Around here we’ve spent a great deal of time detailing generational tendencies. When it comes to nostalgia for their long-gone childhood years, Gen Y is notorious for living in the past, while Millennials are notorious for consigning anything from the before time to the memory hole.
But recently, a new development has been brought to my attention: online millennial nostalgia.
Related: Nostalgia in Light of Generation Theory
Thanks to author JD Cown for pointing me toward this video:
Granted, about half the objects of nostalgia showcased in that video pertain to the 80s or early 90s, and therefore Gen Y.
But others do indeed hail from the formative years of Millennials. And it’s no accident that an outsized number of those fondly remembered touchstones existed not in real life, but online.
Related: The Nostalgia Jukebox Effect
By combining objects of Gen Y and Millennial nostalgia in one video, we immediately get a sense of contrast that helps further delineate the two generations.
To break it down for you, here are the occasions of nostalgia by generation:
Y
- Pellet Ice
- Classic Pizza Hut
- Mac Tonight
Millennial
- AOL
- Peak YouTube
- Original iMac
Comparing both lists, the Last Analog Generation vs First Digital Generation dichotomy really comes through.
The fact that Millennials are getting nostalgic about anything at all is a development that bears watching, though. Chances are, it’s either a good sign or horribly bad.
Weird how so much of Gen Y nostalgia revolves around food.
We may have to look into what that means.
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This is why I’m convinced if anything happens to the internet, Millennials are going to be the most affected. This is their central hub of “community” and has been since they could walk. It’s entirely digital and online. Without it they simply have little else to hang their hat on.
It’s also why a proper 2000s nostalgia movement will never exist. Even if it’s worse, the internet is still there and still exists. But also, there’s no real nostalgia you can milk out of it. Even things like Geocities still exists with Neocities. It’s all still there in some capacity.
I think it’ll be worse the younger the Millennial. I was born in the early 90’s so I still got to experience some of the stuff more definitive of gen y – playing outside, movie nights with blockbuster, Pizza Hut outings, staying out till the sun went down, etc. Though I might be a rare exception in the nuance that is generational analytics. As established in Brian’s previous post, stereotypes are a thing for a reason. It might be typical that Millennials are nostalgic for something that doesn’t exist anymore and far worse, will never come back; by things I mean peak internet sites and the content on those sites. The internet has changed far too much and what we grew up on could never be made today.*
To toss in a bit of food for thought, my generation was brought up on the dream we were all gonna be youtube stars [who played videogames all day]. For a time, YT was giving out partnerships like it was candy so for someone like me with no talent could have gotten on no problem and the ad revenue was generous – tho I had no discipline so it never came to be. Eventually I asked myself what would happen to all the people who took the YT star route and would they be doing the same thing for the rest of their lives? As of 2024, I know my answer – they’re all retiring to be with families. In a way, I see this as the end of an era for Millennials, the hope of that dream dying. A defining feature was the dream of YT being our future, to just make content about what we loved and be paid to live a comfortable lifestyle. With all the familiar names leaving, there’s less and less my generation can cling to for an identity.
Obviously YT has changed much since then and proven only the top 1% get to do that and even for the top 1% it’s not sustainable.
Unlike older generations, who identify with more material goods or businesses which might still be around, Millennials will pine for a digital/intangible space which has been phased out.
*I think this is why Internet Archive and the Wayback Machine have grown in popularity. It’s window shopping a time that is long dead.
I wonder if Gen Y nostalgia around food comes from being the last generation that grew up before the 2000s restaurant boom/bubble.
I’m not familiar with that phenomeonon. Tell us more.
I’m speculating a bit on the early causes, but: Food Network had become really popular by the early 2000s and Tuscan food was very trendy. Neo-Tuscan decor was fashionable in 2000s McMansions as well – I worked as a base-coat painter for a woman who did faux-finish interior painting and saw a lot of kitchens with fake stone arches and vineyard murals. This meant that restaurant careers became aspirational and diners’ tastes shifted. Italian-American food was disparaged in favor of “authentic” Italian food by people who had never heard of balsamic vinegar in 1998.
Fast-casual restaurants (Chipotle, Panera) took off in the 2000s, and social-striving residents of 2nd- and 3rd-tier cities rejoiced when they finally got “their” Starbucks and Whole Foods.
Restaurant careers were aspirational – “The Next Food Network Star” began its run in 2005. People started calling themselves “foodies.” Early Twitter had a lot of “omg this is the best burrito ever” content before that migrated to Instagram.
All this meant a lot of new restaurants in the 2000s. The 2008 crash hurt the industry, but the it kept its cultural status and 2000s/2010s hipsters flocked to it. We’re all familiar with zero interest rates leading Millennials to buy avocado toast instead of houses, so I won’t rehash that here.
