Soha Kassab
A few weeks before I sat down to write this, I deleted TikTok. Not for the first time, but this time, it felt more permanent. I could tell you it was because of the micro-trends that chipped away at my attention span, or the niche audios that wormed into my brain despite holding no actual meaning. I could write an entire essay about how TikTok has flattened originality, stripping people of any layer of authentic skin (and I already have)
But what made me quit was something stranger, something almost absurd: the sudden rise of nostalgia for the Covid era.
The lockdown. The social isolation. The whipped coffee. The Indie Filters. The time when people were collectively bleaching their eyebrows and cutting their own bangs in some kind of mass hysteria. Suddenly, there were videos with captions like “I miss 2020″—romanticizing a time when we were disinfecting our groceries and baking banana bread out of sheer boredom.
That was my breaking point. Because if nostalgia can make people long for a period marked by death tolls on every news channel, makeshift hospital beds in stadiums, and freezer trucks turned into morgues, then it’s more than just a feeling. It’s a delusion. It’s a slow, creeping erosion of context so severe that we’ve somehow rewritten mass grief into an aesthetic. We weren’t just bored in 2020; we were terrified. We were disinfecting our groceries because we didn’t know if the air itself could kill us. The world wasn’t just unstable—it was vicious, unravelling at a scale we couldn’t comprehend. And yet, here we are, just five years later, romanticizing it like it was just another fleeting microtrend.
Pining for the era doesn’t necessarily mean missing the virus itself.
I get it—nostalgia isn’t always rational. Pining for the era doesn’t necessarily mean missing the virus itself. Of course, people romanticize the sense of internet togetherness, the internet culture, and the strange comfort of shared distractions. TikTok, for many, was a lifeline—a way to escape, to connect, to fill the silence. And honestly, I’d be lying if I said I don’t feel it too. There was something about that time—about the weird, insular world of early-pandemic internet—that I find myself remembering with a kind of warped fondness. The late-night Zoom calls, the unhinged TikTok trends, the way the internet felt, for a brief moment, like we were all in the same place.
But that’s exactly why it unsettles me. Because nostalgia has a way of smoothing over the rough edges, of making us forget what was lurking underneath. But recognizing that distinction between nostalgia for an aestheticized moment and nostalgia that erases the reality of that time is what made me pause. Because the more I started to think about it, the more I saw it everywhere.
But this is just one example of a much bigger problem. Nostalgia, in its purest form, is a warm blanket. An extremely comforting illusion. It’s seductive and persistent, making it so easy for us to give in. We have a habit—maybe even a compulsion— to crave and yearn for things that seem blurry or things we cannot have anymore, and nostalgia serves us this faux feeling of having had, of ownership over a past despite not being a part of it. Now, on the opposite side of that spectrum, Nostalgia in its most unhinged form turns into regressive nostalgia; a sentimental obsession leading to disillusionment and cultural decay. This is a yearning to return to ‘the good old times’. We find ourselves chasing an overly romanticised version of certain eras that we’ve all been programmed to believe were not only better but also realer. A time when music was more authentic, fashion was more effortless, and art was made with more ‘soul’.
We love the idea of these eras, but we quietly forget the messier parts.
We don’t just see this in the way people talk about the past—we see it in the way people try to bring it back. The most jarring example I can think of is the comeback of the early 2000s ‘cool girl’ culture. Aesthetic-wise, it’s all lip gloss, low-rise jeans, and Jennifer’s Body-era Megan Fox, but there’s also an undercurrent of reviving outdated gender dynamics. Look at the obsession with Tumblr’s 2014 “indie sleaze” era—a time that, in retrospect, was basically just American Apparel ads, concerning eating habits and Arctic Monkeys/Halsey (specifically her Badlands album) lyrics as personality traits. We love the idea of these eras, but we quietly forget the messier parts.
Nostalgia is selective like that. It’s almost maddening how easily it is to smooth out the rough edges, remove the context and bathe in that sanitized, aesthetically pleasing version of what was.
And yet, we roll our eyes at the reboots, the remakes, the recycled trends that never even get the chance to fully die, and we can’t help but participate in it. We crave nostalgia while resenting it.
So, where is this all coming from? Nostalgia is certainly not a new feeling or a recent discovery…I’m pretty certain every generation looks at the one before it and collectively decides that the past was better, more creative, more sincere and ‘unfiltered’. Does this make nostalgia a dead end for creatives? Or is this just how culture has always worked, a loop disguised as progress?
That loop is everywhere. The world is – objectively – kind of a mess. Every day, we sift through an endless stream of bad news, a highlight reel of everything unravelling at once. And when the present feels too unstable, our minds will reach for something familiar, something that feels like home. Nostalgia is less a choice and more a reflex—an instinct to reach for the past when the future looks uncertain. It’s the psychological equivalent of comfort food.
