2026 is the new 2016.
Or so they say…
Many Gen Z and millennials are reminiscing about the year 2016, as it was a decade ago and feels incredibly nostalgic. Many see it through rose-colored glasses.
Oversaturated Snapchat dog filters were a must-have in your pictures. Pokémon Go was getting people to go outside and catch them all. Artists like Justin Bieber, Drake, Adele, Twenty One Pilots, Coldplay, and The Chainsmokers were dominating the charts. We all stood still for The Mannequin Challenge, TikTok was Musical.ly, and everybody wanted a hoverboard.
To many, it feels like just yesterday we were doing cut creases and blind to how our eyebrows actually looked. It could be because–thanks to modern social media–2026 is welcoming the memories of 2016.
What’s Trending and Why
The BBC reports, “searches for ‘2016’ surged 452% in the last week, and more than 55 million videos have been created using TikTok’s filter named after the year.”
TikTok and Instagram users are reposting or recreating their favorite pictures and trends from 2016. The fashion trends are finding new life again, and even “classic” memes are being used, which are so simple and timeless to many.
The trend seems to come from younger TikTok users dissatisfied with the current state of things, socially and digitally.
It can be linked back to the Gen Z joke turned sincere movement known as “The Great Meme Reset,” where TikTokers longed for the good old days before AI “brainrot.”
It proposed that TikTokers “reset” the internet by posting classic memes to drown out the low-effort AI-generated entertainment and spark a comeback for the forgotten trends.
Film and Tv in 2016
Memes weren’t the only things that made 2016 memorable. The year also brought us Captain America: Civil War, which cemented Marvel’s cinematic dominance. Deadpool was released after the notorious leaked test footage and was a definite risk in raunchy comedy. The franchise seemed like it could go nowhere but up at that point. Stranger Things had also just been released, whose series finale garnered around 31.5 million views in its debut week. Netflix also released the political drama The Crown, which centered around the life of Queen Elizabeth II.
The two films that caused the famous Oscars mess-up also debuted that year. Moonlight and La La Land were up for Best Picture of 2016. In a cringeworthy mess-up, La La Land was initially announced as the winner when, in reality, Moonlight had won. Many say this moment of false announcement overshadowed the significance of Moonlight. It navigates the story of a black gay man through three different periods of his life. Its LGBTQ-theme featured an all-Black cast.
Not All Rainbows
Some people would like to leave the past in the past, as Emma Spector writes for Vogue. “When I look back at photos from 2016, I see someone I barely recognize.” She goes on to talk about her disordered eating and about her intense exercising of any food she did eat. Though she also says, “I choose to honor the part of myself that felt she had to shrink in order to expand her life in the way she so desperately wanted.” She chose to give herself grace for what she went through.
A user on Reddit posted a glow-up from 2016 to 2026. ”It’s crazy to look back, I had no idea I’d make it this far at all… I tried to leave this world so many times as a teen.” She references hating her appearance, just everything about herself. However, she does follow up with some more uplifting words, saying, “I’m so glad I never did, happily married, an artist with a loving home… It’s also funny everyone romanticizing 2016 when that was one of the worst years of my life lol.”
The Internet Maze
Politics was also something you could avoid on the Internet back in 2016. A lot of people found it easier to ignore because we were younger and didn’t know anything. Now the people who miss 2016 are adults and have awareness of politics. Notably, this was when Donald Trump was first elected, which ushered in this new age of the inescapable political maze.
The idea of “doom-scrolling” hadn’t even taken form. The word is often used to describe how the social media landscape has been taken over by bad news and culture wars, which contaminates your feed like a virus.
This is not saying that the Internet was more cheerful and uplifting in 2016, but there wasn’t as much monetization, and it felt like there were more casual users just posting photos and sharing random thoughts with the world. There was no intention of trying to become famous as much as there is today.
We had mentioned how Pokémon Go was released, and many remember it fondly. However, in 2024, it was revealed that Pokémon Go players were providing data to train an AI model to see the world, which sparked concern among users. This seems familiar, as many AI models have been trained on public data without permission.
Remembering 2016
Whether 2016 was a year to remember or something you’d like to forget, it’s almost impossible to erase anything you’ve put on social media. So, you should take it with a grain of salt and learn from the past. Some things could be brought into the year 2026 to evoke a sense of nostalgia. There are even some creators whose content is solely focused on friends or skits about the early 2000s. Whether we like it or not, nothing stays gone forever, so all we can do is remember the heavily filtered picture of overpriced coffee or rose-gold iPhones and how they were seen as a sign of simpler times.
