Gen Z Is Romanticizing The 2010s. Can You Blame Them?

Think Red-era Taylor Swift, One Direction posters, twee fashion, Coachella wristbands, the height of Tumblr. If you lived your twenties in that era, Gen Z envies you more than they'd ever say out loud. There is a thoughtful tweet responding to a video romanticizing 2012 that understands the yearning for this time period.

"I get why this is a thing bc the vibe during this time was absolutely unmatched, miss it all the time,” wrote @RRR0BYN on X. “Cafes were still cozy, nightlife was fun and mostly wholesome, going to the mall to hang out and shop with ur friends was a great time, social media and dating apps hadn't taken over human interactions, I hadn't even owned my first smart phone yet in 2012. We were unselfconscious and free in a way gen z has never been.”

She continued, “This was the last moment in time anyone can remember before everything in life started to be recorded and uploaded as 'content.' It was the last time we were just people without constantly curating a digital avatar."

She's describing what a lot of millennials feel, and it’s perhaps the reason why so many of them are stuck in nostalgia. There was a short window where life felt modern and exciting, recognizably "online,” yet not completely swallowed by the content machine. Above all, the content was authentic, whereas today most influencers are driven by capital rather than their own instincts or genuine interests.

That millennial window of messy, low-stakes, shared-popculture adulthood is exactly what Gen Z is trying to climb into. 

Anemoia: Missing a Time You Never Had

There's a word for this: anemoia: nostalgia for a time or place you never actually knew. Older zoomers and Gen Alpha didn't grow up going to the mall with a $15 Claire's budget and an iPhone 10 in the bottom of a cross-body bag. Unlike most millennials, they lived life through their screens. Most of us are old enough to remember a time without doomscrolling. Gen Alpha and the younger Gen Z crowd do not – that’s why they borrow the millennial era. They can only romanticize and yearn for it because they will never experience a life that isn’t dominated by technology.

I'm not saying millennials weren't online. That's simply not true – they scrolled through grainy Tumblr dashboards and early Instagram grids like everyone else. The difference is that they weren't swiping through 1-minute videos. They lingered in spaces without an algorithm rushing them to the next thing. Even the way we make content is different now. Millennials turned to social media to document life. Gen Z and Gen Alpha live inside it, and as a result, they have learned to be performative. Now, millennials are made fun of for being cringe and quirky because Gen Z and Gen Alpha are too afraid of being perceived as anything less than normal. They have imprisoned their true personalities, showing only what is digestible for TikTok’s algorithm.

Millennials posted blurry, badly lit party photos and thought nothing of it. It was just sharing; Instagram was an afterthought. You went to the party and showed how much fun you had. Today, we put pressure on our own social media feeds. The younger crowd shows up to parties or events with phones already out, already thinking about the post. Even if they're physically at the party, they're not really there. They're editing in their heads, drafting captions, anticipating the likes. They are too self-conscious to let loose at all, knowing any moment could be recorded.

YouTubers back then were living imperfect, often miserable lives, posting updates because they felt like it. It makes sense why the post-millennial crowd wishes their teens or twenties had felt that free. They wish they had spent more time in the real world and experienced what life had to offer, rather than experiencing it through social media.  

They wish they had spent more time in the real world and experienced what life had to offer, rather than experiencing it through social media.

They entered adolescence at the exact moment social media turned from a place to hang out into an industry. Content creation stopped being a niche hobby and became the default way to exist online. Every vacation, every outfit, every friendship could be edited into a vlog, a GRWM, a Day in My Life. Even casual selfies now pass through beauty filters, retouching, the quiet calculation of what will perform. This is the water Gen Z was born into. Millennials got a different deal. One last window where you could still be young and delusional enough to believe it would all work out.

Chelsea Fagan, a millennial writer who went viral talking about this era, called the early 2010s "the last era of sweet delusion." She describes moving to Brooklyn, buying oat milk lattes, dodging fixie bikes on the way to an open-plan office, genuinely believing she had "made it" writing listicles for a living. Objectively, things were rough. The global financial crisis had just happened, wages were flat. Student debt was climbing. Despite these hardships, there was still this vague belief that if you worked hard, networked, stayed late, moved to a city, said yes to everything, something would eventually click.

