I am...confused about why we're missing 2016...

Angeleaza (00:26)
Hi and welcome back to What Are You? The podcast where we think and talk about the many facets of all of our identities and not only am I back with this quick-ish bonus episode but I'm also on camera for the first time. So hi, hello. This is my real life recording face. Nice to see you all.

Now you can still listen to this podcast in your ears as podcasts were meant to be listened to. But if you are someone who loves to watch your podcast, you want a visual for your content, then by all means, watch the video. The video will be on Spotify, if you have Spotify. ⁓ And it will be on Substack if you're listening on Substack. So speaking of Substack.

Oh goodness, it's been so long since I last published an episode and there are so many things that I want to talk to all of y'all about. But the first thing is Substack. about a monthish ago, towards the end of December, I launched a Substack publication because it's what we do now, I guess. But to be honest, it was more so I had

sort of a digital space in place where I could write, where I could create graphics, where I could kind of center all of my media that I have been creating for the past several months, several years. And so I created this Thumbstack and it's called Just Gotta Yap. If you are looking for the blog, you can search either Just Gotta Yap.

Or you can go to justgotayap.substack.com and you'll find my publication. So it's pretty exciting. like I said, all of my past podcasts, all of my future podcast episodes will be living there. So it's a one-stop shop for all things Angelisa Media created. ⁓ Exciting stuff. So.

where has this podcast been? What even is this podcast? So like I said, ⁓ at the top of the episode, this is the podcast where we talk about the multifaceted nature of human identity. And I'm working on season two, everyone. I really truly am. But in addition to season two coming out,

with some of our more traditional episodes, episodes being where I interview somebody and they tell me about a component or maybe several components of their identity and we talk about it and we think about it, we talk about it more and we really talk a lot because it's a podcast. But in addition to those episodes,

I'm also going to be releasing some bonus episodes. So this is the first of those bonus episodes. And while I'm trying to, know, kind of batch create all of my interview episodes, which is, you know, fun, but also takes a good amount of time, I decided that in the meantime, I'll kind of release these ⁓ podcast episodes, or excuse me, these bonus episodes as they come.

⁓ As I record them as I create them. So What what am I talking about when I say bonus episodes? Well, if you have been on my sub stack and you've been reading some of my content I talk a lot about overthinking and that there's power there and The reason why I talk about that is because I do it. I am so so so incredibly talented at overthinking

I develop these hyper fixations, these hyper focuses, and I want to know everything. I want to know why, I want to know how, I want to know the entire history of the world basically. yeah, I kind of lock in, I latch in.

It is my Roman Empire. I need to think about things. I need to talk about things. I need to analyze things. And on my sub stack, yes, I can write about it and I will and I have, but also on my sub stack, I can release these

podcast episodes where I'm kind of talking through some of these Roman empires because you know, it's overthinking this, these hyper focuses, hyper fixations, are a very important facet of who I am, what makes me me. So without further ado, let's get into

talking a little bit about my current Roman Empire, which is this 2016 trend. So what is it? Well, if you have not been on my algorithm on social media, you may, maybe have missed this 2016 trend, but I'll start it.

towards the end of December of last year, 2025. A lot of people started posting little 2016 flashbacks. So what do I mean by that? They would, you know, take the chain smokers and Halsey song closer. That one.

and they would soundtrack like a memory from 2016 or maybe several memories, maybe videos, maybe pictures and they would be like, oh I just want to go back to 2016 and they would all have those like super grainy VSCO filter vibes like heavily, heavily over filtered as we all did back in 2016. Everybody was just like

yearning it seemed for that 2016 time. ⁓ Everyone's saying, it was a simpler time. It was an easier time and like, okay. ⁓ But then I, okay, so at first I was thinking, well, maybe the reason why everyone's doing this is because, you know, it's about to be 2026. So maybe it's like that 10 year challenge where you post a picture of yourself 10 years ago and you're

now and you see how much you've grown up or glown up hopefully over those 10 years and that's just a fun thing to do so I thought this 2016 thing was sort of a version of that but it kind of like exploded like fireworks and everyone apparently is nostalgic for 2016 I don't know it seems more than that 10 year flashback

And I was thinking, okay, where was I in 2016? I had just graduated college, cool, like the year before, so 2016 was my first year of...

