Why Society Peaked in 2016

In many ways, the world sucks right now. We're more divided than we've ever been. There's more chaos, war, and unrest all around the globe. Smartphones and social media that used to act as an escape have turned into digital prisons, trapping us into an endless stream of slop. People are noticing it, and that's why there's been an embrace of times past. Millions of people are giving up their smartphones for flip phones. '90s and early 2000s style is back, and every movie and TV show is a reboot. Mr. is having its moment.

If you came of age in the 2000s and 2010s, the world might seem less desirable now than when you were young. We're plagued with division, misinformation, and a dawning age of technology that may or may not kill us all. When did things get so bad? When did our cultural mood start to plummet so badly that the past became the only place to look to for comfort? And is it a good thing that most of us seem to be stuck in the past?

That romanticism of the past is nostalgia. It's a longing for an earlier time in our life, for a fantasy about a time in a different age. It's the emotion we get when we recall memories of people we love and moments that shaped us. But nostalgia is a complicated emotion; it's not necessarily all positive. Nostalgia is bittersweet. It can be a very triggering experience, potentially taking us back to traumatic times or distorting the past with rose-colored glasses to eliminate all the negative details.

But it's also positive. We remember what happened and how that impacted who and what we are today. We experience things in our present lives through the lens of the past. We pass a restaurant we visited five years ago or a park we played at as kids. We smell the same kind of food our grandmother used to make. We hear a song that played at our high school prom.

Technology and culture have taken note. Facebook memories transport us back to days gone by. The 'On This Day' album on our iPhones propels us to send embarrassing photos to friends and family. But these moments of nostalgia are more than just a ridiculous photo from high school; they're about coping with potentially tough moments. That longing for the comfort of the past doesn't come out of nowhere. Nostalgia is a surefire way to feel better about whatever is troubling us in the present, for better or worse, and it's not something we have to think about very hard.

Most people report experiencing nostalgia at least once a week. Nearly half of people experience it three to four times a week, usually triggered by negative events or feeling lonely. As a species, we've learned how to soothe ourselves with our memories. How long does it take to slip into a moment from your past? A sweet thing a parent said to you, a difficult time you had at school, or an adventure with a friend that you'll never forget—all of these memories, good or bad, are just waiting on the surface to slip us out of our present moment.

While making this video, I became nostalgic for the time before I had this channel. My friends and I would sit down on the grass in the park and talk about the very things I'm making this video about today. And it got me thinking, why don't I do that now? So, I reached out to an old friend, Noah. He always loved digging into the meaning behind words, so I thought he'd be the perfect person to help me explain a bit more about nostalgia.

Now, nostalgia first appeared as a term in 1688, coined by Swiss physician Johannes Hofer. But it has been a feeling described for thousands of years throughout literature and firsthand accounts. People long for home or reflect on their past. This shows us that the feeling of nostalgia has always been present and is a universal feeling across cultures and periods. The word nostalgia comes from the Greek "noos," which means homecoming, and "algos," which means pain. Essentially, nostalgia is a pathological homesickness.

When Hofer first named the feeling, it was seen as an actual illness that was sometimes fatal if people became depressed and lonely enough to stop eating and starve to death. In the 1830s, a Persian man threatened with eviction and upset about leaving his beloved home took to his bed and refu...