The Surprising Nostalgia of Gen Z, Unpacked.

On digital nostalgia, yearning for a future that was their parent’s past and much more….

In the past year I have been struck by how often young people have been mentioning feeling nostalgic. Last spring I heard a child of ten expressing nostalgia while looking through the car window at monolithic (and dare I say hideously ugly) 1960s communist-style grey buildings in Bulgaria’s capital, Sofia. A few days ago, 19-year-old Nancy, a university student in London, told me she felt nostalgic all the time, often for when she was a child or for the 90s, a time before she was born. How can this be? Why are Gen Z and possibly even Gen Alpha borrowing a past that belongs to those before them to feel nostalgic for? Were my mounting observations a mere coincidence of similar feelings expressed by a handful of young people in my bubble or was I picking up on some kind of social trend?

Nostalgia is a feeling I am well attuned to. I grew up moving countries every three or four years. With that came an all-consuming nostalgic yearning for times when I had been back home for holidays or in a different country where I had left too many friends behind. However, my nostalgia was always tied to a specific past I remembered. A past that refused to let me go.

Curious to dig into this deeper, I turned to analysis of Google search, social media and Google Books search Ngram. The evidence indeed points to heightened public attention towards nostalgia. The number of books mentioning the term “nostalgia” has doubled since the turn of the century. Searches for “90s movies” have doubled since 2015. In 2025 alone over 11.7 million posts on Instagram included the hashtag #nostalgia. Searches for Y2K aesthetics, which Nancy educated me is a popular nostalgia-related fashion style among Gen Z, have shot up by 891% since November 2024 alone. Interest in vinyl, CDs and all things analogue among GenZ, which I wrote about in Fortune, has resurged.

To figure out the reasons behind this strong nostalgic tide among the youngest generations I spoke with five young adults and teens aged between 14 and 25, two of whom were my 15- and 18-year-old sons. They all confidently confirmed feeling nostalgic. But why?

In the course of my conversations with these young people, the pieces of the puzzle started to fit together.

I realised that many of their generation are longing for a time in the past when they had memories of their own, unfettered, unfed and unfiltered by screens and apps. Some are also feeling nostalgic for a future which was their parents’ past, which they yearn for.

A past they know they can never experience due to the technological advancements this century. A past which they perceive as much freer, and more joyful and hopeful than their present. Most, if not all, feel trapped in an intensely informationally polluted, over-stimulating and overly fast digital world which weighs heavily on them. Yet, they either don’t quite know how to escape from it or do not even try because they are addicted to it and, in any case, everyone else they know is in it.

Nancy speaks about feeling nostalgic for the 90s because she thinks it was the happiest of times for the generation before her. “I feel nostalgic for a time when people were dressed like our parents when they were young, because that looked like a better time than today.” She goes on to share the most heartbreaking and profound reflection about the period between 2011 and 2016.

“I am nostalgic for a time when I was present, for that time when my generation was between 5 and 10, when we were still doing things in the real world. Now we are not present.”

Nowadays she experiences the world much more often through multiple screens and is disappointed that this reality frequenly leaves her with no memories. “I don’t remember what I watched yesterday on TikTok, but I remember what I did years ago when I didn’t have a phone.” Nancy escapes difficult realities by switching screens if a movie scene she is watching is too sad. She distracts herself by hopping onto another screen until the scene evoking sadness is over.

Interestingly, my younger son, who is only 15, also hails the period between 2012 and 2016 as the most nostalgia-inducing. Although he was only two when the London Olympics took place, he claims to remember this time in purely happy terms. This past Saturday evening, during his sleepopver with his friend, they chose to watch the opening ceremoney of the London 2012 Olympics on YouTube (yes, really). He mentions 2015 as the most lamented time, when the world felt safer and easier. “Before Brexit and Trump came. It felt happy and light then.”

My son’s best friend Charlie (14) reminisces about his early school years [between 2013 and 2018].

“I feel nostalgic for when I was in primary school and didn’t have a phone. I felt so free then, not worried about anything like school, just playing. There was no social media. Now I worry about the world, about online hostility and my appearance. Also, I didn’t care how I looked back then.”

