Born Too Late, Living Too Fast: Why Our Generation Is Obsessed With Nostalgia
- BY SHER OMAR
- 2 days ago
- 4 min read
How technology, global chaos, and cultural burnout created a generation obsessed with the past
Alexa, play “Where Did All The Time Go” by Dr. Dog… Where'd all the time go? It's starting to fly, See how the hands go, Waving goodbye…
Just as the lyrics suggest, time seems to be slipping through our fingers. Every cheesy saying about time, “time flies when you’re having fun”, “time is money”, “carpe diem”, seems all but true these days, although scientists will argue it’s due to the earth spinning faster, but I think there’s a simpler explanation for why we seem to be more focussed on the concept of time…
Somewhere between rising screen time reports, world news notifications, and the fifth reboot of a childhood TV show, it happened quietly: we became a nostalgic generation. “Nostalgia” it’s delicate but potent. In Greek, Nostalgia literally means “the pain from an old wound.” It’s a twinge in your heart far more powerful than memory alone- a feeling of a place where we ache to go again.
Not in the casual “remember when?” kind of way. In the deep, aching, emotionally loaded way. The kind where a song from 2012 can ruin your whole day in the best and worst way at the same time. The kind where low-rise jeans, digital cameras, and old Facebook albums feel like artifacts from a gentler civilization. One that wasn’t driven from instant gratification, over-sexualization, doomscrolling, brainrot and insane pressure from our online presence on social media.
See, we long for the days that didn’t feel like something out of Blade Runner…Every futuristic film or cartoon show has been correct in predicting what our world would look like; AI, Trump being president again, the entirety of Dubai, Robots, but one thing they were dead wrong about was our enthusiasm for it all. In fact, people are choosing to look back on how realistic life felt when we weren’t being sucked into modernism, minimalism, and neutral colour palettes. We long for a life that is lifelike.
Walk into any store or scroll any feed and you’ll see it: fashion from the early 2000s, 90s silhouettes, Nancy Meyers inspired homes, vintage digital cameras, wired headphones over airpods, skateboards over hoverboards, film grain filters over beauty filters. Even beauty trends are circling back; thin brows, glossy lips, minimal makeup. This isn’t just a style cycle. It’s emotional recycling.
Old trends carry emotional fingerprints. They remind us of sleepovers, high school corridors, family homes we no longer live in, summers that felt endless. Wearing something from the past feels like wearing a memory; like carrying a small, comforting piece of who we used to be into a world that feels increasingly unfamiliar.
When the future feels uncertain, the past feels like proof that we’ve survived before.
Nostalgia isn’t always about the era, it’s about us in that era. When we revisit old music, old shows, or old fashion, what we’re really revisiting is a version of ourselves that feels less responsible, less aware, less heavy. Before we understood how expensive life is. Before we carried the weight of global crises in our pockets via push notifications. Before we knew how complicated everything would become. The past, in our memory, feels smaller. Manageable. Soft around the edges. We miss a time when our biggest problems were personal, not planetary.
Why Old Music Is Climbing the Charts Again
Streaming charts are now time machines. Songs from a decade ago resurface, go viral, and suddenly belong to a new generation, while still belonging to the old one.
Music is one of the strongest memory triggers we have. A single intro can transport us to a specific car ride, bedroom, friendship, or heartbreak. In a time when everything feels overstimulating and constantly changing, familiar songs offer emotional stability. They don’t demand anything from us. They don’t surprise us. They held us exactly where we were. New music asks us to feel something new. Old music lets us feel something we already understand.
Life Is Moving Too Fast, And We Can Feel It
Technology has sped up everything: how we communicate, how we work, how we consume information, how quickly trends rise and die. Nothing lingers. Nothing settles. We barely finish experiencing a moment before it becomes content. Remember Vine? Damn Daniel, you do? How carefree and childlike we all could be, without judgment, sponsorships or paid partnerships. We weren’t forced to be influenced, in fact, every single person was doing the influencing. Our creativity was on a high, not the greens or mushrooms kind, but the kind that connects our souls to our imagination; creating meant spending time with your friends or loved ones, being silly and free and an unwillingness to be something you are not.
We are the first generation to measure our lives not just in memories, but in archives. Photos, stories, posts, voice notes, receipts of who we were were witnessed, and constantly accessible. The past is no longer distant; it’s one scroll away.
And when the present feels overwhelming, politically unstable, economically strained, environmentally anxious, it’s natural to reach for a time that feels known. Safe. The past can’t surprise us with bad news, the future can. Maybe our obsession with the past isn’t regression. Maybe it’s regulation. Nostalgia reminds us that joy existed before and can exist again despite the rapid changes in the world around us. That we’ve felt safe before. Loved before. Hopeful before. It’s a coping mechanism dressed up as an aesthetic, vintage filters, reboots, reunion tours, thrifted wardrobes.
We aren’t trying to live in the past forever, there’s wonderful things about 2026 and the modern world I wouldn’t want to give up, but I do think we’re just borrowing pieces of the past to survive the present, because in a world that feels loud, fast, and slightly apocalyptic, looking back isn’t about refusing to move forward. It’s about reminding ourselves what moving forward is supposed to feel like.
