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What do you think late 2010s-early 2020s nostalgia will look like?
Asking mainly because we generally view this period as a rock-bottom, but nostalgia seems to be as good as natural, so what do you think people in 5, 10, 15+ years will remember overly fondly about the present?
I imagine there will be movies about people doing cool stuff like writing songs and making art and writing books and creating software during isolation. Also, everyone will be wearing fashionable masks. A certain style of clumsy-but-nostalgic video chat will be understood as visual shorthand for this era. Also, there will be lots of Cybertrucks, even though they aren’t out yet.
I wouldn't call that nostalgia though. I think it will be mostly similar to movies about the Great Depression or WWII. Something of historical interest, but not exactly nostalgic.
You might be surprised, people have nostalgia for weird things. My well-off grandmother was always cooking low-cost depression-era meals that no one today would want to eat.
Yeah individual people have all kinds of feelings about the past. I was talking more about a collective sentiment, as exemplified in movies and other popular art forms.
"Remember driving cars? I can't believe we did that. So dangerous, but super fun too!"
That's a good one. In the shorter term I think there will be lots of nostalgia for combustion engines as well.
I guess I'm assuming the number of ICE vehicles on the road will drop sharply by the early-to-mid 2030s. So a nostalgia for the 2020s when the majority of vehicles weren't electric.
Absolutely. Muscle car enthusiasts, for example.
The early 2010s will be full of neutral colors, slimmer fitting clothing with a lot of sweatshirts and sweat pants, and a lot of beanies. Hipsters were brought to the fore from 2010-2013. Even though high waisted pants were only popular in the recent years, they will focus on them for this time frame.
The movies will emphasize on bright, neutral, and pastel colors, idealistic thoughts and technology that is better suited for 2005-2009. Similar to how we think of the early 80s before the neon. The movie "Perks of Being a Wallflower" will be considered the Definitive Film of that era, similar to Breakfast Club or 16 Candles are thought of as now.
The latter 2010s will be more akin to dark neon, cassette futurist in style, dystopian, worrisome, full of rebellion and anger. Working against "The Man" and taking back control. Slim and sleek clothing, bright neon hairs, tattoos, and overall 'punk' style. A lot of leather, even though sadly not all that in style.
The 2020s will be a mash-up of that angsty dark future style, and some colorful, baggy, eccentric 70s. The style is already shifting that way.
I just watched WandaVision and you pretty much nailed the aesthetic they went for in the 2010's/Modern Family episode. It was the first time something made me feel nostalgic for that particular time window, making me feel a bit old.
Haven't seen WandaVision yet, so I guess I'm happy my 'prediction' was accurate? That's good and salient to know.
Edit: As someone who checked out of the MCU after.... I think endgame? Would this be something good/fun to watch?
I'm not terribly invested in the MCU and I found it pretty amusing. It pays off to be familiar with the Avengers films, since the show directly follows the events of Endgame and major plot points from Infinity War and Age of Ultron figure heavily in the show. Any references to other movies flew over my head and probably weren't important enough to impact my enjoyment.
The general premise of the show is executed very well. Each episode is presented in the style of "family" sitcoms from a different era, starting in the '50s and progressing to the present. To explain why this is or how it fits into anything much further would be a massive spoiler though, so I'll leave it at that.
The board is being reset and a lot of the new guard is being setup. WandaVision is fun if you like the history of sitcoms, and Falcon/Winter is almost like a Marvel procedural. I don't think either of them are must watches in the context of the MCU, but if you want to revisit, they're both done and you can get through them with a month of Disney+.
Hey, I happen to think it looks good. ;)
When everything online was smaller, more creator-driven, and generally pre-commercialization. A remembrance of blogs - although they've been making somewhat of a comeback recently. And Flash.
In the real world, I think this past decade will have been the last where most of the effects of climate change won't have been readily apparent, and also the last with (relative) economic stability for young people.
Oh! I thought this question was about the past decade. For the present and past couple of years:
Aside from some personal things, I don't know what I'll be nostalgic for when looking back on this stretch. As an American, maybe the early days of lockdown when it brought people closer, or the collective resistance to Trump that was everywhere over the past five years. Hopefully we look back at BLM fondly and idealistically, in a way that is similar to the fondness many people have when telling the history of the 60s Civil Rights Era, but with more honesty. I'd actually like to hear your thoughts on this, Kuromantis. I'm starting to get a little old and out of touch, so most of my cultural nostalgia will likely focus on stuff from the early 90s to about 2015. Tik Tok, Lime scooters, middle parts, and this outrageous "70s meets 2000 with a touch of early 90s" style is too much for an old man like me. You're in an age group that will look back at this time with a lot of joy, what do you think?
Affordable TV. Netflix is £6 a month!!! That is incredible. Satellite TV was/is so expensive. The basic Sky package is over £25! My dad point blank refused to get Sky when i was young (900 channels and nothing to watch) but even he couldn't imagine living without Netflix. Our house's tv box isnt even connected, instead we watch exclusively Netflix, Amazon and Iplayer and it costs less than the basic sky package did 20 years ago.
I think we are coming to the end of it now, more services, more costs, more adverts but it was good while it lasted.
