Photo illustration by The Globe and Mail. Source photos: AP;Getty Images;Netflix;YouTube;AFP/Getty Images/The Globe and Mail
When I noticed my social media feeds had been overtaken this month by decade-old photos, memories and memes, I was a little bewildered. Everyone from celebrities to your everyday millennial friends have been waxing endlessly nostalgic for 2016 – a year when the Harambe meme dominated, Pokémon Go was an unavoidable craze, and Gilmore Girls and Ghostbusters were rebooted. On the surface, 2016 seems like a more wholesome time, but it was also a cultural hinge-point when everything began to shift.
“I promise whatever happened to you in 2016 mine was crazier,” entrepreneur and socialite Kim Kardashian captioned an Instagram post this week. What the Kardashian didn’t make explicit with her selfies and vacation photos is the bleak fact of something else that happened that year: She was robbed at gunpoint in Paris of jewellery worth millions of dollars.
As an extremely online arts and culture writer at the time, I remember how the internet had buzzed, and it was not with sympathy. Commentators dissected her life of excess. The implication? That the robbery was inevitable and, therefore, maybe even deserved.
At the time, the conversation felt shocking. Something had curdled. Kardashian has always been and remains polarizing, but the cultural mood shifted from supporting voyeuristic fascination to delivering moral punishment. The Kardashian robbery didn’t cause that shift, but it made it clear: The internet had stopped feeling playful and started feeling prosecutorial. And, well, kind of dark.
We didn’t know it at the time, but 2016 was the end of monoculture, of appointment-viewing TV, music releases that felt like events and cultural moments everyone seemed to experience at once.
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There was plenty of pop cultural good born that year: Beyoncé’s Lemonade and Drake’s Views dropped, Hamilton had recently debuted on Broadway, Moonlight premiered, Simone Biles was on the rise. TV was thriving with the premieres of Stranger Things, Insecure, Atlanta and Westworld. Music brought us what was arguably Kanye West’s last coherent work, The Life of Pablo. Just before author J.K. Rowling went off the political deep end, the Harry Potter franchise saw new installments. For crying out loud, Leonardo DiCaprio finally won an Oscar.
Lin-Manuel Miranda and the cast of the hit production Hamilton perform at the Tony Awards in New York in 2016.The Associated Press
But – and it’s a big but here – it was also the year of massive rupture, including the Brexit referendum, Donald Trump’s first election, the Orlando nightclub shooting, and the deaths of icons Prince, George Michael and David Bowie. Looking back, you can feel the pivot happening in real time. The world didn’t end that year but it stopped feeling stable. We crossed a threshold.
Many millennials associate 2016 with their first real taste of adulthood – careers starting, identities solidifying, independence taking shape – before the weight of constant crisis set in. When I look back at 2016, personally, it was the year my life felt like it was truly beginning. I landed my first full-time journalism job at a national newspaper, writing about arts and culture, which have always made the world feel expansive to me. I was coming into my voice, my ambition and my sense of self. The future felt open.
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For Gen Z, adulthood has arrived hand-in-hand with AI anxiety, climate dread and a political landscape that feels permanently on fire. Their lives have unfolded almost entirely online, under systems that reward self-branding and punish softness. Against that backdrop, millennial “cringe” – sincerity, experimentation, earnestness – has gained a certain appeal.
The way millennials came of age now seems, at least to younger folks, indicative of a lost freedom. Zoomers are posting odes to side parts, Tumblr and Twitter before “X”, flower crowns and genuine, sometimes embarrassing optimism, framing it all as something enviable. They’re yearning for what it felt like to exist in the world before everything became relentlessly surveilled, optimized and politicized.
That’s maybe why 2016 occupies such a strange place in our memory. It wasn’t innocent – far from it – but it was the last year when the illusion of coherence still held. Before everything fractured into divisive feeds and echo chambers. Before joy and enthusiasm were treated with suspicion, and looking forward to the future was quickly labelled naive. Before an era defined by discord and the belief that visibility is a liability. Today, irony is safest and cynicism feels smarter. But god, it’s exhausting.
Spaces that were once fun and futile have become hardened sites of judgment and, more than ever, consumers crave a strange and unusual moral didacticism in every bit of their media. How boring!
In just 10 years, so much has changed. That’s baldly evident in pop culture and, more deeply, in the way we feel and express ourselves, whether it’s anger, indifference or fear. Through its rose-coloured view, nostalgia will always be an optimal lens. Here’s hoping it paves our way back to a better time.