Economists who spoke to Newsweek about this period noted that even though the recovery was slow, the outlook for young workers in the early 2010s still felt more optimistic than it does now. Tech was expanding, and startups were hiring. Annoying unpaid internships were everywhere, but at least there was the illusion of a ladder.

However, Gen Z's college years collided with COVID-19 lockdowns. Many were isolated. Their first “big girl jobs” were remote, and they didn’t get fun office friendships or happy hours. Now, recent graduates are met with job listings demanding five years of experience for entry-level pay, and adults telling them that everything from the climate to democracy is hanging by a thread. The news, like a spell, repeats to them that they will never be able to afford a home. So when they look back at the 2010s, they’re staring at a version of young adulthood that still assumed the future would, on balance, improve.

So why do they keep roasting the "millennial cringe" if they secretly want the millennial life script? Part of it is how internet culture works. Gen Z uses irony as a shield. It's easier to make a joke about chevron prints and “Live, Laugh, Love” decor than to admit you're terrified about your own future, and a little jealous of anyone who ever believed the world was getting better.

Mocking millennials also draws a line that says: We are not you. We’re younger than you. We will not stay in offices we hate. We are self-aware and not cringe. But the content they create gives them away. They buy digital cameras or flip-phones to imitate the badly lit party photos millennials used to upload to Facebook. They’re demanding that Hollister bring back their babydoll tees and Henley tops. They share clips from Gilmore Girls and Smallville, listen to Emo music, and borrow the aesthetics of the subcultures from that time.

Gen Z or Gen Alpha don't want their adult lives as they exist today. They want the millennials’ early twenties, frozen in amber, before the insane political divide, before Covid, before every conversation felt like it could devolve into apocalypse discourse.

What the Romanticizing Is Really Saying

What is Gen Z and Gen Alpha really saying? I can speak for them, I think:

• I want a life that's allowed to be lived, not just posted. Why can’t I just be? Why does everyone tell me to share every aspect of my life?

• I want physical places to go that aren't outrageously expensive or constantly policed. $10 vodka tonic waters have been keeping me away from the bar. Maybe that’s a good thing – but I also want to have fun sometimes. And why does it feel so awkward at clubs? No one is dancing.

• I want friendships that form without an algorithm ranking everyone's faces and opinions.  Why do I know when my friends hang out without me before they even tell me? Why does Instagram decide who my “close friends” are? Why does it feel like I have to perform the friendship online for it to count?

• I want to feel some baseline optimism about the future instead of a permanent crisis. Half the left tells me to lean in and girlboss. The other half tells me the planet is dying and nothing will ever get better. The right tells me to stay home and have babies. In this economy? Trust me, if most women could stay at home and not work, they would.

Where Do We Go From Here?

There's no rewinding to 2012. What can change is how seriously we take what this nostalgia is trying to say. Older millennials can stop getting defensive when Gen Z makes fun of their Hogwarts houses and side parts and maybe admit that something precious slipped through their fingers: the ability to grow up without broadcasting everything for the world to see.

Parents can hold the line a little longer on phones and social media for their kids, knowing that an offline childhood isn't deprivation. They can put more of a focus on living in the real-world and take them out more. Young people can keep experimenting with flip phones on weekends and digital cameras. Maybe they can challenge their friend group to exist mostly offline, or find hobbies to love. Perhaps third spaces will make a huge comeback, and we all can meet up at the roller rinks and malls again.

Gen Z makes fun of millennial cringe because cringe is an easier target than despair. Underneath the jokes is a serious question: Why did you get a shot at unselfconscious living and we didn't? Worse, is that millennials miss what they had. Gen Z and Gen Alpha miss what they never got to have.

The least older generations can do is stop laughing long enough to answer honestly – and help them build something better than a recycled aesthetic from 2012.