Help! I Can’t Leave 2016 Behind!

Fetty Wap. Vine.  A mango juul pod in the middle school bathroom. It’s 2016, and a Victoria Secret push up bra is holding up your tits. 

Damn Daniel!!! They shot Harmabe! Kylie Jenner has blue hair and everybody has really fuck thick eyebrows. Can you believe we might have a female president, let’s Pokemon go to the polls!

2016.

Pre-trump. Pre-pandemic. Pre-TikTok.  

2016

Pre- Dubai chocolate, pre Labubus littering the earth.

Things have been weird since 2016.

2016. The last “mythical” good year.

What made it so magical? I mean, the top song of that summer was “One Dance.” by Drake. That’s a fucking a time to be alive. I don’t even think Drake was a pedophile yet.

Well, for us Gen Z, that year landed right at the sweet spot of our formative years,making us all between ages 13-18.  So 2016 was first parties, first kisses, first time getting finger blasted at the movie theaters. (not my own story, but definitely something that holds true for a lot of you whores)

(no judgement though)

2016, it’s this memory I have in my head. A jeep car, drinking Svedka vodka out of a water bottle, and listening to loud music off of a JBL speaker.

But I have never done that. A Jeep car? I didn’t have rich friends like that.The Svedka, the jeep, that’s not a real memory of mine. And yet it is something I feel  nostalgic for. Why?

There’s this thing, psychologically speaking, called a “reminiscence bump” — which  just means the memories from our teen years take up permanent real estate in our heads. Duh. Anyone could have guessed that.

But, for Gen Z, that bump isn’t individual; it’s communal. 

Why? Oh. The internet!

Oh yeah! We were the first generation to come of age online.

Oh right . We were the first age to have our formative years live-streamed through dog filter Snapchat stories.

Ha!  Our childhood adolescence was quite literally outsourced to a cloud, making my memories not really my own, but a digital mythology. Svedka vodka, adidas sneakers, Jeep cars, these images, burned into my brain permanently from doomscrolling overly edited photos from VSCO. 2016, the year we all pretended to be a little older, a little freer, and a little sluttier than we really were.

It makes me sad. Devastated even to think about 2016. It was so deeply innocent. Playing Pokemon Go in the streets and nearly getting hit by cars, pranking teachers by doing the "Mannequin challenge,” filming Musical.lys that will haunt me for the rest of my life.

And oh god, I am not saying that I peaked in 2016. This is legit what I looked like in 2016. 

But maybe the reason I can’t leave 2016 behind is because everything after it feels like one big universal hangover. One direction, they split up. And fucking Liam Payne died. The lights came on, and holy shit I am so tired. The world got louder, scarier, and way too online. We didn’t know it was gonna get this weird.I mean juul pods turned into geekbars. What are we doing to ourselves!

And so I yearn,

I yearn for Hot Line Bling,

I yearn for watching Stranger Things for the first time, 

I yearn for the final moment before the world stopped pretending it was okay.