Sorry, fully adulting. ⁓ So yeah, I was an adult the whole year. What else was I doing? I was working. I was working in ⁓ my first kind of responsibility role. I worked as a marketing and recruiting assistant at George Washington University, the Graduate School of Political Management.

And then, yeah, I started working for Lululemon, ⁓ at the Famous Store, ⁓ if you know, you know, but it was at the, Famous Store in downtown Bethesda, Maryland. If you don't know why it's Famous, Google. I also, to be clear, worked there after it.

was famous years after. Also in 2016 I traveled a little bit. I was in one of my favorite shows that I've ever been in, which was Evil Dead, the musical.

I got good reviews, it was so fun. I met a lot of very cool people. But other than that and the ⁓ obvious, the election, the 2016 presidential election where Trump won the presidency for the first time. But other than those things, I couldn't really remember anything about 2016 that made it especially special. And I wasn't really sure why we would want to go back.

because it just felt generic and maybe that was the reason but I decided to do some research. So I spent some time reading quite a bit about 2016 and when I read about the year I remembered actually quite a lot actually did happen in 2016 and I'm not gonna lie most of what happened in 2016 according to the media was not good so

we're gonna start off by going through a few headlines that were from pieces of media that were published in different parts of 2016. The first being from the World Economic Forum in December 2016, the article called In Pictures, the tumultuous year that was 2016 by Alex Gray.

Alex Gray gives us a photo retrospective of the year 2016 in this piece, but also does support those photos with text. I took some of the early lines out just to give you a sort of idea of what this year looked like. So Alex Gray says 2016 will be remembered as a year in which

political shocks humbled pollsters and created the potential for a fundamental change in the world order as we head into 2017. The war in Syria dragged on bringing grisly scenes of civilian suffering and accusations that the wider world was turning a blind eye to the carnage. Eesh. Grey also says, it was also a year in which records tumbled at the Olympic Games and we got closer to Jupiter than ever before.

Cool. That was a positive. so the Olympics did happen in 2016 and ⁓ the Olympics that year were the Rio de Janeiro Olympics. So that's pretty cool. Those Olympic games, I believe, are the first games where Simone Biles appeared.

Also, was Usain Bolt's final Olympic games.

the next headline that I pulled from 2016 is from the Wall Street Journal. This article was released in 2016, which I thought was really interesting considering the year was just barely half over. We were only eight months into the year. So this article, again, is from Wall Street Journal written by Ed Ballard.

is headlined, Terror, Brexit, and the US election have made 2016 the year of Yeats. Again, yeesh. What does that mean though? Mr. Ballard says, ⁓ amid a bevy of bad news and political upheaval, journalists, commentators, and others are turning to W.B. Yeats' chilling 1919 poem, The Second Coming with unusual frequency. So what's that?

⁓ okay, so W.B. Yeats, famous poet, wrote this poem after the first World War. World War I ended in 1919. Basically about everything that sort of happened in the first ⁓ 19ish years of the 1900s at the turn of that century. So what

was happening. There were good things. Genius says that there were new astonishing inventions, for example, the motor car and the aircraft, but also there were bad things. And Genius calls them cataclysmic and irreversible societal changes. The Russian Revolution happened in 1917. The Easter uprising happened in 1916 in Ireland.

and of course World War I, which produced a death rate that exceeded anything in history at that time. So much of the world, especially maybe more of your artists, your ⁓ writers, your reporters, ⁓ your politicians, or maybe more your political analysts, they saw this

this not being not good. So Yeats wrote this poem called The Second Coming that basically compares what was happening in the world at that time in 1919 to the apocalypse or the second coming of Christ. The apocalypse, if you are unfamiliar with the book of Revelation, it's the last book of the Bible.

