Old Snapchat filters, Pokémon Go screenshots and grainy front-camera selfies. I assumed it was one of those January internet things that would disappear by the following weekend.

Instead, #2016 crossed 1.7 million TikTok posts early in the year, and months later people were still talking about it. And there was one line almost under every post - “2016 was the last time everything felt normal.”

I don’t even know if that is true. I barely remember what I was stressed about in 2016, which probably says more about nostalgia than the sentence itself.

What interested me was the timing - Ten years

That is unusually fast.

For years, designers and fashion people have talked about a 20-year cycle. Something becomes popular, everybody gets sick of it, it disappears for long enough to become embarrassing, and eventually somebody young finds it again.

This year, researchers at Northwestern tested that idea.

So the cliché was not completely made up.

The strange bit is that the cycle has also become messier. Since the 1980s, more styles have been hanging around at the same time. Things do not disappear properly anymore.

And once I read that, 2016 started making more sense.

Nothing from 2016 went anywhere.

The songs are still on Spotify, the photos are still sitting in your camera roll, and old Vine compilations are on YouTube.

Someone who was six years old that year can spend two hours tonight watching exactly what teenagers wore, listened to and posted back then.

You do not need to rediscover the past anymore, you can search it.

20 year cycle made sense when a trend had to die before someone could bring it back. Now it can sit online for 10 years until enough people decide it suddenly feels comforting again.

I thought this was mostly an internet-cycle story until I read Cathy Cox’s work on nostalgia. She is a psychologist at Texas Christian University who studies what nostalgia does to people.

Earlier this year, TCU asked her about the 2016 trend specifically, and her answer was less sentimental than what social media has to say.

People tend to reach for nostalgia more when they feel lonely, bored or sad.

That made me go back to the line about 2016 being “the last normal year.”

I can remember the dog filter and the Pokémon Go, maybe name a few songs from that year, but I cannot tell you what annoyed me on a random Tuesday in August 2016, or what I was worried about that week.

The internet remembers roughly the same things I do, like photos people thought were worth keeping, songs they still play, or memes that were funny.

Most of the ordinary days around them are gone. So ten years later, we are looking back at a pretty selective record of what 2016 felt like.

Cox’s lab has also found that people can feel nostalgia through memories they never personally lived, which helps explain why somebody who barely remembers 2016 can still feel attached to it.

There is enough of the year available online for them to build their own version of it.

And its the same towards old things offline too. Vinyl is an easy example.

India barely had a vinyl ecosystem left a decade ago. Then in 2024, the country got its first vinyl pressing plant in decades in Navi Mumbai.

Its founder, Saji Pillai, told a reporter he felt “like a kid in a candy shop” watching the first records come off the line.

Listening bars have started appearing in Mumbai, Delhi, Bengaluru and Ahmedabad.

There is something objectively funny about paying money in 2026 for a format that streaming spent years making unnecessary.

But I get it.

Spotify gives me every song immediately, which is useful. A record makes me get up, choose something, put it on, sit through a side, turn it over.

That inconvenience is now part of what people are buying.

Maybe nostalgia is not always about wanting the old object. Sometimes the object is just the easiest way to get an old feeling back :)

The 20-year rule made intuitive sense.

Twenty years is long enough for one generation to get bored and another to come along without the embarrassment attached.

Ten years is different because it means we are becoming nostalgic for things we have barely had time to lose.

I spent longer on the 2016 tag than I want to admit.

At some point I realised I was looking for evidence that the year really had felt different.

I did not find much.

What I cannot stop thinking about now is 2026.

There is probably something from this year that feels completely ordinary today and will look strangely comforting in 2036.

Maybe earlier, if ten years is the new twenty, I already know I would laugh if someone told me what it was, which is probably what I would have done in 2016.

Hit reply and tell me: what from right now do you think you will be nostalgic for in ten years?

I read every email.

Until next week,
Ritesh

P.S. The 2016 trend reportedly began with one TikTok user proposing January 1 as a kind of reset day for bringing back the internet of a decade ago. That part feels very 2026 too. One person posts an idea, and suddenly a million people have the same memory.