time warp

To bolster our analysis, my research team also conducted a representative survey this year of more than 2,000 adults in the United States. We found that most Gen Z adults — 68 percent — reported feeling nostalgic for eras before their lifetime.

In other words, nostalgia is, counterintuitively, a future-oriented endeavor. We draw on it to resolve our dissatisfactions in the present and to move forward with hope and determination. Yes, nostalgia can be indulged. But for most people, most of the time, it is a stabilizing and energizing force.

Sixty percent of Gen Z adults said that they wished they could return to a time before everyone was “plugged in.”

Most of my research on nostalgia has focused on the sentimental engagement with cherished memories from one’s own life. But people can also feel nostalgic for a past that predates them, which is known as historical nostalgia.

Gen Z continues to mine Y2K and early-aughts aesthetics impossibly hard (Victoria’s Secret, Uggs, Hunter boots), but eventually they’ll run out of millennial trends to resurrect. I’m curious to see if they’ll then reach back to the ‘90s (or even earlier?) or if they’ll start nostalgizing their own pandemic-era experiences.

They binged Girls , snapped up digital cameras on eBay, and wore low-rise jeans with visible whale tails. Print magazines experienced a renaissance, with Gen Z driving demand for “something tangible and collectible” at a time when everything felt ephemeral. Bridget Jones creator Helen Fielding said “half the audience are Gen Zs” at her book... See more

Unable to afford the future, Gen Z is romanticizing the past. But in 2025, their nostalgia targeted not their own childhoods but the adolescence of millennials.

42% of Gen Z having dipped into retirement savings just to pay off BNPL debt. The average Gen Z now carries $94,000 in total debt.

Young people, raised on screens, are rejecting algorithmic mediocrity. As Clay Routledge wrote this fall, Gen Z is experiencing “historical nostalgia” for eras they never lived through, grasping for something real in a world that’s become too frictionless .