I think nostalgia comes in because this is another example of a common mass culture becoming fragmented. We all ate at Pizza Hut or Godfather’s when we were kids because that’s what there was and nobody lost social status for doing so. Once dining became such an arena to compete for status and restaurants proliferated, you got points for seeking the local and obscure. Boomer parents trained their children (Millennials and younger) to have tastes in food befitting their social-climbing destinies.
People also just dined out a lot more beginning in the 2000s. We remember it more fondly because dining out, even at Sizzler’s, was still something of an event when we were children.
OK, yes. Thank you for putting a name to the phenomenon that was the bane of my existence for years. While I had noticed that sometime around the year 2000, food went from being honest, tasty, and filling to overdone performance art, I just thought of it as the Millennialization of restaurant cuisine.
As chance would have it, I just came across a website cataloging how various websites looked throughout the years:
https://www.webdesignmuseum.org/
If you look through various websites I think it will become clear why there is web nostalgia.
Youtube: Used to be focused on community videos, now focused on corporate and bland clickbait.
Winamp: Used to be focused on community skins and plugins to customize your own media player installation, now a generic streaming site with NFTs.
The Simpsons: Used to have an episode guide, character bios, message board, etc. Now just tells you to watch the show on streaming services.
Yahoo: Used to stress a directory of sites (many of which were small fansites) as well as offering services like auctions, classifieds, a messenger, etc. Now just has stories about politics and celebrity BS on top of tons of ads.
In each case not only did the aesthetic change, but the sites also lost content and a focus on the community. It’s easy to sum this up by saying that they used to have soul, and now they don’t. About the only sites shown that have remained consistent without being totally stagnant are Homestar Runner and Newgrounds, which explains why millennials are fond of both.
Now there ARE sites like the classic ones still around on the internet, both in terms of old sites that managed to stick around, or deliberate throwbacks. But they are a much smaller percentage of the web now, and since search engines now suck (and there are few webrings or directories to get around them) finding those sites is much harder. If you are stuck to your phone, which many millennials are, it is even harder still. Even if you do find such sites, the fact that they are now a niche thing means that they are not going to have the level of community involvement as before. I used to post on message boards with hundreds or even thousands of active members; now the boards I post on have maybe 10 people who post more than twice a year. So I can understand the nostalgia, even if I don’t have it myself as intensely as millennials do.
(You don’t hear much about nostalgia for pre-web things like Gopher, Usenet, MUDs or services like Prodigy. I’m guessing that’s just due to their relative lack of popularity, since occasionally you come across someone who is intensely nostalgic for that stuff.)
Here’s my hypothesis about the food thing.
It’s not the food itself so much as the fact that a lot of the Gen Y nostalgic food is centered in the in restaurant experience. Often neglected by parents, for the average Y, going out to eat constituted a memorable experience of spending time together, in a distinct environment with its own smells and tastes. Combine that with nostalgic advertisements, and it’s the perfect recipe for sentimentality.
This stands out to me because I have virtually no nostalgic attachment to food, and when I was a kid, we got takeout all the time but almost never dined in at, say, Pizza Hut. I tend to think of toys and their ads as peak Gen Y nostalgia since that’s more personally apt, I guess.
Lately I’ve seen a lot of Millennial nostalgia for the digital aesthetic of the early to mid 2000s. This was when I was in high school, but it’s hard for me see much of sentimental value in the Xbox user interface or Windows Vista. You’re absolutely right that it’s all based around the Internet and digital entertainment with little real life or in person communal aspect.
You’ve probably got something, there. In our household, the family night out at Pizza Hut or Godfathers or Shakey’s was the way to celebrate or just have fun together. So, I still pine for those experiences.
But the heyday of eBaum’s World, the look of Windows ca. 2005, and the ability to hurl gamer words on XBox Live evoke little more feeling than recalling the toaster I had back then.
Revolt against the wthnic cuisine. Bring Pizza Hut and Pizza Inn back.
I am a Generation Y (1985), though Australian (It was very similar change over here). This might be some of the reasons Why Generation Y is nostalgia for food more than other things? I can point out 2 things.
1. It was the last generation where restaurants and fast food use Beef Tallow, Lard, butter and/or coconut oil in their food.
– McDonalds switched in 1990 from Beef Tallow to seed oil
– Oreo cookies were made with lard until the mid-1990s over to seed oils,
– Burger King around 2010s from Beef Tallow to Seed oils.
– Movie Popcorn change from coconut oil to Seed oils in 1994
I am sure many other fast food and food package also change, and for sure some bake goods switch from butter to seed oils. Also probably other things have changed as well but it is hard to find the information.