It talks about Christ and the second coming and basically it's the end of the world. the Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis is a pretty strong allegory of the Bible. ⁓ So the last book in the series is called The Last Battle.

and it's very much in line with the events of Revelation. So maybe if you're not feeling like reading the Bible, but you'd want a little more than what a Google search can give you, definitely check out The Last Battle. But let's talk about the actual text of the poem. So I pulled a snippet. This is the first stanza, just to kind of give you a glimpse into what this poem was saying.

Turning and turning in the widening gyre, the Falcon cannot hear the Falconer. Things fall apart, the center cannot hold. Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world. The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned. The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity. Hmm. So...

It's pretty, it's pretty dark, but I mean, there's this whole article in the Wall Street Journal about how many journalists, commentators, other people, general public were likening the year 2016 to the poem, the second coming to this imagery that Yeats provides us.

from this poem written nearly a century before. So very interesting. It did seem to be universally discussed to be a sort of dismal year. But even more interestingly, I think, especially considering the events of January, 2026 in America,

⁓ some of the more challenging darker events, namely the executions occurring in Minnesota. This poem does feel like it could be talking about today. I mean, especially the last line that reads again, the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity. Maybe ⁓ a little

too real for the moment, but let's move on. another article that was released in 2016 that, again, doesn't really seem to be talking about the year as one that was incredible, was written by Slate in December 2016 by John Kelly. The article is titled, The Word of the Year for 2016 Isn't a Word.

it's a number. basically, Kelly talks about in this article how, you know, how every lexicon, dictionary, thesaurus, what have you, releases a word of the year at the end of the year. There are so many words every year, maybe it's something that's trendy, maybe it's a new word, etc. But a word that like really

perfectly describes the year. John Kelly makes an argument in this piece that the word of the year for 2016 should just be 2016. And he says, in trying to wrap our heads around 2016's all reason and logic defying onslaught of tragedy and absurdity, we objectified the year. We gave it a shape and form.

likening it to a melodrama, a malfunctioning machine, an unstoppable meteor, anything to get some small grasp on the year's surreal and hellish parade of events. But as 2016 mercilessly pressed on, 2016 stopped being an object and became a subject. Social media often figured 2016 as a character in imaginary dialogues. He talks about how on election day,

A writer named Owen Jones captioned a gif of a mushroom cloud saying, just how 2016 is 2016 prepared to be? And then he later added when the early results of that election were favoring Donald Trump, 2016 currently thinks there is ample 2016 to go. 2016 is currently saying, hey, look how 2016 I can possibly be. so.

Okay, let's recap. 2016 shocked so far. That's at least what all of the media was saying at the time. So it sucked so much that they were taking poems from the end of World War I that were talking about the end of the world and saying, oh yeah, this poem is about now, 2016. They were calling 2016 a terrible year.

by saying this 2016 is just 2016 because it's terrible and horrible and no good and very bad. Okay, so that's kind of where we were at the time.

Then we had Smithsonian Magazine releasing another article in December 2016 titled, Why 2016 is Only the Most Recent Worst Year Ever by Lorraine Boissoneau. Apologies, Lorraine, if I mispronounced your name. But she says in this piece, this year has been miserable for many, but it has plenty of competition from its predecessors in the 20th century. And she goes on to talk about,

how yes, this year has been god awful, terrible, but we as human beings are really talented at kind of finding the negativity in a year. like, we're so good at, you know, cataloging different events by the calendar year, different goals, different endeavors by the calendar year,

like New Year's resolutions, New Year's goals, New Year's manifestations, like I just wrote a series about on my sub stack. ⁓ But we can also be super negative and we can get to the end of the year and not infrequently say, my gosh, that year was the worst year ever. Or we get partway through the year and we're like, this year is terrible.

