Barely has the new year got under way and already the internet has decided it’s had enough of 2026. Social media is in the grip of a wave of nostalgia for 2016, with a host of celebrities, from Kylie Jenner to Hailey Bieber posting throwbacks from a decade ago.
In Jenner’s case, they include snaps from her so-called ‘King Kylie era’, when she somehow managed to convince every teenage girl on the planet to buy her lip glosses – including my then tweenage daughter, who is also, together with all her friends (now in their 20s), fixated with 2016.
Ah, 2016. It was the best of times, it was the worst of times: Apple launched its Airpods, the first series of Stranger Things aired, the great British public voted to call a £200million polar research ship ‘Boaty McBoatface’, Donald J. Trump won his first presidency and Harry met Meghan. (Indeed, the Sussexes have also indulged the 2016 trend by posting a video – shot by Lilibet – of them dancing barefoot in the grass at their home in Montecito, with the caption: ‘You had to be there.’)
The world was obsessed with, in no particular order: Pokemon, bubble tea, Instagram dog filters, Musical.ly (the precursor to TikTok), Victoria’s Secret, the Brandy Melville alien, vaping, American Apparel, pastel-coloured hair, Hamilton (the musical), skinny ripped Joni jeans from Topshop, Kat von D foundation, Anastasia Beverly Hills brow pomade, Shane Dawson, Tumblr, Lena Dunham’s Girls, Effy from Skins, side partings, Nike Air Force 1, patterned leggings. Happy days!
They certainly were for me. My children were still young and life was for the most part pretty good. I was happily married, the world felt relatively sane and, dare I say it, secure – and I had a vibrant circle of intelligent, interesting, successful friends.
That is not to say my life is miserable now – far from it. It’s just that if you had asked me then where I would be in ten years’ time, I probably would not have envisioned that things would have turned out as they have.
Social media is in the grip of a wave of nostalgia for 2016, with a host of celebrities, from Kylie Jenner (pictured in New York in 2016) to Hailey Bieber, posting throwbacks from a decade ago
For me, 2016 means one thing and one thing only, and that thing changed my life irrevocably: Brexit, and the seismic political schism it provoked, dividing the country and cracking open my own safe, comfortable world.
The result of the referendum shattered my family and friendships and, ultimately, cost me my marriage. After that, nothing was ever the same again. Try as I might, I couldn’t put Humpty back together again.
But them’s the breaks, and I’m not complaining. The last ten years have taught me an awful lot about myself and my own flaws and failings, and as hard as some of these truths have been to confront, it’s been worth it. What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, and all that.
For the wider world, the 2016 trend seems to have a similar bittersweet theme. Looking back, there was a kind of innocence in the air, an almost childlike optimism – exemplified, perhaps, by dear old Boaty McBoatface.
People still knew how to have fun, art still mattered, you could have a conversation with someone without them looking at their phone.
We were not yet all slaves to the algorithm. Because undoubtedly that has been the main driver of change. Social media was still in its infancy and not the angry, toxic, often dangerous place it is today, full of vitriol and hate.
It was a fun place, where people filmed themselves doing silly dances, pretended to be puppies or chased after imaginary Pokemon characters. It wasn’t all about shameless self-promotion, ‘monetisation’ and the constant manufacture of online rage.
Cancel culture had not yet taken hold; the pandemic and its pernicious threat to liberty and livelihoods was not on the radar; politics was not locked in a seemingly endless cycle of crisis; Russia had not invaded Ukraine; AI was not threatening to do all of humanity out of a job, while inundating us with DeepFake porn.
Looking back, 2016 feels like a more emotionally safe time, the calm before the storms of the past decade. And it has been a stormy one, a time when so many certainties have fallen away. In a way it’s been a cultural revolution, and not necessarily a happy one.
Who would have thought in 2016, for example, that a Supreme Court ruling would be necessary to determine what a woman is, or that the country would be led by someone who doesn’t know the answer to that question?
Or that sex-selective abortion would become a thing? Or that there would be open support for terror groups like Hamas on the streets of Britain, or that Jews in this country should fear for their lives?
PERHAPS it’s only natural, given the state of the world, that people should take refuge in the past. What’s so surprising is to see so many young people doing so.
You expect it of the older generation, but when people in their 20s, whose future should be filled with hope and potential, are hankering after the past, you have to ask: why?
Perhaps I’m reading too much into it. Perhaps it’s just a bit of fun and a chance to see if you can still squeeze into those skinny jeans (answer in my case: no). Or perhaps it will remind everyone that the world wasn’t always this divided and judgmental – and encourage us all to take things a little less seriously.
Jess’s tragedy is why we need family GPs 
Jessica Brady, with her mother Angela, died of cancer in 2020 aged just 24
Jessica Brady was a young woman who died of cancer in 2020 aged just 27. Her mother Angela, with Jessica, has championed the introduction of something called ‘Jess’s Rule’, a new system urging doctors to think again if they are unable to pin down a diagnosis after seeing a patient three times.
Jess was examined by six doctors at her local surgery, but no referral was made. Eventually her family paid for a private consultation, but it was too late. Jess was diagnosed and died a few weeks later.
This protocol is a fantastic idea, but isn’t the real problem the demise of the family GP? Time was, you always saw the same doctor, who knew your medical history. Nowadays you never know who you are going to see.
Often the doctor doesn’t have time to go through everything, and quite often they make mistakes, not because they are careless but because they are not allowed to treat patients as people, merely a collection of symptoms.
Why is Anne Boleyn, one of history’s most unfairly maligned women, being played on Broadway by a trans woman?
Isn’t it enough that a man cut off her head – must she now have her entire identity denied too?
Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor is said to be decluttering ahead of his move to Marsh Farm in Sandringham.
Much has been made of the ‘pokey’ accommodation, but at least it doesn’t have bars for windows.