If your Instagram feed is anything like mine, every white girl you know is posting a carousel of photos showing how hot they looked in 2016. In the caption is probably a tribute to the halcyon days of sipping rosé and wearing feathers in their hair at Coachella (we were all so wild and free!). The side parts are deep, the Francesca’s necklaces are bold, and the Snapchat puppy filter is somehow a little bit sexy.
It is, of course, easy for millennials to idealize that far-off time, when our hearts and our cheeks were a bit fuller, when 2016’s long summer nights promised only good times ahead, before it all got yanked away.
Of course, at the time, we may not have been quite as happy as our desaturated throwbacks make it seem. When we were actually living in 2016, plenty of us were bemoaning the fact that it was, by many measures, the worst year of our lives: There was Donald Trump’s election, of course, plus Brexit and the deaths of Prince and David Bowie, who’d apparently been holding the fabric of society together through the power of their anthems alone.
But if 2016 felt, at the time, like a portal to a hellscape, we’ve just been journeying deeper and deeper into the bowels of hell for 10 long years now. In comparison, the welcome mat to the hellscape doesn’t look all that bad—especially if you’re a millennial looking back at your youth before corporate and political anomie sucked it dry, or a Gen Zer who feels like they missed out on all the good times. But was it really better in that sparkling land of $5 Ubers and Forever 21 crop tops bought by the bushel? Or is it all just a mirage? It’s time to take off the rose-tinted Ray-Bans and stare right into the harsh light of the truth, VSCO filters off. Which is really better: 2016 or today?
Movies and TV
It’s no secret that Hollywood is currently in a tailspin, by and large one of its own making. Strikes, studio consolidation, AI, the pandemic, and the hungry maw of stale IP have conspired to contract the job market and diminish the quality of what we’re getting, especially on algorithm-driven streaming services. The long fall of one TV behemoth demonstrates how far we’ve come from 2016: Stranger Things premiered on Netflix to great fanfare in July of that year, using the potent pill of nostalgia to sweep us back to the ’80s of Hawkins, Indiana. The show united us in awe, internet speculation, and a deep and abiding concern for Barb’s welfare. In 2026, it brought us together again, this time in the conviction that there must be an alternate ending because the finale was so abysmal (and possibly written with ChatGPT).
But let’s look at some of the other TV and movies on offer in 2016: There was Season 6 of Game of Thrones, widely considered one of the show’s best—and certainly the last good one we got before the precipitous decline in Seasons 7 and 8. 2016 also saw the premieres of Westworld (its first and last good season), Fleabag, Atlanta, Insecure, and The Crown. Pickings were very good for both globe-trotting epics and personal stories told by idiosyncratic rising stars.
There’s plenty of good TV now (and frankly, the existence of The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City in 2026 gives our current reality a little bit of an edge), but it just doesn’t feel the same as it did then: like you could count on some new, generation-defining series to come out every few months. We have The White Lotus, Severance, and The Pitt, sure, but as The Ringer’s own Alan Siegel has said, we’ll probably never have anything like Stranger Things again (or Game of Thrones, no matter how hard HBO tries). It sometimes feels like we’re spinning the dial just to find something that’ll be good background noise while we look at our phones. (Matt Damon agrees.)
2016 was a banner year for movies, too. Remember the Moonlight vs. La La Land debacle? That might have been a low point in Oscar history, but it happened at the ceremony in 2017, when the world was already on a downswing. In 2016, we just got to savor both movies, probably in the theater and not on a streaming service (the theatrical window was twice as long back then!). We also got: Arrival, Hell or High Water, Rogue One, Zootopia, Manchester by the Sea, The Nice Guys, Moana, and Captain America: Civil War. As you may have noticed, a lot of the content we’re getting these days is recycled from these films: Andor, as great as it is, wouldn’t exist without Rogue One; Disney’s churned out both Zootopia 2 and Moana 2 in the last few years and is going back to that well with the live-action version of Moana this year; anticipation for Avengers: Doomsday is based largely on the return of a sorely missed Chris Evans; and what was Hell or High Water but the high that Taylor Sheridan has been chasing ever since?
Winner: 2016
Music
All I really need to say is that 2016 was the last time we got new music from Rihanna and Frank Ocean. But if that somehow weren’t enough, we also got Lemonade, Beyoncé’s most earth-shattering (slash Jay-Z-shattering) album to date; “Hotline Bling” and all its memes, back when it was totally aboveboard—nay, almost a millennial duty—to be a Drake stan; Blackstar, David Bowie’s bittersweet parting gift; and Chance the Rapper’s Coloring Book (if you lived in Chicago in 2016, you know what a moment that was).