So, while 2016 at the time was the current winner for the worst year ever, it was just the most recent one. And we had plenty of other terrible worst years ever prior to 2016. So ⁓ it's interesting, her take on the negativity of the human mind when it comes to kind of categorizing.

year and villainizing a year. And then there was one other piece that was released at the end of 2016. This was actually on John Oliver's TV show Late Night Tonight with John Oliver. it was called Fuck 2016.

And it progresses thus. So ⁓ let's talk a little bit about why 2016 was such a terrible year. there were a lot of wild events that occurred that year. So event one, ⁓ the Zika virus epidemic. Lots and lots and lots and lots of people.

got sick from the zika virus. ⁓ Next we had Brexit, which is when the United Kingdom voted to break away from the European Union. Like I said, yes, Trump ran for the United States presidency and won. However, prior to that, he secured the Republican nomination earlier that year, which at the time

least from the way I remember it, felt a little jarring and a little shocking ⁓ because, I mean, we have not yet experienced him actually winning the presidency at that time. So that wasn't super fun. He also had a lot of really graphic events that occurred that year.

There were several terrorist incidents in Brussels and in Nice in France. ⁓ There was also the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando that occurred on June 12th, 2016, which was the second deadliest mass shooting in US history. ⁓ At the time, it was actually the number one deadliest mass shooting in United States history.

However, the Las Vegas shooting that occurred in 2017 kind of took the crown from that. yeah, it was pretty terrible. There were 49 people killed plus the perpetrator and there were 58 people wounded. In general, 2016 was not a good year when it came to gun violence and mass shootings.

It had the highest number of mass shootings actually 383 mass shootings since the gun violence archive began keeping records of gun violence incidents in 2013. That record that was set for most mass shootings in 2016 was not broken until 2019. So there were 418 mass shootings in 2019.

Let's just take this back, put it in perspective. 2013 to 2018, the most mass shootings occurred in 2016. That is devastating. That is tragic. All mass shootings are, but wow, that's especially horrible.

Another mass shooting that occurred in 2016 was the shooting of Dallas police officers in July of the year. So on July 7th, police officers in Dallas, Texas were ambushed and shot ⁓ by the perpetrator. Five were killed, nine were...

injured and two civilians were also injured. that's a total of 11 injuries and five deaths.

perpetrators motivation behind committing this horrible mass shooting was the different instances of police brutality that had recently occurred in Baton Rouge Louisiana with the killing of Alton Sterling and ⁓ in Falcon Heights Minnesota with the recent

killing of Philandro Castile, both at the hands of law enforcement officers. Police brutality took hundreds of lives in 2016 alone.

And we don't know if it's due to the influx of social media. We don't know if it's due to the ⁓ commonality of cell phones and the commonality of people recording incidents or documenting incidents. Or maybe there was just more police brutality, but race-based police brutality was occurring at record.

numbers in 2016, which is god-awful horrible and honestly really a challenging topic for me to talk about as I've lost family at the hands of law enforcement due to police brutality.

But getting back to this July 2016 incident, it was the deadliest incident for US law enforcement since the September 11th attacks, wild. It was the second deadliest targeted attack of US law enforcement officers in history and the largest since the Young Brothers massacre of 1932 killed six officers in Missouri. So a pretty terrible incident. However,

However, let's take it back a bit because this incident, there was one good thing that came out of it. ⁓ And that one good thing was a pretty iconic tweet called Milkshake Duck. Have you ever heard of Milkshake Duck? If not, do not worry. I will break it down for you. But to get to Milkshake Duck, we have to first go to...

another viral moment of the year which was Chewbacca Mom. So if you don't know who Chewbacca Mom is, honestly you're missing out. This video went viral. this lady wore a Chewbacca mask. People also call her the Chewbacca Mask Lady. So she looked like the Wookie from Star Wars and she put this mask on and she just laughs.

and it went viral. She filmed herself laughing while wearing the Chewbacca mask. She posted it on Facebook, of all places, in May 2016 and captioned it, it's the simple joys in life, dot dot dot. Incredible. That feels very...

