We Called It 'The Worst Year Ever', So Why Are We So Nostalgic For 2016?

Have you noticed that with this new year, social media is awash with nostalgia for 2016 which was somehow 10 years ago?!

For those of us that remember, this was often cited as being the ‘worst year ever’ due to a number of beloved celebrities dying, including Alan Rickman, George Michael and David Bowie. It was also the year that Britain voted to leave the European Union, and Donald Trump was elected for the first time as president in the US.

With all this in mind, it begs the question of: why do we romanticise it now a decade later?

Why we miss 2016 all of a sudden

Personally, 2016 was a rough one for me. My relationship of seven years ended, my health was pretty poor and my landlord sold the flat I’d called home for five years, meaning I had a month to get a new place to live and move myself there. I didn’t have the best time.

However, and maybe I’m wearing rose-tinted glasses here, I do miss it. It feels like we’ve had a very heavy decade with the Covid-19 pandemic, various wars, the rise of the alt-right. Of course, 2016 wasn’t a great time politically and set the foundation for everything we fight against today, but it all seemed so much simpler.

Speaking to Glamour, chartered clinical psychologist Tracy King said: “There is a quiet sense of loss wrapped up in this nostalgia,

“People are not saying that 2016 was perfect. They are saying that life felt more manageable, more connected, and more human. The world still felt like something you could move through without constant tension or alertness.”

That definitely mirrors how I feel. I know that my own life was falling apart in 2016, but that’s somewhat easier to cope with when it doesn’t feel like the world around you is, too.

Clay Routledge, an existential psychologist and leading expert in the science of nostalgia, also explained to NBC: “People tend to be nostalgic when they’re anxious about the future or they’re not sure what direction in life to take.

“So I think this generation is dealing with those anxieties, and they’re using nostalgia as a way to respond to them.”

King assures that we can use this warm nostalgia to steer our lives towards happier days, saying: ”[Nostalgia] reminds people that meaning, connection and hope were once easy to find, and even if they are harder to reach now, those memories can help keep hope alive for the future.”

Here’s hoping.