Why does everyone want it to be 2016 again?

SINGAPORE – Going online lately has felt like being dragged into a time machine. The year is 2016 and no one is leaving home without putting on a crummy choker, V-neck slip dress from Topshop and caterpillar brows.

Throwback pictures from the era

have flooded social media

in the last two weeks, posted by everyone from millennial office ladies and local celebrities to major luxury brands. All the hallmarks are there: Snapchat dog filter selfie, lettuce hem crop tops, artfully arranged “messy” buns and the faint rustic air now associated with photos taken on iPhones with buttons.

What is funny is how universal the nostalgia is. The siren song of 2016 – Closer by The Chainsmokers – has been answered by figures as disparate as Nobel Prize laureate Malala Yousafzai and American reality TV star Kylie Jenner, poster girl of the age.

The standard caption for these blasts from the past is “You just had to be there”. That has not stopped younger Gen Zs chiming in with baby-faced pictures from when they were 12.

Having been there myself as a sulky 18-year-old, it is a little galling to see this sudden reappraisal of the year US President Donald Trump

won his first election

. Though, if I’m being honest, world politics were hardly top of mind for me then, as occupied with teenage self-loathing as I was.

I suspect a craving for that innocence has something to do with the trend, which has mostly been carried by millennials then young enough to shut out the headlines without guilt. But even accounting for the year’s Brexit referendum, Brussels bombing and the death of icons like David Bowie and Carrie Fisher, it was a much simpler time.

Ten years ago, it was possible to scroll to the end of one’s Instagram feed because timelines were chronological. Celebrities controlled their own social media and us regular folk posted rants and pictures of Sunday dinner without anxiety.

Beauty standards were the usual thin waist, thigh gap, thick hair – which seem laughably low-effort compared with the preventive Botox and Ozempic shots in vogue now. Influencers existed as popular people we were one or two degrees removed from, not as a workforce. Pictures were doctored, not AI. Pokemon Go briefly brought world peace.

And dare we forget Harambe? Other viral sensations included Pen-Pineapple-Apple-Pen and the “Damn, Daniel” boy from Vine. Honestly, our approach to the internet was the equivalent of using the world’s most powerful calculator to add two and two.

That 2016 already feels like an alien world is chilling but a return, even if only down memory lane, still feels like regression.

For one thing, the sameness of all the tributes point at a monoculture. How bizarre is it that American model Hailey Bieber could have worn the same high-waisted jeggings (jean leggings) and off-the-shoulder-top outfit as my junior college classmate that year?

It has become blessedly impossible to pin down just one trending look these days, given the thousand or so micro-trends that are active at any moment, and the slow death of the High Street that once dressed us all. These days, wearing vintage pieces and indie labels are the norm.

As for trend diktats, there are so many competing “cores” – slang for hyperspecific style tropes – it is easy and quite discreet for one to opt out of the cycle altogether. Fashion media has even helpfully pronounced personal style a “trend”.

The bulk of pop culture also issued from America in the 2010s. Ergo, it was enormously white. The balance has tipped considerably since then, with Japanese anime, K-pop and Chinese social media platform Xiaohongshu going mainstream in the West.

It is easy to forget that beneath the Buzzfeed of it all, 2016 was a year of structural change that prefigured the present. Instagram killed its chronological feed in June, switching fully to a personalised algorithm that would birth the doomscroll and the hyperactive content cycle. The Meta-owned platform also debuted Stories, which effectively ended rival Snapchat, in line with a turn towards consolidation of the social media apps.

Perhaps the only thing I truly miss about 2016 is a comforting sense of limits. In our humour, we could not have anticipated the absurdity of skibidi, or in our politics, the latter-day collapse of the world order. People whispered about the four-day work week, without imagining remote work.

The first Trump presidency – sans ICE raids, political abductions and Elon Musk – in hindsight feels like it kept to those invisible fences that are unlikely to ever be restored. You have to laugh at the year-end headlines that asked if 2016 was the worst year ever.

Still, though it feels like the world has grown bigger and scarier, it also feels more adult. The fault lines so hidden in 2016 that American mainstream media predicted a landslide win for Hillary Clinton are now all on the table; and we have better jokes for comfort.

Just let 6-7 slide. One day, that’ll be Gen Alpha’s 2016.