We had the Chainsmokers for our anthems:
We had Migos for our ragers:
And before he was making whatever The Idol was, The Weeknd couldn’t stop dropping absolute bangers:
Suffice it to say that none of those people—not just Rihanna and Frank—have been releasing much of note lately (apologies to Chance). We do have plenty of bright new lights: artists like Rosalía and Bad Bunny (Benito Bowl incoming) who are expanding what pop music can be. But there are few defining hits like Beyoncé’s “Sorry” or Rihanna ft. Drake’s “Work” or Fetty Wap’s “Trap Queen.”
The death of the monoculture has been much ballyhooed, but I’m here to say it again: It really did feel like music brought us together then in a way it doesn’t now. That band that’s being heralded as rock’s new savior? Guarantee your friends who aren’t extremely online haven’t heard of it (they probably did love Twenty One Pilots, though). Chappell Roan and Sabrina Carpenter might be two of the only artists everyone in a car could sing along to, but even then, they’d all just be mouthing along to the parts they heard on TikTok, not raging in the back seat like we did in my day.
Winner: 2016
The Internet
When I scroll back in time to 2016, I remember posting without a care in the world, just to remember what I did (or ate or wore) that day. Even a comedian’s try-hard Twitter jokes or a proto-influencer’s OOTD felt so sincere, not fraught with stakes or monetization like they are today. Internet trends were simple and kind of corny (remember “Black Beatles” and Harambe, may he rest in peace?), while today they’re usually lacquered with several layers of brain-rotted absurdism. Nowadays, there’s an ironic remove to the Instagram carousel dumps where people post pictures of dirty dishes alongside their tear-streaked faces, a far cry from the aesthetic in 2016, when we were posting loving shots of latte art and squatting on the grid with the girly pops.
In general, the internet in 2016 felt more like an adjunct to real life, a way to extend it and remember it, rather than an ecosystem of its own. And even though it sometimes felt like we were putting up a front back then, we were, for the most part, thinking a lot less about what we put online and enjoying life more.
And sure, people had always posted about politics on Facebook, but before that November, it didn’t feel like the hostile, frenzied battlefield it is today. 2016 was when our internet credulity was turned against us by bad actors and “fake news” obliterated our sense of reality. Creatures of the internet like incels and QAnon conspiracy theorists came out from wherever they’d been hiding (4chan?) and became part of the internet’s new, gross fabric. Now, Twitter’s been taken over by Elon Musk, and Grok’s been unleashed upon the world. Mark Zuckerberg vowed to contend with misinformation on Facebook, then just kind of shrugged his shoulders about it and went to Trump’s second inauguration. We’re up to our ears in AI slop, and we have to keep telling our moms that those videos of bunnies jumping on a trampoline aren’t real. The internet still has some delights and a capacity to surprise (I don’t spend half my time on Bravo Reddit boards for nothing), but the option to use it exactly how we want to—and then forget about it when we put our phones away—seems to be gone.
Winner: 2016
Fashion
The word “cheugy” (now itself pretty cheugy, by its own definition) was invented to describe what we were wearing in 2016: skinny jeans, skinny scarves, skinny chokers ’round our skinny necks. I worked at Urban Outfitters in 2016, so I was on the front lines of the Coachella-adjacent fringe-and-feathers moment, which occasionally landed on the wrong side of cultural appropriation. We piled on all the accoutrements, the signs we were in the know—those Free People bralettes, the notorious green army jacket, a lace-up top for every occasion—whether we were going to class or the club. Bolder was always better, from our carefully stenciled brows and lightning-bright highlighter to the lip kits peddled by King Kylie herself.
It’s safe to say that we’ve all pared it down a bit (recession-core?), or maybe we’re just tired: Matching sets, roomy pants, and human-looking eyebrows all speak to a need for slightly more comfort than what the trends in 2016 offered. But if Gen Z, after years of skewering millennials for our fashion sense, is finally being drawn to the dark side, maybe it’s just because we looked like we were having so much fun in our Converse and chokers back then. But for those of us who painted on our skinny jeans every day like it was a full-time job, it might be harder to give up the comforts we’ve grown accustomed to. To Gen Z: Have fun finding our cold-shoulder tops at the thrift, a bequest from one generation to the next. Enjoy them as we did: with a White Claw in hand, “Shut Up and Dance” blaring at the pregame.