early-ish internet to me that a video of just a lady in a Chewbacca mask laughing went so incredibly viral. This woman got famous. She was on late night shows. She was on morning shows. She did a lot with this fame that she got from being the Chewbacca mask lady. But

You always gotta quit while you're ahead. So she posted another video in July 2016 right after the Dallas police shooting. She lived in Dallas so she posted a video to Facebook again of herself covering the Michael Jackson song, Heal the World,

And she dedicated it to the victims of the shooting, ⁓ which again happened very close to her home. ⁓ people said yikes when she posted this, again, cover of a Michael Jackson song, because they said it sort of.

looked like it was a distraction or she misunderstood the weight of how terrible this incident was. And then there was a tweet. So moving from True Back a Mom, we're moving into the probably the most iconic tweet of 2016 and maybe one of the most iconic tweets of all time because on July 12th

of 2016, a few days after Chewbacca Mom posted that video to Facebook, this cartoonist, an Australian cartoonist of all places, but his name was Ben Ward. He tweeted from his Twitter handle, which was pixelated boat. He tweeted the following. The whole internet loves milkshake duck.

a lovely duck that drinks milkshakes. Then in asterisk five seconds later, we regret to inform you the duck is racist. Okay, so Ben Ward said that the tweet was influenced by Chewbacca Mom and it gained popularity immediately. Immediately,

in case you're not understanding, the definition of milkshake duck now in internet culture and internet terminology is a person who gains popularity on social media for maybe being a good person or just any kind of positive trait but then is later canceled or discovered to have like a bad past for some reason.

And yeah, it's become just a staple of both internet culture and cancel culture in general. ⁓ A lot of celebrities are public figures when they have been, quote, canceled. They have also been, quote, milkshake ducked. So, you know, there is a pot of gold at the end of some rainbows. Milkshake duck saved us all.

in that series of events. But other things that happened in 2016, we had Pokemon Go. Oh my gosh, Pokemon Go. Did you play it? Do you know what it is? It was a phone app where we caught Pokemon. The app developers planted Pokemon all over. And we went outside. We went to the monuments. We went to different areas of the city to catch Pokemon.

And that's it. And it was awesome. And during that presidential campaign that fall, Hillary Clinton did in fact tell us to Pokemon Go to the polls. So that's cool. Stranger Things was released in summer 2016, which was also very cool. I watched it. I binged the first season on Netflix, which is crazy because I'm not a binger.

And I'm not usually a horror girlie, but Stranger Things was great. And if you didn't know, it lasted until the finale aired on December 31st, 2026, or excuse me, 2025. So it ended right at the top of this year.

Also, Hamilton, the Broadway musical, did not debut in 2016. However, 2016 is the year where we first had, as a society, Hamilton fever, if you will. Hamilton actually premiered on Broadway or opened on Broadway in the fall of 2015, but broke records at the Tony Awards, which are

the awards for Broadway each year. So Hamilton broke records at the Tony Awards for the most nominated musical 16 nominations, and then won 11 of the awards. So that's pretty cool. That Hamilton fever then had a resurgence when the final

original cast live performance was released on Disney Plus in summer 2020. Cool, cool. Another silly thing that happened in 2016 was the mannequin challenge, we just pretended to be mannequins to this song called Black Beatles. And that's it. We just stood still and

different positions that was very popular in 2016. Also popular or maybe notoriously popular in 2016 was clown summer. So clown summer is the summer of 2016 which is when there were reports of people disguised as evil clowns in random places.

all over the world. They were in forests, they were in neighborhoods, they were in schools, and though this sounds like a very American thing to happen, it was not only in America. This happened all over the world. It happened in the United States, Canada, Australia, Ireland, New Zealand, United Kingdom,

But yes, it did start in America. The sightings were first reported in Green Bay, Wisconsin in what turned out to be a marketing stunt for a horror film. But people decided that they didn't want to know that fact. And they just ran with the evil clown thing all over the world. So by mid October 2016,

