why Everyone Breaks Up In September And Falls In Love by November
The New Cool Is Going Offline: Gen Z’s Strange New Era Of Silent Social Media