I'll be like 90s nostalgia that actually stretches as far out as 2005. At least the American cultural aesthetic mostly normalized in the mid 00s, and hasn't changed too much since then (nothing as drastic as the 70s -> 80s -> 90s, for sure), but I'd wager most countries have stabilized somewhat. There won't be a dominant style beyond what is co-opted from popular media of our time. It won't kick in until around 2030 at least, sort of how 90s nostalgia started really ramping up in the mid 2010s.
Culture doesn't matter as much. Look at the people still wearing 50-style stuff that started in the 80s, or all the prevalence of 50s-themed diners in the US. I don't think the 10s have much of a defining aesthetic, and the ideology of the time won't be carried over as well, either.
My best comparison would be the 80's, where there was a whole lot of wild nonsense going on in the political world with Reganomics and the AIDS crisis chugging away in the background, but pop culture overshadowing every aspect of the cultural memory, up to when the wall fell. We're probably going to remember Let's Players, Tik Tok, Oculus Quest, Doordash, Metaverse games as services, Marvel putting out a new movie every week, and everyone coming out with a streaming service until the pandemic made everybody lose a year plus.
-Marskless activites as concerts, parties, movie nights, etc.
-Less restricted travel.
-Using internet on browsers using personal computers and smartphones, the new normal could be AR/VR metaverse.
-WhatsApp, Instagram, Snapchat and many other will be a thing of the past, The ICQs of this era.
-Videogames Consoles, people will be playing more on game streaming apps.
-Smartphones and iPhones in general.
@AnthonyB asked me to give my opinion on the subject, mainly because this period's nostalgia will be my age group's nostalgia, being a younger teenager. I was planning on doing this, but decided to do it later because I guessed I could make a list long enough for the comment section to gave less comment, which in hindsight is a pretty poorly-made guess, even if this is decently elaborate. I'm personally not all that in-tone with what the people around me are up to, so my take is not really more informed than anyone else here's take IMO.
But first, 2 things for speculation: Given people are living longer and having less children, I wonder if there will ever be a point where having a relevant youth and youth culture will just become fundamentally less important, albeit maybe that's either already happened (well, the decreasing youth part, that is) or is happening too slowly for it to be definitive to any generation or group cohort.
I also wonder how nostalgia is going to be affected by the fact that it will be far less difficult to just look up the past felt like to the people living it when it was the present. A lot of the time, whenever people talk about how free and great the internet was or how
naivea-political, optimistic or whatever people were, I always find it really annoying how hard it seems to be to verify whether they're right or retconning unless it's about politics or public opinion, in which case they're usually obviously retconning. Geocities, Orkut, MySpace all had their backlogs deleted. Yahoo answers will soon too. If Reddit and others don't face the same fate if they're ever threatened, and governments make sure things like redditsearch can operate withoutbeing threatened by companies, or those governments themselves, this could be the first time in history you can use date specific search to just look up past people's comments decades in the future.Anyway, if the future is better than the present I think the most clearly discernable nostalgic view is the Political view, personal nicknames being the "Build Back Better Generation" view and The "Second Greatest Generation" view).
Like @AnthonyB said, we could look back on this period as the period when we fought for our social rights, economic rights, our climate future, our democratic rights, and more. We would talk about how we stood up in the face of injustice and slowly crawled our way to the top of the political ladder and, facing the greatest threats from our political enemies ranging from the end of democracy to a permanent and ever growing climate crisis to the undoing of decades of social rights, defeated them to bring prosperity for our (ever decreasing number of but oh well it has to happen) children to enjoy. A Bernie/Biden 2020 t-shirt from the time period would be a relic.
(OBS: It hopefully wouldn't be described in such dramatic terms.)
Otherwise, I don't really have any big views, more so aspects of today that might be nostalgi-fied:
A brief list of (YouTube) people who I think might pop up in nostalgia or are at least associated with 'zoomers' (Note: I don't really watch most of these, many are just guesses and can be enjoyed by anyone else)
Dream
The Game theorists (yes, they've been here for 10 years, but their current audience is people a few years younger than me)
Seth Everman
RTGame
Flyingkitty
Davie504
Carlsagan42
Jameskii
(Modern) Pewdiepie
Some stereotypical games would be:
One thing I see in some/most battle reoyale games is a ranked mode where a handful of people play together to go up ranks, and I knew some people who played these competitively with groups of people long-term. That sounds like the kind of playstyle you make friends with, which is very strong nostalgia material IMO.
Still as popular as ever. Nothing says children aren't walking the same path now as some people here did, the main difference being they would congregate around different YouTube tutorials and have no care for herobrine and the game is more complicated and prettier.
Not sure what Among Us nostalgia would look like honestly. Perhaps remembering dumb things you said in chat.
Some other things are:
If things get worse, we will remember now as the last time before true climate catastrophe.
The social awkwardness of today is perhaps redone into something more cutesy and bearable, albeit I would be extremely disappointed at this. Masks might face this too.
As said by petrichor, meme stocks.
Trap will definitely be associated with zoomers and likely pop up in nostalgia, as already said by Loire.
I also wonder if Lo-Fi might be associated with zoomers and pop up in nostalgia or not. I've heard this is one of the objectives of Lo-Fi.
Something I thought of that might be “period establishing” (rather than nostalgic per se) would be vaping. I have several coworkers who vape, and in my mind it is something which really typifies the late 2010s.