The Good Old Days: Nostalgia as comfort in uncertain times

Gen Z has an insatiable hunger for all things vintage and nostalgia. They are fascinated not only by the nostalgia of their own childhoods, but also by the decades their parents and grandparents grew up in. But in a time of increased political and social instability, is it any wonder that we turn to the past for comfort?

If you’ve kept up with fashion and pop culture trends in the past few years, you’ve most likely noticed that vintage keeps popping up, whether it’s the low rise jeans and henley tops of the early 2000s, or babydoll dresses and penny lane coats reminiscent of the 1960s and 70s. According to ThredUp’s 2025 resale report, “the global secondhand apparel market is expected to reach $367 billion by 2029, growing 2.7X faster than the overall global apparel market.”

Beyond fashion, older technology such as record players, flip phones, and digital cameras seem to be making a comeback. In 2022, vinyl records made a remarkable comeback, with revenue growing 17% and exceeding CD sales for the first time in 35 years, according to the Recording Industry Association of America's annual revenue report.

Although every generation reminisces on the past and on the time that they grew up in, Gen Z seems more fixated on the past than any other generation before it. In fact, Gen Z doesn’t only seems to be nostalgic for the early 2000s that they grew up in, but for past decades that they haven’t even experienced, a phenomenon that hasn’t been observed in any other generation.

Freya India, a Gen Z author and thinker, explains that this phenomenon could be a result of the anxieties and grief our generation is experiencing now that our lives are consumed by endless information and doomscrolling. In her article “A Time We Never Knew,” she writes, “I am grieving something I never knew. I am grieving that giddy excitement over waiting for and playing a new vinyl for the first time, when now we instantly stream songs on YouTube, use Spotify with no waiting, and skip impatiently through new albums... I even have a sense of loss for experiencing tragic news––a moment in world history––without being drenched in endless opinions online. I am homesick for a time when something horrific happened in the world, and instead of immediately opening Twitter, people held each other. A time of more shared feeling, and less frantic analyzing. A time of being both disconnected but supremely connected.”

Our generation is experiencing a constant stream of anxieties and crises, so it seems natural that we turn toward the past as comfort. Our mental health is considerably worse than the generations before us, we are lonelier than ever, and we live in a time of increased political instability and polarization. It seems completely reasonable that we turn to the aesthetics and technologies of past generations as a form of escapism.

But as we retreat into the past, we must ask ourselves, was the past really that much better? In the 50s, there was higher racial and gender inequality, smoking in public, and aspic jelly. The 80s brought the AIDs epidemic, the Cold War, and satanic panic. In the 2000s, the world experienced several economic crises, increased terrorism, and an excess of leopard print. Every generation brought with it new anxieties, tragedies, and cringeworthy trends, most of which are ignored when we idealize them.

We often hear from our parents and grandparents how great their childhoods were without cell phones and social media. We’re told how much simpler life was in the 60s, 70s, 80s, and 90s, and even recall our own childhoods of the 2000s with a strong sense that it was somehow better than today.

According to a 2003 study by the American Psychological Association, people tend to remember the past as better than it actually was for two main reasons. The first is that positive experiences simply tend to outnumber negative ones, and people generally seek out positive experiences. Second, negative memories usually fade faster than positive ones, a process referred to as minimization. This process allows us to remember our lives in a more positive way, while negative memories about our lives and the world fade.

Understanding this can help us realize that the collective memory of past decades is a lot like a highlight reel. When thinking of their childhoods, our parents are more likely to remember Duran Duran and Schoolhouse Rock than the eruption of Mount St. Helen. And when we think of our own, we probably remember silly bands and Club Penguin before we think of the 2008 financial crisis.

There is a line between finding inspiration from past decades and living in a state of grief for the past, and when we cross that line we cheat ourselves out of a life of contentment. Perhaps if we let go of the expectation that decades past were unquestionably better and that we’ve missed out on something we can never get back, we could ease our anxiety and make the most of the life we’re living now. In her article “Modern nostalgia: Why do young people ache for a past they never lived?” Ixone Arana writes, “If you must remember something, let it be that time flies, and it is better to invest it in living experiences instead of evoking them.”

It can be tempting to view nostalgia as unproductive, but some researchers view it as a helpful tool in shaping the future. Dr. Clay Routledge is a social psychologist specializing in nostalgia, who believes that “nostalgia is, counterintuitively, a future-oriented endeavor. We draw on it to resolve our dissatisfactions in the present and to move forward with hope and determination.” Routledge sees Gen Z’s obsession with nostalgia as a way to understand what we feel we are lacking today, and move forward in a productive direction. If we can ride the line between grounding ourselves in the past and moving towards a hopeful future, why not use nostalgia as our compass?