It's Time to Let Go of Millennial Optimism
Graphic by Max Weinstein
2026 seems to be the year of nostalgia and reminiscing. Social media has been flooded with people rediscovering the music and style of 2016. More recently, on TikTok, users have been posting slideshows and edits of photos of the early 2010s to the song “Blood” by The Middle East, with this time period now being called “Millennial optimism."
Millennial optimism seems to be defined by the happy and carefree attitude that radiates from old Pinterest and Tumblr posts by millennials in the 2010s. Many Gen Zers have been reposting old pictures with filters and captions emblematic of the decade, and many Millennials are reposting photos of themselves from that time period. While there's no issue with reminiscing about a period in your life when you felt more carefree, there is a fine line between reminiscing and selective memory crossing into erasure.
2008 to 2016 may seem like a paradise of American society now, but the reality was much different. Just two years before the 2010s, the United States entered the Great Recession, largely considered the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. Millennials―the oldest of whom were 27 at the time―faced the brunt of this. Although the recession was considered “over” by 2009, its effects were felt for much longer. Three years later, in direct response to the growing inequity and disenfranchisement many young people felt, Occupy Wall Street began―a majority millennial movement against the corporations and financial institutions they blamed for the 2008 financial crisis.
This protest against economic inequality continued even after the occupation ended, when over 200 fast food workers in New York City went on strike to increase the minimum wage in 2012. This eventually spread to other cities and became known as the Fight for $15 movement; although many cities and states have since implemented a $15 minimum wage, the federal minimum wage is still $7.25.
In 2013, two years after Occupy and one year after the reelection of the Obama administration, George Zimmerman was acquitted of murder for the shooting of then 17-year-old Trayvon Martin. This led to the creation of the Black Lives Matter movement, which started out as an online hashtag, but evolved into an international movement against the systemic anti-Black violence of American Policing. Black Lives Matter continued steadily throughout the 2010s, re-emerging at the center of national dialogue in 2014 with the killings of Eric Garner in Staten Island, New York, and Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. The movement would then reach the height of its momentum in 2020 in response to the killings of George Floyd, Ahmad Aubrey and Breonna Taylor.
These are only a snapshot of the social and political movements that took place in the 2010s, centered on the United States. Globally, the 2010s saw a wave of transformative movements. In Brazil, the Free Fare Movement started as protests against increased transit costs in 2013, then proceeded to reach thousands of people across its major cities. Hong Kong had the pro-democracy Umbrella Movement in 2014, and―most notably―the Arab Spring that began in 2010 in Tunisia against its government quickly spread and inspired similar movements in other Southwest Asian and North African countries. The decade was filled with mass protests and movements that journalist and author Vincent Bevins delved further into in his 2023 release, If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution.
I am not trying to be a downer when I bring these real issues to the limelight. It's totally reasonable to love the fashion, arts and politics of an era not far gone, but I believe it's important not to let nostalgia erase or contort such recent history. “Millennial optimism" isn’t the product of a freer, less tumultuous time period; It exists in spite of the challenging times, as a response to the recession, the protests and the political divisions of those years. We don’t have to sanitize and romanticize the past in order to enjoy aspects of it.
The 2010s are gone. Gen Z will never get to experience young adulthood in the 2010s, and Millennials will never get those years back. And we have to be okay with that. Instead of longing for a rose-tinted view of the past, we need to find ways of creating our own optimism and fond memories in our currently chaotic times.