That’s why nostalgia isn’t just a feeling anymore. It’s a business model. Every industry – whether that be fashion, film, music, art and even literature – doesn’t just recycle stories, it resurrects them, Frankenstein-style, hoping we won’t notice the seams. Turning every new cultural moment into an echo of something we’ve already seen.
Last semester, in my poetry class, we studied a selection of contemporary works—poems that rejected traditional forms, defied expectations, and often felt, at first glance, almost unreadable. As we sat in that seminar room, shifting uncomfortably in our seats, there was a shared sense of frustration, even mild disgust. It wasn’t that these poems were inherently bad, but rather that they were unfamiliar and resistant to easy understanding. Our tutor urged us to sit with that discomfort, to engage with our confusion rather than dismiss it outright. And it was at that moment that an unsettling question took shape: Do we want originality?
It’s rather easy to sit back and complain, criticise and whisper about how unoriginal contemporary culture is, but when we really think about it: every time someone tries to create something truly new, the reaction is confusion at best, rejection at worst. (What is this? I don’t get it. Bring back the old one.) People love to mock contemporary art for being too abstract, too conceptual, too try-hard—but guess what? That’s exactly what people said about Impressionism, Cubism, and every major artistic movement that changed the game. Maybe some guy in the 1800s walked past the Mona Lisa and went, Ugh. Portraits were better before they had expressions. Maybe someone in the 1920s looked at Picasso’s work and muttered, I miss when art looked like things.
My takeaway is: The problem isn’t that new things aren’t being made, it’s just that we don’t like feeling left out of the loop.
Maybe that’s why we keep turning to the past—not just as inspiration, but as a blueprint. If the new unsettles us, then the familiar soothes us. And what’s more familiar than something we’ve already seen before?
I don’t hate reboots. At least, not always.
There’s a particular kind of thrill in seeing something familiar reimagined, like running into an old friend and realizing they’ve changed in a way you never expected. But then there’s the other kind of reboot—the ones that feel less like reinvention and more like a desperate attempt to bottle the past and sell it back to us at a profit.
I thought about this when another Mean Girls remake dropped in 2024,(which was a recreation of a 2017 play, and that play was originally a twist on the 2004 movie) or when my friend told me about a new Harry Potter series being announced, or when an artist drops a remix/acoustic version of their Magnum opus despite it sounding perfectly fine in its original form. It’s not that these things are bad (although that is debatable), it’s that they feel tired. Like a boomerang mistaken for an arrow.
Creativity has always been presented as a forward motion, yet we keep circling the same ideas.
‘My favourite thing about concepts like these is that they are almost always so contradictory. The irony, of course, is that nostalgia is both creativity’s biggest barrier and its greatest fuel. Some of the best art isn’t nostalgia-free; it’s nostalgia-drenched—not in a way that copies the past, but in a way that interrogates it, reshapes it, makes it new.
Nostalgia, when used intentionally, isn’t just a return—it’s a revision, a conversation between past and present. It’s the difference between mindlessly rebooting a film and reimagining a cultural artefact through a sharper, more critical lens. How musicians sample old songs and give them new meaning. Fashion takes silhouettes from the past but updates them with a modern eye. Nostalgia is inescapable. Rejecting it could only lead to a never-ending spiral of absurdity, so the trick is to learn how to weave it into our lives, our art and our perceptions while refusing to be trapped by it.
My final observation about nostalgia is that it spreads quietly, like a virus with no name, slipping through the cracks of memory until it rewires the way we see ourselves. Inevitably, it infects our memories and instincts, shaping what we create, what we crave, and believe we have lost. And before we realize it, nostalgia is no longer just something we feel—it’s something we are. When I was younger, I used to believe that my best ideas would come later. I truly believed I was still in the warm-up stage of my life, waiting for some golden era of originality to hit me like divine intervention. But lately, I’ve developed this terrible habit of flipping through my notebooks and rereading old things I’ve written and wondering if I’ll ever phrase something so precisely again. I linger on a ‘perfect metaphor’ or a line break that rolls off the tongue so smoothly and I wonder how I did it. Maybe I’ve already peaked, but I was too busy looking forward to notice it. Thus, I hold onto old versions of myself like a favourite sweater—worn-out, stretched at the sleeves, but impossible to throw away
Here’s the comforting catch that I often circle back to, though: Those past versions of ourselves were probably just as uncertain as we are now— Nostalgia just reframes the past as an unattainable ideal. The past isn’t better; it’s just archived. It has the luxury of being static while the present constantly shifts under our feet.
Soha Kassab
Featured image courtesy of Jon Tyson via Unsplash. Image license found here. No changes were made to this image.
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