Clown sightings and attacks had been reported in nearly all the United States, nine out of 13 provinces and territories of Canada, and then, 18 other countries. Also, this is wild, students at Penn State and Michigan State University were involved in mobs, in mobs that searched for clowns on campus after reported sightings.

and there were clown attacks around campgrounds, which is wild. But yeah, in addition to all of those wild occurrences throughout the year, there were also so many celebrity deaths that occurred in 2016. And this is something I totally forgot about. I did know at the time that ⁓ there were a lot of celebrity deaths, but it was, from my memory,

it kind of felt like there was always somebody dying, always somebody dying, somebody famous dying. ⁓ But people kept saying, you know, that's it, that's the last one because everything comes in threes, everything bad happens in threes. So there we go. And then when it happened again, everybody would say, well, ⁓ maybe it'll stop now. And we kept doing math and...

finding our multiples of threes, but things kept happening. So who died that year? RIP to these people. But we had David Bowie pass away. We had Prince pass away, who is also topically enough remembered with his music that plays in the final episode of Stranger Things. So that's pretty cool. I know that he is a trending artist again.

10 years after he died. Amazing. We also had famous boxer Muhammad Ali pass away. ⁓ We had Celine Dion's husband, Renee, and I'm not even going to attempt to say his last name because I don't know how to pronounce it. ⁓ I remember that was pretty devastating at the time. She was very devastated, very publicly devastated. ⁓ We had Alan Rickman pass away. Alan Rickman

Probably most famously known as playing Professor Snape in the Harry Potter movies, but also very well known for playing Emma Thompson's husband, bad guy, in ⁓ Love Actually.

We don't like him in that movie, though we do grow to like him in Harry Potter.

So very sad. I remember everyone was posting a picture of Alan Rickman as Snape saying, always when he passed away. We also lost Maurice White, who is the founder of Earth, Wind & Fire.

Harper Lee, author of one of my favorite books of all time, To Kill a Mockingbird, passed away also. ⁓ Gene Wilder, who played Willy Wonka in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory movie, he passed.

⁓ John Glenn, the first astronaut to orbit the Earth, passed away. ⁓ Kenny Baker, who you might not know his name, but he was the actor who played R2-D2 in the original Star Wars movies. Unfortunately, he passed away and he was playing R2-D2, the droid in those movies. ⁓ Kind of on the same vein.

⁓ We lost Carrie Fisher at the end of that year Carrie Fisher played Princess Leia in the Star Wars movies

I know that they used footage that they had already filmed of her for the Star Wars movie that they were currently making. the day after Harry Fisher died, her mother, actually, Debbie Reynolds, who's so famous, she was made famous by ⁓

starring in the Singing in the Rain movie musical. She passed away the day after her daughter Carrie Fisher. ⁓ Debbie Reynolds is a very interesting woman, so I would highly recommend that you do some research on her.

Another celebrity death that year was George Michael, who was part of Wham. You may know Wham as the group that sings Last Christmas. Like, last Christmas I gave you my heart. He died on Christmas Day. I remember at the time that was wild. That kind of blew our minds.

Another person that passed away that year was Elie Weisel, who is the Holocaust survivor who wrote Knight about his experience in a concentration camp at the hands of the Nazis. So he became an incredibly famous

⁓ writer and human rights activist. So he I didn't realize that he had passed away that year as well. Also, if you are familiar with the book, I'll Be Gone in the Dark, the author of that book, Michelle McNamara, passed away that year while she was still writing that book. She was also a crime writer. She had a crime blog. But her husband

who was Patton Oswalt, an actor, helped to compile the remainder of her notes to finish the book, which was amazing and wonderful in and of itself. The book was about the search for the Golden State Killer, who at the time had not been identified. And then her notes and her book helped authorities to capture the Golden State Killer, I believe, two years after. So...

That was truly incredible. RIP, Michelle McNamara. And the last, truly the last big death of the year was honestly one of the most heartbreaking of all time was Harambe, who was a gorilla at the Cincinnati Zoo. ⁓ What happened? Well, a two-year-old fell into the gorilla exhibit or got into the gorilla exhibit.

