For an app primarily used by by young people, TikTok is oddly obsessed with nostalgia. Whether its obsession with childhood memories or Y2K fashion, the app is overrun with yearning for the past.
The hashtag #nostalgia has 18.9 billion views. Accounts like
The period of time represented in these videos ranges from the early 2000s
It’s disorienting to scroll through the app and be reminded of a forgotten childhood memory, yet one type of nostalgia TikTok trend aims to do just that. These videos are typically captioned something like “unlocking memories you forgot about.”
I’ve seen multiple “POV: it is the last day of school before Christmas break” videos and they are scarily accurate. These videos are a mixture of home videos, slightly pixelated photographs and images of the types of snacks at an elementary school classroom holiday party. All are set to music that’s intended to make you feel sentimental. One was set to Frank Sinatra’s version of “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.”
I’d completely forgotten about class holiday parties before seeing
There are hundreds of these POV videos, like
Other nostalgia videos are so bizarre and oddly serious that they seem satirical.
I’ll give users that long for the period of time when Beverly Hill Chihuahuas was popular the benefit of the doubt. It’s understandable that people are attracted to memories before coronavirus, herd immunity, quarantine, and social distancing were a part of our vocabulary.
Postdoctoral scholar David Newman at the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Science at the University of California, San Francisco, told Mashable, “We tend to feel nostalgic when we’re feeling lonely or things aren’t going well.” Newman studies nostalgia and has published several papers on the topic.
“I would imagine that people have been feeling more nostalgic because we are living through this difficult time and people want to remember the good times when things were not this way,” continued Newman.
Looking back on shared memories can build a sense of community, added Newman. “There are certain types of nostalgic feelings that can have this sort of comforting feel and make you feel more connected to people,” explained Newman.
Some videos will only resonate with people of a certain age on TikTok. For anyone over the age of 25 a lot of the cultural references made in nostalgia videos
TikTokkers aren’t just nostalgic for their own limited childhood memories of the early 2000s, but are nostalgic for the time period more generally.
Two of the top videos under the nostalgia tag are compilations of high school senior class videos,
Gen-Z’s obsession with the early aughts is also present in their love of Y2K fashion. This affinity for Y2K fashion is inherently nostalgic. One popular way to describe Y2K fashion on TikTok is “
Adjacent to the babysitter aesthetic is Elena Gilbert aesthetic and Twilight aesthetic. Elena Gilbert style is based off of the main character of Vampire Diaries, which aired from 2008 to 2017. The Twilight series movies came out from 2008 to 2012. These converging aesthetics involve layering dark colored long-sleeve Abercrombie shirts with white camisoles and low-rise jeans.
Perhaps Gen-Z is so attracted to videos of high schools in the aughts and Y2K fashion because they grew up watching high school movies and television shows that took place in that period. Streaming allowed Gen-Z to become obsessed with high school shows that aired in that era like The O.C., Gilmore Girls, and Gossip Girl. These movies, shows, and babysitters they projected onto created their expectations of high school. In reality, their high school years were in unprecedented times and impacted by the pandemic. Maybe these videos and Y2K fashion allow young people to live out their fantasy high school experience.
Zoomers not only have had their formative years shaped by the pandemic, but are also facing the brunt of the climate crisis. It makes sense that they yearn for a simpler time. A time when directions had to be printed out on Mapquest, and texting was done in T9.