Why so much nostalgia?

Why so much nostalgia?

Why does nostalgia feel like a place millennials keep returning to? R&B throwback parties, Nameless @25, the Millennials Cookout...the list is endless. Everywhere you look, there seems to be a millennial somewhere planning an event for other millennials. I couldn’t help but wonder what it is about the current cultural landscape that has them so nostalgic. But I was wrong. It is not really about the industry. You see, art might be forgotten over time, but it never truly disappears or gets erased. It gets shelved. And every so often, someone retrieves it, dusts it off, repackages it and brings it back into the world. Millennials seem to have made it their business to keep retrieving. Perhaps because they are trying to ground themselves in a world that feels increasingly fast-paced, digitised and, at times, strangely intangible. This is where the millennial experience gets interesting. Why aren’t Boomers and Gen Zs experiencing nostalgia with as much intensity? You may wonder. Boomers grew up in a world where technology was limited and communication was largely physical. Gen Zs, on the other hand, grew up in a world where the internet was already becoming part of everyday life. For many of them, having a mobile phone, being online and communicating digitally were simply part of the landscape. Millennials were caught somewhere in between. They grew up with the best of both worlds. They remember a time before everything was online and they were there when the internet became the centre of everything. They remember landlines and CDs. They adored Bluetooth and there was that one radio station they did not play about. Then came Facebook, smartphones and streaming. They watched everything unfold slowly and perhaps that is why they are so hung up on keeping little pieces of that world alive. Rather than fully surrendering to this new, fully fledged internet world where everything is available and somehow nothing feels tangible, they keep reaching for familiarity. No matter how small. They are not necessarily going back in time because they dislike the present. They are using familiar cultural objects to find each other in it.

Why music? Art has a funny way of making a comeback. It always does. Fashion can return because clothes are visual. You can resurrect a silhouette, give it a new name, put it on a runway and suddenly it is contemporary again. In the big 2026, there is plenty of 90s fashion making its way back. Even pedal pushers are back! They are calling them capri pants now, but some of us know better. Music is different because it is temporal. You cannot simply carry a song with you or even touch it. But a song can transport you. You can remember what you were wearing when you first heard Nasinzia. You remember the matatu. The person you had a crush on at the time. The radio station that played it. Maybe even the exact afternoon you heard it. It is almost as though music stores memories. And, in a way, it does. Because music does not take up physical space the same way paintings or clothes do, our brains tend to build a permanent home for it in the mind. Music Psychologist John Booth Davies called it the ‘Darling, they’re playing our tune’ effect. So when millennials return to the music of their youth, they aren't necessarily declaring that music was better back then. They are returning to a version of themselves that existed when those songs first mattered to them. That might explain why a concert will sell out months in advance or why thousands of people will gather at Ngong Racecourse for another millennial-themed cookout. It is the promise of a glimpse back at what used to be. A period when life was perhaps less complicated. When your friends were a sneaky phone call away and not somewhere between 307 unread WhatsApp messages and 20 Instagram reels. When everyone was still alive... Perhaps that is the real reason they keep building these little time machines- where for a few hours, people remember what it was like before everything changed.