Take Me Back
Why are millennials becoming more nostalgic than any other generation?
Well, as a generation of elder emos, pop princesses, and grunge lords take note of their creaking knees, piles of bills, tightening jeans, and growing crow’s feet, it’s tough not to think of easier times. And for millennials, a generation that lived through decades of eminent societal collapse, they’ve cultivated dark-humored ambivalence and a subconscious need for stable comforts– those ‘simpler times’ are easily traced back to childhood. Before society opened Pandora’s box of the Internet, kids could run and play outside without micromanagement, they weren’t perpetually available with a cellphone in their pockets, and they weren’t inundated with 1,000 news stories from around the world reporting the latest humanitarian tragedy. It’s not like the 2000s were any better than the 2020s, it’s just that millennials were young, innocent, and most importantly, unplugged. Nostalgia has a way of romanticizing the past, so millennials look back at the Y2K years with rose-colored glasses, glorifying those childhood memories (good and bad), and desperately seeking some way to feel something so delicately wonderful as an adult. On top of that, millennials are notorious for ‘laughing away the pain’, memeifying serious tragedies like 9/11, the 2008 housing crash, and mental health decline. In doing so, they’re clearly coping by romanticizing a bygone era where humanity's darkest memories are alleviated by nostalgic humor.
Blast From the Past
Millennial nostalgia can be directly linked to those feel-good memories. Like Pavlov’s dog, millennials see a janky old CD player and instantly recall their favorite Backstreet Boy album. Similarly, the sound of an old bike chain spinning, a Tamagachi ping, and that nasty dial-up tone will take millennials straight back to their childhood, inadvertently demonizing modernity to escape back to a simpler time.
Similar to Marty McFly in Back to the Future, millennials all secretly wish they could go back in time. Not to break up their parents' future failed marriage, but to enjoy the romanticized notion of simplicity in a pre-Internet world. Millennials got a taste of this idea in their youth, traipsing around the neighborhood without a cellphone, but they are now wrung out by the endless accessibility of modern technology, wishing it never existed in the first place. Because memorizing your friend’s family landline number wasn’t as bad as getting a phone call from your boss at 8:30 PM asking you to get your spreadsheets completed by EOD. While this ‘grass is greener’ concept relinquishes millennials from accepting reality, it also entertains the impossible what-ifs of being born in a different, less chaotic generation.
Nostalgia Sells
If companies can get away with an ‘easy sell,’ why wouldn’t they capitalize on it? The timeless trope of ‘working smarter, not harder’ applies too easily when it comes to selling nostalgia. There’s no reason to improve, innovate, or create anything original when they can just sell us something we’ve already had, lost, and now miss.
These days, there are a million examples of companies cash-grabbing the millennial generation on a reboot. Vans Warped Tour 2025 was just announced following the raving success of the When We Were Young festival in 2023 and 2024. However, both of these events are hosted by LiveNation, a notoriously monopolistic parent company, prioritizing easy money over a decent festival experience. Although the tunes are agelessly elder-emo, the starting price tag of over $325 per ticket was timelessly expensive for a concert that would bankrupt you financially and tweak your lower back. But that’s not stopping the millennials from putting their names on a waitlist to buy tickets. They will gladly throw some arch-support inserts into their old checkered slip-ons, pop in some earplugs, and grab their checkbooks to buy themselves a little shred of their childhood.
Can't forget the shoe inserts too
Similarly, Samsung Flip and Motorola Razr (yes, this still exists) have both released modernized flip phones to give younger generations the sensation of ‘slamming the phone shut to hang up’ or to cosplay as a Y2K popstar. Apart from a gimmicky centerfold, these phones don’t offer much more than other standard smartphones–oh, and they cost $1,000.
Since its original release in 1999, Tony Hawk Pro Skater and the consequent follow-up extreme skateboarding video games, have been totally beloved. But for Activision, they saw an opportunity to resell the same game to the same audience for an extra $40–and this skyrocketed the game’s cumulative earnings to over $1.4B.
And you can’t claim that you’re a millennial unless you devoured Gossip Girl in the early 2000s. However, recently, HBO decided to cash in on a reboot of the 👏 exact 👏same 👏show. Can we stress enough how little we needed this? Except millennials will eat it up every time because they just can’t help it.
Unoriginal ‘originality’
Gen Z and Gen Alpha never lived without technology, so the romanticization of Y2K and the early 2000s has been all over TikTok for years. Even just fashion trends have been generating billions in consumer sales as teens bring back low-rise jeans, baby tees, dad shoes, and Juicy Couture. Ultimately the resurgence of these trends feeds off of the indie-sleaze desire to be alternative in some way, ironically biting its own tail by revitalizing trends that make us feel young again. As if elder millennials can finally stick it to our parents saying, ‘Look, Mom! It wasn’t just a phase!’
Nostalgia will always sell, but right now, as millennials are facing their mountainous student loans, a world on the verge of collapse (again, lol), and a deniably receding hairline, paying a couple of hundred dollars to feel that crisp, childhood nostalgia again is pretty priceless. So while corporations are fanning the flames of millennial nostalgia and milking them for all their worth, they’ll always have an audience of 30-somethings lined up at the box office, electronics store, or the strip mall to buy a little piece of their childhood.
Millennials are firmly aware of the manipulative effects of nostalgia, but are they even capable of fighting it? While there is some value in sameness, repeatability, and predictability, perhaps one day millennials, or even younger generations, will tire of monotony, breaking the mold of nostalgic resells and cyclical trends by rebooting a fresh, new onslaught of entertainment.
Because, guess what? Today’s innovations are tomorrow’s nostalgia–it just needs 30 years to fiscally mature…
ihorga - via Canva