I don't want to parent shame, but we don't know how he got in. All of the gorillas were asked to, go back to the gorilla house instead of being in the outside area. They all did, except Harambe, who tried to protect the child, tried to protect the two-year-old. But the zoo officials did.

have to shoot Harambe, I actually went to the Cincinnati Zoo about a month ago and my fiance's niece, who was 11, was asking about Harambe after I told her that we went to the Harambe memorial that they now have at the Cincinnati Zoo. And so we were telling her about what had happened and she asked.

why? Why did they shoot Harambe? And they, we explained of, well, they had to protect the child. And even though Harambe was protecting the child, you know, it's just protocol because the child was a human. And she said, well, why is the child's life more important than Harambe's life? And, it was just very heartbreaking.

at the time and just to recount it as well. But yeah, R.I.P. Harambe, they did completely redo the exhibit to prevent something similar from happening in the future.

But I don't have an answer to my question yet about why are we so overly fixated on 2016 in the year 2026. Why? Like this year seemed to suck a lot. But I did a little research and in my research I think I may have an answer.

An important note before I get into this piece. I'm a millennial. I was born in 1992. Gen Z in 2016 was 4 to 19 years old. So that's very important because the reason why this trend has kind of taken off is because many and maybe most trends are led by Gen Z.

So with that in mind, in 2016, Gen Zs were kids to young adults. There's an article written by Scottie Andrew for CNN ⁓ earlier this year in January, 2026, where a media professor and cultural studies professor named Jessica Maddox

talked about nostalgia.

She recognizes that there's a whole lot of revisionist history going on in regards to the 2016 trend. And she says, though, nostalgia is always complicated because we think that by doing or consuming something, we can have the same feeling we had back then, which is never the case, unfortunately.

So she talks about the nostalgia that we had for the simpler media diet, the simpler social media diet, the simpler time that we had at that time. We didn't have algorithms. We didn't have ⁓ TikTok. We barely had Instagram stories.

Instagram stories were released in August 2016 and I remember this clearly. We didn't really use Instagram stories when they were first released. It definitely took about a year or so to warm up because at the time the way that all of my peers and I perceived

Instagram stories was just copying Snapchat and we already had Snapchat and we already had Snapchat stories so why do we need them on Instagram too? It just felt repetitive. We didn't need it. So Professor Maddox talks about our media diets being wild, ample.

It was a lot more streamlined. We were more of a monoculture at the time. We weren't all splitting off into our separate internet silos, if you will. We were more on the same page. She says, our media diets were very different too. We weren't being constantly bombarded with bad news, either from politics or from constantly being plugged into media.

I think that is a part of the reason why we look back and think it was easier or better, probably just because we weren't plugged in as much and we weren't as online doing as much doom scrolling. We weren't really engaged in the way we are now. She says to a little later, when people refer to it as the last good year, I feel like maybe what we're really saying is it was the last time before there was a seismic

shift in American politics.

which unfortunately I think is true as well. There was another professor that was interviewed by CNN, Dustin Kidd, who's a sociology professor and pop culture expert at Temple says, it was the last moment of joy before the politics of our time overwhelmed the culture. that 2016,

was about the change of everything in politics, the entire political field and the way that the political landscape infiltrated our mainstream culture and had such a ripple effect.

Now, you can't mindlessly observe politics. You can't escape. You can't ignore the political landscape and the political goings on if you consume any kind of social media or any kind of internet because it is pretty well and fully consuming.

In a BBC article that came out earlier this year by Naomi de Souza called Rose Tinted Filter, Why 2016 is Taking Over Social Media in 2026, she talks about the nostalgia that we have for different trends of the time. So music, because music was poppin' Yeah, that was also the year Lemonade by Beyonce was released.

It was fire. ⁓ There were fun makeup looks. There was maximal glam makeup. We were being extra. We had our cut crease. We had our contour. That was the time where I was like, snap, I really need to learn how to do eyeshadow. ⁓ And then she talks too about social media. ⁓ It was a lot more simple. There were no Instagram carousels. Snapchat was prime.