My older son, who is in his first year of university, also feels nostalgic for times in the past when he felt carefree. Although he is a regular social media user, I remember him once saying that he wished social media had never been invented. He felt trapped in it.

Nona (25), a marketing professional living in London, does not feel nostalgic for a particular era but feels nostalgic for a time when everything felt slower, when you had to wait for a while for something you purchased to arrive and when things therefore felt more special. “For a time when you were longing for something you could not have.”

I notice a fundamental generational difference that has formed between all my digitally native interlocutors and me. They are able to experience digital nostalgia, while I cannot. My younger son feels nostalgic when TikTok pushes out particular filters that he associates with the earlier part of the century. He assures me that just because this type of nostalgia is digital it does not make the feeling less powerful. Nona and her friends signpost the past in terms of digital eras. She says that they feel a particular nostalgia for what they call the “Tumblr era”, [which started around 2011 and peaked in 2014], when smart phones and apps were still a novelty.

I ask my fascinating young companions to tell me what they think about the world today compared to when they were younger. Nancy calls it “tumultuous” and hurries to change the subject. Charlie calls it “much more hostile than five years ago” and “more black and white”, while my 15-year-old son calls it “much more fragmented” (by which he means divided). He speculates that this makes people less connected to each other then for example in post-war times.

Nancy worries about her generation no longer being interested in real life face-to-face communication. A few days prior she’d suggested to her flatmates that they get a takeaway from a shop just five minutes from their house. They enthusiastically embraced the idea before asking: “Is it on Uber Eats?”. Speaking directly to the shop assistant felt like too much of a communicational stretch, she thinks.

I get twitchy thinking about how trapped and unsafe Gen Z must feel. Trapped in an all-consuming digital prison, they feel lost both in the digital and real worlds which feel increasingly threatening and much less joyous than their parents’ world in the 90s or the start of the century. So much so that hopeful content is siloed and sighposted by a #hopecore hashtag on TikTok.

Here we strangely seem to converge. Our nostalgia – mine for the past that I have lived, theirs for the past that they will not live – intersects. In the rare moments when I feel nostalgic, it is often for my life in the 1990s and early 2000s when walls were crumbling (think the Berlin wall), grunge and indie music were thriving (think Nirvana and Pearl Jam, Oasis and Blur) and nations were uniting (think Central and East European countries joining the EU). The world felt expansive, generous and full of opportunities which I enthusiastically chased by settling (and feeling welcome with my highly skilled migrant visa) in the UK, finding love twice, having children, growing professionally. It is no wonder the #90snostalgia hashtag has been the most popular nostalgia derivative hashtag on Instagram this year.

There is a bright spot - some Gen Z adults are beginning to push back on the digital prison they have found themselves in, proactively creating moments of freedom for themselves with great results. This year, Nona, who was the oldest Gen Z person I spoke with, has managed to reduce her screen time from approximately ten hours a day to two or three. Earlier in the year she and her boyfriend (26) had both stumbled on an advertisement for Unplugged on social media. Unplugged is a business with a mission “to help the ‘always on’ switch off” by offering cabins in the English countryside without access to Wi-Fi or any screens.

Equipped with their curiosity, the wish to pay full attention to each other, an analogue map and a Nokia brick phone for emergencies, Nona and her boyfriend spent an enriching tech-free few days.

“This get away made us realize how addicted we are to our phones but also that actually we can very much get away without them”, admitted Nona. “This signalled to us how much we appreciate undivided attention and how much the phones obstruct that attention”, she added.

They have taken steps to limit their screen time since then and no longer sleep with their phones in the bedroom. “Our phones are never the first or the last thing we look at anymore” she says with contentment. Nona and her boyfriend loved their experience of disconnecting from tech and reconnecting with nature so much that they returned for another getaway a few weeks ago.

I envisage more and more Gen Z adults reclaiming their reality by creating and entering more tech-free spaces like ‘rawdog fights’ or switching to flip phones or dumbphones, that free them from the digital jail which highjacks their memories and leaves them feeling constantly nostalgic. Until they re-immerse themselves feeling safe in the real world with real people, looking into real people’s eyes again, making their very own analogue memories, nostalgia is here to stay.

Photo by kristin todorova on Unsplash