Whenever I’ve scrolled through social media over the past few days, I’ve experienced the slightly dizzying sensation of falling into a time warp: one that takes me back almost exactly a decade.
“2026 is the new 2016!” a whole slew of TikTok posts bafflingly claim, overlaying video footage with a warmed-up, lo-fi filter that feels very 10 years ago; according to the app, more than 55 million videos have already used this particular filter, named after that year, while searches for “2016” have shot up by 452 per cent. How many of those posters and searchers, I wonder, were actually old enough to drive at the time?
Over on Instagram, the millennial platform of choice, which was therefore very much in its imperial phase during 2016, the nostalgia is even more striking. Thirty and fortysomethings have gone rooting through their digital archives to fish out their highlights from that year, sharing photo carousels (a feature that would surely have blown their 2016 minds, given it was only introduced the following year) filled with all the trend hallmarks of the era.
There are plenty of slightly blurred selfies, captured by lower-resolution phone cameras, which showcase all the hair and makeup trends that were once so essential. The swathes of glimmering highlighter. The careful contour, copied from that one behind-the-scenes photo of Kim Kardashian. The blonde balayage highlights painted scattershot through brown hair (as a bottom-of-the-rung writer on a fashion magazine back then, I’m pretty sure at least 70 per cent of my working week was devoted to explaining the concept of balayage). The Snapchat puppy filter obliterating facial features, and the wild levels of FaceTune.
There is, of course, a certain fun in looking back at these little snapshots preserved in digital amber (throwbacks like this also serve as a great opportunity to remind everyone of just how young and hot you looked 10 years ago, aided and abetted by the Valencia filter).
And remembering all our pop cultural obsessions from that time – grown adults wandering around cities playing Pokémon Go! Attempting to work out the identity of “Becky with the good hair”! Thinkpieces about the feminist value, or lack thereof, of Taylor Swift’s “squad”! Netflix still being good! – has its own charm, too.
Even the celebrity drama seemed more momentous then. I can still remember my work WhatsApp group exploding with panic at approximately 10pm on a weeknight when photos of Swift walking hand in hand with Tom Hiddleston were published online.
But all of this 2016-related nostalgia also feels like a convenient rewriting, or romanticising, of recent history (probably due to this trend doubtless being pushed online by a bunch of people whose biggest worry at the time was maintaining their Snapchat streak with their schoolmates).
Because, let’s face it, 2016 was hardly a banner year.
All of this 2016-related nostalgia also feels like a convenient rewriting, or romanticising, of recent history
Cast your minds back to January 2016 and you might remember two high-profile celebrity deaths that seemed to augur poorly for what was to come. The double-whammy loss of David Bowie and Alan Rickman had us collectively wondering whether 2016 was cursed; that their passing was swiftly followed by the deaths of a number of other icons, from Prince to George Michael to Carrie Fisher (“Why are so many celebrities dying in 2016?” was a genre of headline that seemed to crop up with morbid frequency).
And then there were the seismic events on the world stage, the ones that seemed to set the tone for the slow slide into chaos and despair that has arguably characterised the decade that followed. Donald Trump emerged first as a populist wildcard in the race to become the Republican presidential candidate, then ended up defying expectations to beat Hillary Clinton to the White House. Global politics has only become stranger and more topsy-turvy since then.
On this side of the Atlantic, the Brexit referendum turned our political order upside down, paving the way for years of circuitous negotiations, a revolving door at Downing Street thanks to a succession of relatively short-lived PMs, and divisions that have become yet more pronounced over the past 10 years.
“Post-truth” was declared as the Oxford English Dictionary’s word of the year, ushering in an era of distrust for the establishment and social media fakery being taken as fact; you can certainly trace a line from this to 2026’s AI slop-stravaganza. That’s perhaps important to remember when we claim that things were so much simpler online in 2016. Yes, the general mood might have been slightly less toxic (I have strong recollections of one day when the entire internet seemed to be watching, and talking about, a livestream of a puddle blocking a path in Newcastle), but the foundations were being laid for our current hellscape.
In fact, 2016 was so widely assumed to be an absolute nadir of a year that the unredacted version of #F***2016 was a popular hashtag (back when Twitter was something more than just Elon Musk’s vanity project).
This reinvention of 2016 as some kind of joyous pinnacle, then, proves our relentless capacity for nostalgia, the ability to transform even the bad times into something worthy of reminiscing over from a distance of just a few years.
Perhaps the fact that even a real dud of a year seems like a lovely refuge from the dark drama of 2026 speaks volumes, too. All I can hope is that 10 years from now, we’re not all still glued to the latest social media platform, posting weird AI-generated selfies, and seeing them as a glorious reminder of better days.
