Over the past month, my timeline on Instagram and FYP on TikTok has been saturated with throwbacks to 2016. Kylie Jenner reclaimed her social media crown with her 2016 throwback post captioned: ‘you just had to be there’, alongside Shay Mitchell’s post captioned: ‘I heard 2026 is the new 2016 and I’m so okay with it’.
The year 2016 marked the peak of pop music with anthems from Rihanna, Justin Bieber and The Chainsmokers. Album drops felt more exciting than ever. Suicide Squad and La La Land ruled our screens, Kylie Jenner’s blue hair and Pokémon GO dominated phones – and if it wasn’t on the new iPhone SE or iPhone 7, were you even there? The year is now culturally mythologised. Wider events like the Rio de Janeiro Olympics, the Brexit referendum and Trump’s defeat of Clinton in the US elections define the year as infamous. However, why are so many people taking to social media expressing how they can’t fathom that 2016 was 10 years ago? And why do we look back on this era so fondly?
For many readers, this year may have marked a ‘coming of age’. I’m 21 now, but in 2016 I was going to secondary school perfecting my Snapchat flower-crown selfie. This year was hugely influential to my childhood, simultaneously feeling like lifetime ago and like it was yesterday.
Yet my distortion of time and reminiscence is not purely personal. Since the Covid pandemic, studies have shown that there has been a universal distortion of the perception of time, referred to as the ‘pandemic time-warp’. What started as a distortion of time during lockdowns, as days blended into one, has progressed into a lingering sense of feeling out of touch with time.
There has been a universal distortion of the perception of time
If you are a student reading this, I’m very confident in saying that your education was disrupted at some point, whether it be around GCSE or A-Level periods. Just as life resumed and felt ‘normal’ again, the widespread public use of AI, since the release of ChatGPT in November 2022, contributes to the uncanny feeling that ‘nothing is real’.
The 2016 nostalgia isn’t just a social media trend, but symptomatic of a post-pandemic temporal disorientation.
It represents an era before rupture; not perfect or politically calm, but conventional. Whilst social media trends may have progressed from 2016, in some ways, it feels as if politics haven’t. We’re still hearing the Brexit headlines and experiencing the effects of the ‘Leave’ vote, even though the referendum was June 2016.
Trump’s second election witnessed a win over Kamala Harris in November 2024, recalling his 2016 election win over Hillary Clinton. This almost feels recurrent. Of course, the world has changed profoundly in 10 years, but the echoes are difficult to ignore and reinforce the sense of temporal instability.
The 2016 revival, then, is not just a yearning for skinny jeans and aesthetic pictures of Starbucks coffee cups. It represents a longing for simpler times that feel familiar, untouched by Covid. It’s a desire for a clearer perception of time, where years don’t blend into one another.
Whilst the cyclicality of politics is not unique to our time, it does add to this uncanny feeling as we remember 2016 and realise that this iconic year was a decade ago.