Why Facebook is suddenly full of nostalgia for the recent past

And yet when it comes to being part of the cultural conversation, Facebook might as well not exist. It barely even features in moral panics about the damage of social media or excessive internet use. It might as well be invisible.

One reason for that is surely that Facebook simply isn’t cool. If we do think of it, and if we’re honest most of us don’t, it’s to think of it as a social network for boomers. And boomers, being in their 60s or above, are simply not where the cultural conversation is at – the kind of memes that dominate Facebook tend to be driven by nostalgia, shared by parents of grown-up children remembering better times.

There is one poem in particular that seems to pop up time and again in UK Facebook groups – never with an author credit – for town after town. Invariably, it attracts a polite smattering of likes and hearts, and replies like “Love this!,, so true, the best times without a doubt! X” and “Most definitely the happiest of times xx”. Here’s an extract:

I remember the cheese of my childhood,
And the bread that we cut with a knife,
When the children helped with the housework,
And the men went to work not the wife.
The cheese never needed a fridge,
And the bread was so crusty and hot
The children were seldom unhappy
And the wife was content with her lot.

That’s eight lines out of 40 total. If you’re a typical Facebook boomer, the chances are you’re nodding along happily. If you’re anyone else, I’d hope your toes are curling in second-hand embarrassment. 

Younger generations in particular have enjoyed sneering at boomer nostalgia memes for a decade or more now, with millennials sharing them among ourselves for ironic cultural cachet – boomer memes might dominate the largest social network, but when they’re discussed it’s usually in derogatory terms, and by millennials rather than boomers themselves.

We have offered many interpretations for why nostalgic memes do so well. Is it, we have asked, simply that people prefer to recall when they were younger, healthier, and less burdened by obligations? Are people really nostalgic for eras we know were poorer, when people were sicker, had far fewer material goods, and when sexism and racism were rife? Or do they just wish they were 20 again?

Many column inches have been filled with such musings, often wondering about the intrinsic differences between millennials – the first generation that can claim to have grown up online at all – and Gen Z, the first digital natives, and boomers, who only discovered the internet as adults. Underpinning much of it was one certainty: it could never be us. Even as we aged, we would be different. We could never be so cringeworthy.

Except in recent weeks, the unthinkable has happened. A new wave of nostalgia-bait content is going viral, and it’s broken containment – it has spread well beyond Facebook, popping up on X, YouTube, and even TikTok. Much of it is obviously AI created ‘slop’ content. But most notably and horrifyingly of all, it isn’t aimed at boomers – it is aimed squarely and firmly at the millennial cohort.

Gone are appeals to the era of outside bathrooms, milk delivered in bottles by the milkman, and playing outside in ginnels. In their place are videos inviting the viewer to remember through rose-tinted glasses the distant past of… the 1990s, or later.

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One particularly viral TikTok video shows an uncanny child reminiscing about Walmart in 2002. “Remember when Walmart used to have a fish tank? Man, those goldfishes are awesome,” one recalls. “No digital rewards, just a smiley sticker slapped on your shirt. That was magic. Does your Walmart still have these stickers in 2025?”

Because any viral video on TikTok inspires thousands of copycats, this rapidly became a deluge of nostalgia videos imagining the ever more recent past. “Can you believe we’re almost 30 now?” asks the narrator of a video remembering the mall culture of 2012. “Do you miss being young and wild?”

Now that the nostalgia phenomenon is affecting people in their 20s, 30s and 40s, it is suddenly worth cultural examination – perhaps if nothing else because of the sheer horror of 28- and 29-year-olds apparently needing to remember their ‘wild’ days, at a time when they surely should still be living them, if that’s what they want to do.

Many commentators are reaching to technology itself to explain the nostalgia wave. While the early 2000s certainly had the internet, it was before the smartphone era, they muse. Perhaps the burden of being constantly online – and thus constantly performing for social media – has led to a yearning for a simpler time when such burdens were less ever-present?

This explanation presents a charming paradox, certainly, one which it shares with the ‘tradwife’ TikTok trend. ‘Tradwives’ are a movement in which female influencers – usually heavily made up and attractively if faux-modestly dressed – talk about traditional values and their love of being a homemaker. 

Most explanations take this on face value, talking about it as part of a rise in conservatism among young people – especially among young men – without noting that it is an online movement, not an offline one. ‘Tradwives’ aren’t homemakers, they are influencers, appealing to a young male audience that often wants to imagine themselves as the husband, or at least lover, of the woman they’re watching. 

A 21st century influencer trend is being interpreted as something deeper, as a yearning for the past, and as representative of a political school of thought to which it likely doesn’t even belong.

In just the same way, it is hard to sincerely present online trends involving producing AI-generated videos in the hope of going viral on TikTok as part of a serious movement hoping for a life lived less online. Commentators like deeper explanations for culture, but sometimes the shallow ones are best – people like this content in the same way as they like any kind of brainrot video. It’s fun to watch trends for a while until people get bored of it, and then people move on to something else.

When looked at through this lens, the surge in nostalgia content targeting millennials says less about the march of technological development and our reaction to it. But it might say something more about millennials.

There is no universally agreed age bracket for millennials, but a common definition says the group is anyone born between 1981 and 1996. That makes the very youngest millennials 28, and the oldest 44. That means the youngest millennials are at the absolute tail end of their years of being cool, relevant to marketers and at the heart of the cultural conversation. 

Most millennials are past it, already in the era of dad jokes, quiet googling of midlife crises and health symptoms, and finding themselves worrying that today’s students and 20-somethings aren’t quite doing it right. 

Seeing our peers suddenly sharing nostalgia content, the temptation is to reach for an explanation that is about the technology, something to do with the algorithm or the pace of societal change. There is a simpler explanation staring us in the face, but it’s far more crushing to the ego: nostalgia appeals to members of our generation now because, like the boomers before us, we’re already fading from relevance, and anything that reminds us of our time in the sun has some appeal. 

We’re not that different to the boomers after all – we’re becoming them, albeit with much lower levels of wealth, home ownership, pension savings, and general future prospects. Frankly, the whole prospect is a depressing one. Perhaps a video reminding us of better times might help?