There is a certain art to nostalgia, I have come to realise. Let’s define art as a deliberate process of creative inclusion and exclusion: what is and what might have been but isn’t. Just as an artist consciously selects his piece’s medium, a musician her song’s instrumentation, a career sentimentalist (my side hustle) uses careful filtering processes within the mind to convert ever- fading memories into a durable sense of nostalgia. I recall a line from Noah Baumbach’s Kicking and Screaming in which a jaded college graduate declares his nostalgia for the conversations he had yesterday and even for the present moment, which is relatable but something entirely different. True nostalgia—the sort that stays with us and eventually becomes a future item of nostalgia itself—requires a degree of make-believe, storytelling and deception. We must shuffle and skip our mind’s back catalogue to create narratives that fall somewhere between historical fiction and outright conspiracy. This is surely an artful process, and a deeply personal one at that—you will never understand the special significance Zachary’s Chicago Pizza in North Berkeley holds for me, and I will never understand the place your mind currently is, or wishes it was, as you read these strange words. It is all the more perplexing then, that we (“we” being a highly fluid coalition) have collectively decided to canonise the year 2016 as one of humankind’s high-water marks and dedicate our current year to Saint 2016’s memory. 

One might contend that nostalgia is a necessary component of the human condition, a decade is an aesthetically satisfying unit of time, and, therefore, 2016 nostalgia in 2026 makes perfect sense. But where were the tributes to 2015 last year and to 2014 the year before that? There seems to be something qualitatively different and enduring about 2016 in the shared imaginations of people with enough free time for extended escapades into memory. But any “objective memory” (an oxymoron if there ever was one) of 2016 surely points to a fatalistic, doomy year: populism’s ascent with Trump’s first election and Brexit, wanton terror attacks globally, deaths of icons both old (Bowie) and new (Harambe). The prevailing impression at the time, which I just about remember myself, was one of a global hex—some kind of karmic retribution cast upon the world. It is one thing for nostalgic minds to paint over the bad and magnify the good, but the transformation 2016 has undergone in collective memories is a far more remarkable feat of wilful amnesia, trauma burial and epic storytelling. Thousands of authors telepathically rewriting historical manuscripts—an archivist’s worst nightmare.

Re-imaginations of 2016 implicitly function as condemnations of our current year; escapism requires not only a destination but also something to escape from. I obviously cannot speak for anybody but myself, but I think it would be fair to characterise 2026 as a year so far defined by qualities of disjointedness, fragmentation and incoherence. There is no monoculture, no shared experience we can either escape to or from. Conversely, much of 2016’s allure comes from the perception that it represented the last days of “the monoculture”—life permanently lived through a Snapchat filter and to a Chainsmokers song. It should be clear that everything seems monocultural when looking back; the farther away one gets from something, the more nuance is lost in perception. This is a clear and logical argument, which unfortunately has no place in what is ultimately a discourse on sentimentality and irrationality. Even if waking life in 2016 was not overlaid with a purple-ish hue and permanently set to four-chord electropop, the fact it is remembered as such is arguably more significant. In today’s world, a For You Page is neither designed to be universalising nor memorable; collective imaginations cannot take hold for ephemeral micro-cultures. And so, we find solace in the devil we once knew, not the devil whose form changes every day, surfing the algorithm.

Thus far, I have done well to ensure this does not devolve into a discussion about the Trump of it all, which it well could and now briefly will. It is hard to understate his influence on global popular imaginations over the past decade, and so many of the dark clouds that hang over us today have been of his making. 2016 was not a pre-Trump year, but it certainly was the last before he assumed qualities of ubiquity and zealotry—when he was either a vote for or against, not the Second Coming to some and the devil incarnate to others. The notion that the world before Trump was a less hateful place can only be denied by his cultists and general contrarians, which, combined with inevitable romanticisations of childhood and innocence, paints the picture of 2016 as some kind of halcyon swan song to a bygone era. And there is some truth to this vision, just as there are limitations to the idea that a single man can decisively meddle with the levers of history. Implicit within this retrospection is also the idea that we live in a twisted, corrupted timeline; we were actually meant to ride that idyllic 2016 wave forever, but someone took a wrong turn somewhere down the road and now we’re lost. Perhaps revisionist nostalgia is the closest thing we can do to reverting our course, however fleeting and fantastical it may be.

I am a massive David Bowie fan today, but wasn’t all that familiar with the Starman in 2016, the year of his death. Even still, I remember the prevailing impression back then, as the year trudged on, that his death represented something intangibly seismic. A decade later, niche corners of the internet and the slacker hive mind (spaces I am no stranger to) still maintain that Bowie’s departure was the edge of the cliff we’re now free- falling from. But Bowie himself once sang, “Time may change me, but I can’t trace time.” A possible reading of this is that we live haphazard lives dictated by the past choices of versions of ourselves that don’t exist anymore, but I have no appetite for such depressing conclusions. Here’s something slightly more palatable: Father Time is the undefeated heavyweight champion, and humanity’s best recourse is to simply leave the ring and watch his moves from afar. Time can be neither traced nor understood, so it should only be experienced. Nostalgia should be dabbled but not indulged in. But Bowie was not of this earth; of course, he wouldn’t understand our undying preoccupation with time, the great human Achilles heel. As long as the past remains unreachable, we will forever be enamoured by it, as the case of Saint 2016 shows us. A rather simple conclusion, then, borrowed from Holden Caulfield: in the end, everyone ends up missing everything. Death, taxes and rose-tinted glasses.