Hillary Clinton poses with Pharrell Williams for a selfie backstage before a campaign rally in Raleigh, North Carolina, on November 3, 2016.
We’re just two weeks into 2026, and from a quick glance at my social-media feeds, it looks as if a lot of people are desperate to escape from our current horror-filled timeline. Friends, strangers, and even Hailey Bieber are taking a digital time machine back to 2016, sharing photos and videos they took that year in all their heavily edited glory. Selfies with the Snapchat dog filter abound, as does evidence of the VSCO photo-editing app. Most of the posts are quite heartwarming, if banal, with people reminiscing on what 2016 meant for them and how their lives have changed since. Queer Eye star Jonathan Van Ness, for example, posted a carousel of photos that included walking his first Emmys red carpet, captioning the post “2016 me could never believe 2026 me.”
So why exactly is everyone romanticizing 2016? Part of it seems to be a real craving for a period when culture felt genuinely playful (remember the Mannequin Challenge or Vine?) and when people seemed more carefree online — at the time, no one really curated the aesthetic of their Instagram feed. Barack Obama still was in office, and it was widely believed that Hillary Clinton would soon make history as the first woman president. Beyoncé released Lemonade and blew us all away. Twitter was actually an entertaining app with funny and smart creators, still years away from becoming a cesspool filled with Nazi propaganda and sexual-abuse images. The Met Gala was a cultural gift that kept on giving; you could trace some of the biggest celebrity feuds, breakups, and new relationships of 2016 to that first Monday in May. Meme culture was at its peak, and following influencers was fun because they were not yet Amazon-storefronting you to death.
I get why people are looking back on 2016 with fondness, and I also understand that it can be uplifting to look back at where you were ten years ago versus today and see how much you’ve grown. So I feel like a jerk for having a negative reaction each time I see one of these posts. Because what all this rosy, Coachella-flower-crowned nostalgia elides is that 2016 was chock-full of horrors, too.
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Most obviously, Americans elected Donald Trump and probably ripped apart the fabric of the universe in the process. But even before that fateful presidential election, so many Outrageously Bad™ events had happened all over the globe that I have yet to forget: a concerning Zika outbreak. Terrorist attacks in Burkina Faso, France, Turkey, Germany, and Belgium. The same racism and anti-immigrant sentiment that propelled Trump into the White House also gave us Brexit. Here at home, a gunman attacked Pulse, a gay nightclub in Orlando, in what was the deadliest terrorist attack in the U.S. since 9/11 and, at that point, the deadliest mass shooting in the country’s history. (Always an overachiever, America would break that latter record just one year later.) Police also fatally shot two Black men, Alton Sterling and Philando Castile, in separate incidents caught on camera that sparked nationwide protests. There was the Flint water-contamination crisis, state lawmakers introduced a first wave of anti-trans legislation, and Brock Turner’s light sentence for sexual assault highlighted the limits of the criminal legal system when it comes to ensuring justice for survivors.
So sure, the VSCO filters were cute, but if we’re being honest, the vibes in 2016 were pretty rancid. I can accept that for some people, the year felt full of possibility, at least until the morning of November 9. The world has become a scarier, more challenging, and more divided place over the past decade. But in many ways, including that Trump is back in office pursuing his agenda more aggressively than in his first term and that high-profile law-enforcement shootings are dominating headlines, we never left 2016. You may continue posting throwbacks to your heart’s content, but, please, do not tell me it was the “best year ever.” The terrible events of 2016, and the photos from that time showing me wearing way too much highlighter on my cheeks, say otherwise.
