Maybe We Don’t Miss the 2000s. Maybe We Miss Ourselves.

Lately, I have been wondering why Gen Z is so obsessed with the 2000s. Everywhere I look, it is low-rise jeans, digital cameras, flip phones, old music, baby tees, chunky belts, tiny sunglasses and enough lip gloss to blind somebody. We have somehow reached a point where having an iPhone with a camera that can practically count the pores on your face is not enough anymore. No, apparently we now want digital cameras from 2007 because the pictures are blurry. And honestly, I get it.

I think it comes down to nostalgia.

Or maybe it is something slightly more complicated than that. Maybe we are nostalgic for a version of life that felt simpler, slower and, dare I say, less fucked.

I was born in 2004, which means I technically grew up in the 2000s, although I was not exactly sitting around analysing the state of the global economy at four years old. My biggest economic concern was probably whether my mother was going to buy me snacks. Still, when I think about childhood, I remember the 2000s as colourful. I remember the sky being bluer, the sun being brighter and everything somehow feeling bigger and more exciting.

Maybe that is just what childhood does to your memory, but I like to believe the 2000s had something to do with it too.

I remember Saturday mornings when my brothers and I would wake up ridiculously early to watch cartoons. We would all go to sleep knowing that whoever woke up first had one very important responsibility: getting the remote. There was no negotiating. There was no “let’s take turns.” There was survival of the fittest.

One of my brothers, however, decided to take this competition far too seriously. Instead of sleeping and waking up early like the rest of us, he would apparently stay awake the entire night and simply wait for morning with the remote in his hand. I would wake up thinking I had outsmarted everyone, only to find him already sitting there like a security guard protecting national intelligence.

And somehow, those are the things I miss.

Not the actual cartoon. Not even necessarily the television. I miss the feeling of being that excited about something so small. I miss how little it took to make us happy.

Today, I can wake up, pick up my phone and within five minutes I can find out that the economy is struggling, the planet is getting hotter, someone my age just bought a house, someone else is getting married, another person has started a successful business, somebody has a perfect body, somebody is travelling around Europe and someone I went to school with is somehow already a CEO.

And it is not even 8 a.m.

Good morning to you too.

It feels like we have become young adults in a world that is constantly reminding us that we are running out of time, money, opportunities and apparently glaciers.

There is unemployment, economic uncertainty, climate change, political tension and the general feeling that adulthood was advertised to us very differently. We were told to go to school, get good grades, get a job and build a life. Somewhere along the way, the instructions changed, and nobody bothered to send us the updated version.

So sometimes I find myself wondering what it must have felt like to be 22 in the 2000s.

What did it feel like to be my age in 2004, before social media had turned everybody’s life into a public performance? What did it feel like to have friends you could only reach through a text message or by physically going to find them? What did it feel like to not know what everyone else was doing all the time?

I know I am romanticising it. I am aware.

I was not 22 in the 2000s. I was a child. I did not have bills, a career or an existential crisis about whether I am doing enough with my life. My biggest problem was probably finding the remote before my brother did.

But that is the strange thing about nostalgia. Sometimes we are not nostalgic for something we actually experienced. Sometimes we are nostalgic for a version of the world we have created in our heads.

And maybe that is why the 2000s have become so attractive to us.

Because the world we inherited feels so loud.

We are constantly connected, but somehow constantly overwhelmed. We can speak to anyone at any time, but we are also comparing ourselves to people we have never met. We know what our old classmates are doing, what celebrities are eating, what strangers are buying, where influencers are travelling and what somebody’s boyfriend bought them for their birthday.

There is no real escape.

Even when you are alone, you are not really alone. You are carrying around an entire universe in your pocket.

And maybe that is why we keep reaching backwards.

Look at the return of digital cameras. People are deliberately buying cameras with worse image quality than the phones they already own. Why? Because the pictures feel different. They are grainy, imperfect and sometimes completely terrible. You cannot immediately edit them, post them, delete them and take another 47 pictures until you find the angle where your face looks acceptable.

You take the picture, and you move on.

There is something strangely beautiful about that.

The same thing is happening with music. I find myself listening to older music all the time, and I know part of it is because those songs remind me of a particular time in my life, but I also think there is something about the way music used to exist.

Music videos felt like events. Artists had identities that felt distinct. You could recognise a song before the chorus even started. You could tell who the artist was by the visuals, the production, the clothes, the entire world they had created around themselves.

Maybe I am just becoming one of those people who says, “Music was better in my day,” even though my day was approximately twenty minutes ago, but sometimes it feels like everything now is chasing the same trend.

Everybody wants to go viral. Everybody wants to sound like somebody else. Everybody is talking about sex, money, bodies, relationships, what someone can buy them or what they can do for somebody else. And there is nothing inherently wrong with any of those things, but sometimes I miss when music felt like it had somewhere else to take you.

Maybe I am not actually missing the 2000s.

Maybe I am missing scarcity.

We used to have fewer photographs, so the photographs we had mattered. We had fewer songs readily available, so the songs we loved became attached to our memories. We did not have access to everybody’s lives, so we had more space to experience our own.

There was something about not knowing.

And perhaps that is what makes the 2000s so appealing to a generation that grew up with the internet. We have been given access to almost everything, and somehow, we are starting to crave less.

Less information.

Less comparison.

Less documentation.

Less noise.

Less pressure to turn every experience into content.

We want flip phones even though smartphones are objectively better. We want digital cameras even though our phones have better cameras. We want old music, old clothes and old technology even though most of us would probably have a breakdown if someone actually took away our Wi-Fi for three days.

So maybe we do not really want to go back.

Maybe we just want to feel what we imagine people felt back then.

Unrushed.

Unwatched.

Uncompared.

Maybe Gen Z does not miss the 2000s as much as we miss the version of ourselves that existed before we knew how much there was to worry about.

Before we knew about every war.

Before we knew what everyone else was earning.

Before we started measuring our faces against strangers on Instagram.

Before every hobby had to become a side hustle and every moment had to become content.

Before growing up meant having the entire world handed to you through a screen before you had even brushed your teeth.

I think about that little girl waking up on Saturday morning, running to the television before her brothers could get there, convinced that securing the remote was the most important thing in the world.

She did not know about inflation.

She did not know about climate change.

She did not know she would eventually become an adult who would stare at her phone and wonder if she was falling behind.

She just wanted to watch cartoons.

And maybe, in a strange way, that is what we are all trying to get back to.

Not the 2000s.

Just a time when something as small as getting the remote first could make you ridiculously, completely happy.

Maybe we do not want the past back.

Maybe we just want life to feel that simple again.