We just, posted our picture. We put the filter on and honestly, we didn't really think about how many likes we got or I don't remember thinking about how many likes I got. I kind of like shamelessly posted

Also, a psychologist cited in this BBC piece does talk about how we look for these cultural markers sometimes when we as a unit strive to have this sort of group think nostalgia. And 2016, as I've talked about, was full of cultural markers.

Mashable wrote an article earlier this year that was called, was 2016 the last good year by Chance Townsend that kind of talks about all of this.

He says, for older Gen Z, 2016, or more specifically the summer of 2016, hits a particular part of the brain. It was the last time we were allowed to be kids.

It's a longing for a time before when the internet was Vine and memes and Snapchat, dog ears and rainbow filters. So this nostalgia is saying, we want the internet to feel human again. And then Townsend really closes out the piece while saying, that yearning isn't really about the year itself. It's about what life felt like before everything became so performative and optimized.

before being online meant building a brand, before politics consumed every feed, and before the future felt permanently foreclosed. Which is pretty dark.

But I get it because we are currently living in a space and place where objects like the brick are trending, where we're trying to find our way back to analog hobbies and behaviors, working with physical media. We're trying to reignite

the connection that we lost at some point, whether it be COVID, whether it be post-COVID, whether it be, you know, 2017 due to, you know, the prevalence of media and social media and brain rot culture. I get this sort of nostalgia that's being talked about. And for me, this kind of explained

why this 2016 trend exists more effectively than anything else that I've come across. But I want to leave you with this. there was a piece that was published by NPR in December 2016, by Sam Sanders.

It's called, Should We All Just Stop Calling 2016 the Worst? Sam Sanders starts the piece by saying, the year it all went to hell, the year nothing made sense, the year we lost track of reality, the year Merriam-Webster made surreal its word of the year.

This article talks a lot about this phenomenon that psychologists and sociologists and researchers were examining and identifying in 2016 called ambient journalism.

Sanders says in the piece, Nikki Usher, a professor of media and public affairs at George Washington University, calls this recent phenomenon ambient journalism, or when you're constantly plugged in through social media and you're constantly online and engaged in some way. And that constant bumping into news and online discord and constant engagement, over time, it becomes an assault. And

Besides that aggression of immediacy, a lot of the headlines we consume this year, again in 2016, particularly about the election, pushed a certain narrative, a nation, even a world completely and disastrously divided, perhaps beyond repair.

That's a lot. It's wild because this piece again was published in December 2016 about the state of journalism, the state of media and the state of our media and social media diets at that time, 10 years ago. Whereas now in 2026, we are all, or maybe that's hyperbole, but for the most part, it seems like...

A great majority of the population is fighting to get less online, is fighting to resist that discord, that assault that we feel all the time from our phones, from our media. I mean, I know myself, I spent probably two weeks before and after Christmas with my phone on Do Not Disturb.

Because I don't want to be tethered to my phone. I don't want to be getting the notifications. And I get so exhausted by screens and screen time. And I'd rather do other things. So it's interesting that this

The trend comes from the desire to do other things and be other places that are less online, that are more wholesome, less violent, verbally violent, or news violent, media violent. But at the same time, that's when we were starting to feel the impact.

of such violence. We were were citing, we were observing the beginnings of such violence in 2016. Weird. Anyway, I'm a millennial, so I guess my childhood ended before 2016. I'm nostalgic for 2006. That time was fire. That was the year I started high school. Lots of good stuff happened in 2006. the music was popping.

⁓ Life was easier. Smartphones were not really a thing, I don't think. I didn't have one. I had a dumb phone until the end of high

school. But that's all for today's bonus episode of What Are You? Thank you so much for listening or watching or both. So weird to be podcasting to a camera.

But I mean, I guess it's just like a self tape, right? I'm bringing back my theater, girly And yeah, I will talk to you soon!

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