Why 2016 feels special again: The internet's obsession explained

Are we uncertain of what the future holds, and therefore turning to nostalgia?

2016 is worth romanticising. At least at this point in time — our lives weren’t permeated with 24x7 AI generated results for everything we looked up on the internet. It was still a place to go down Reddit rabbit holes, Zayn Malik’s Pillowtalk was the sultriest song, The Chainsmokers’ Closer the angstiest and well if we made a mistake in our relationships, all we had to do was send Sorry by Justin Bieber to our high school boyfriends.

The 1975 released one of their best albums I Like It When You Sleep, for You Are So Beautiful, Yet So Unaware Of It. People were perpetually playing Pokemon Go and flirting with their crushes using the dog filter on Snapchat, and at the best case, VSCO.

According to TikTok, searches for “2016” surged by 452% in the second week of January, and more than 55 million videos have been created using the app’s filter (oddly enough, a rose tinted one) named after the year.

We must wonder though, what got us so tremendously nostalgic ten years later, at the cusp of New Year?

Instagram in 2016 didn’t open to noisy reels, all disguising advertisements and product sales, whilst gingerly surveilling us, Trump hadn’t been elected as the American president, George Floyd was still alive, the pandemic hadn’t broken out, locking all of us into our houses and taking the lives of over 7 million people.

The year was, however, upsetting in other ways: implications of Brexit played out, Doland Trump was elected on November 8th, 2016. Alan Rickman, David Bowie, Leonard Cohen, Prince, George Michael, Muhammed Ali and Harper Lee died.

Everyone around us is posting photographs of themself in 2016, a time where people were more whimsical online, less curated versions of themself. Perhaps we are looking to it because the world felt more free — and that is okay. It is an homage to pop culture and politics that felt more authentic and liberal.