Winner: Now (those cheap chokers broke all the time, actually, and my Free People bra really hurt my neck)
Eating, Drinking, and Making Merry
In the prime of VSCO-filtered Instagram, “phone eats first” became a mantra for the Instagram set, artfully plated avocado toast serving as a counterweight to the fit pics on our grids. It’s no coincidence that rainbow bagels took off in 2016, their multicolored hues a match for our shots of candy-colored skies. I’ve never even been to a Voodoo Doughnut, but I can imagine a box of them now, heaped high with Cap'n Crunch and incandescent icing. In-N-Out trays became their own genre of content, a sign that you were happier than everyone else because you were eating a burger in California.
There was nary a glimmer of protein-maxxing. Food used to delight us, but now it seems like it’s just supposed to serve us by turning our bodies into literal lean protein. Instead of cute little shots of cupcakes or cronuts, all I see on TikTok now are recipes for Greek yogurt mixed with instant pudding or completely earnest advice to eat the same exact thing every day to get the best results for your physique. I so miss not knowing what a macro is.
Instead of our health, we were just worried about where the next party was and whether the one Uber in our college town would actually come pick us up. We first met White Claws and Juuls around 2016, and the haze we entered as a result might explain why we miss that time so much—we can barely remember it. As I hear tales that Gen Z is going out less and scrolling more, I have to imagine that they long for the times we had, when we were outside and unsure where the rest of the night would take us. All due respect to responsible alcohol consumption, but pounding jungle juice out of a bathtub was an undeniably thrilling part of life in 2016—one I might not choose to relive now but sure am glad I experienced (and managed to survive) then.
Winner: I guess we are probably healthier now
The State of the World
I think it might be fair to say that 2016 and right now are both losers here. The most obvious low of 2016 was Donald Trump’s election; perhaps we remember that year so fondly because it was the last time we were naive enough to think that Hillary or Bernie could beat him.
But that wasn’t 2016’s only low point: Think back hard enough, and you’ll remember it as the year Prince, David Bowie, Alan Rickman, Leonard Cohen, Carrie Fisher, Muhammad Ali, and so many other of our icons and iconoclasts passed away. The terrorist attacks in France and the shooting at Pulse were shocking and devastating in a way that they might not be today, inured as we are to a constant stream of bad news.
Now, we’re in the thick of Trump’s second presidency, which is somehow even worse for immigrants, the climate, the economy, and the basic fabric of society and geopolitical order. The killing of Renee Good, the detention of immigrants by ICE, the takeover in Venezuela—every day of this year has already been subsumed by a new, different stream of troubling events. The brightest light, of course, is the resistance that’s growing in places like Minneapolis and New York. By the end of 2016, we were desperately seeking tips on self-care; in 2026, many are looking for ways to help those who need it more than we do.
Winner: Draw
Our final tally? Four counts for 2016, three for now—a surprisingly high number, given my own yearning to escape to the good ol’ days. While we certainly had our moments then—a part of me really does miss Snapchat filters—once you remember 2016 beyond your preserved-in-amber Instagram grid, it was still just life. And we were all racing toward a world where it would be more difficult to ignore politics and live safely in our little bubbles—even though the state of the world, both at home and abroad, hadn’t been all that copacetic even before Trump was elected. In her good-riddance send-off to 2016, Jia Tolentino wrote that we have “a cognitive bias that makes us recall bad events more vividly than good ones”—hence all our moaning and groaning at the end of 2016 that it was the “worst year ever.” That cognitive bias seems to have reversed itself with time, painting 2016 as the “best year ever” instead. Really, it was just another year, more than a little bit like this one. But even if the euphoria we associate with 2016 is just nostalgia talking, there’s no reason we can’t channel some of it in 2026. If you need to cue up some Chainsmokers to feel something again, more power to you. If chokers make a comeback and we have to binge Season 1 of Stranger Things to cover the multitude of sins committed by Season 5, that’s just a very 2016 form of self-care, not regression. Past eras always come back around—although it’s happening a lot faster now than it used to—and celebrating 2016 gives us a chance to own our pasts instead of leaving them in the dustbin of history. But please, I beg you: Let’s all agree not to bring skinny jeans back this time.