2. Divorce was still high for many parents in the 90s. Our generation was hit very hard by it, I was fortunate that my parents stay together but alot of my friends parents got divorce. For some of us Gen Y the restaurants were some of the last time some of us ate with our parents together as a family.
3. It was less DUI stuff to worry about, and things were less gay and less diverse. You felt safer due to the lack of diversity, though I still rarely feel unsafe with Asians (Just disgust and annoy sometimes and mainly depending on the group and what they are doing). You could make all sort of jokes around the dinner table without someone getting upset and conversations were less political. Most of the politics were about economics and religions (only really about Catholics and Protestants, especially in regard to the violence of North Ireland). Sometimes War would come up, I remember the Bill Clinton bombing of Iraq and Yugoslavia, and talking and discussing the 1st Gulf War. Racial injustice or at the time Gay Marriage was almost never talked about. This change around the 00s, I know universities and Media were already change by the mid 90s but the rot had not yet pass into the family, church and schools.
4. No to very rare Mobile Phones. This change is more about the conversations we had but even the books we were reading. If you caught up with a person back in the 90s you had to plan in advance to catch up, location and time. You had to wait sometimes and yet it was not as much of a struggle as it is today to be alone and in own your own head. You might even run into other people or start a random conversation with a stranger while waiting. At lunch people would engage with the conversation. It felt better and I admit it could be more my age and age group but hanging out with Girls was less stressful. You could have fun and no topic was off limit to talk about, again this might be because I was a kid to teen during the 90s.
4. Also travel was fun since the diversity was oversea and felt interesting when traveling. Though I travel to China in the 2004, it was the 1st time being around alot of Asians. We had 1 Chinese kid growing up at school. How much that has change, especially Australia, so many Indians and Chinese here. Blacks and Arabs I only saw after High School. Islam I only knew exist after the event of 9/11, still remember that night (Time zone) and the day after I was in year 10.
I hope this helps
The industrywide downgrade from tallow/lard/omega 3s to seed oils can’t be discounted. For that we have a Texas oil millionaire to thank. He suffered a heart attack in the late 80s and, convinced by the new lowfat, high carb diet the government was pushing, he sued McDonald’s. The other fast food chains soon fell in line, and by the end of the 90s, restaurants that cooked in anything besides U-boat lube were rarer than hen’s teeth.
Yes you are correct. It has help led to the increase of obesity since the 90s, especially for children which was rarely hear about. We need pressure to hit the other way. Bring back Lard sand Beef tallow. Media that said anti Saturated fat should be ban or Sue. It will take time but remember the Texas Oil Millionaire did not comer up with the anti fat, nor the courts agreeing on their own.
It was ideas push by Crisco, people like Ancel Keys (pushing his deceptive ‘Seven Countries Study’) and the American heart association (change in 1961 to this statement ‘recommended that all men (and subsequently women) decrease their consumption of saturated fat, replacing these fats whenever possible with polyunsaturated vegetable oils, as the most promising measure of protection against heart disease’)
These ideas (lies) plus the money from the seed oils and the Vegetarian (and later Vegan) diet is what created the believers that push this. The truth always comes out, it just take time and people willing to stand up.
Amen. I switched to tallow and clarified butter and never looked back. Nor do I want to.
Millennial nostalgia is a HUGE thing right now, and the main reason is that “Cultural Ground Zero” only applies to pop culture that had been around for a long time, like music and movies.
-As it has been discussed previously in the Ysphere, video game Ground Zero was reached a decade later in 2007. Some even say, with sound argumentation, that video games peaked in 2001.
-TV dramas peaked in the 2000s. The Sopranos, Breaking Bad, Rome… It was the decade when “made for TV” stopped meaning “lowbrow”.
-While anime was past its 90s peak, it was still going strong in the 2000s (Inuyasha, FLCL, Gurren Lagann, Code Geass) and it had reached such a peak in popularity that Western animators started making “animesque” series (Avatar: the Last Airbender, Totally Spies, Martin Mystery, Code: Lyoko)… I’d put Anime Ground Zero somewhere in the early 2010s, after K-On and Madoka Magica.
-Many beloved internet pop culture items started in the 2000s (4chan, Wikipedia, WoW, YouTube, MySpace) or peaked in that same decade (internet forums, Habbo Hotel, Newgrounds, torrenting). Do they exist nowadays? Sure, in the same way that fast food chains and blockbuster movies exist nowadays as well. A mockery of what had once existed.
-2000s technology was aesthetically delightful, starting with Y2k and ending with Frutiger Aero. They symbolized the coolness and the hope of the future, respectively. Today’s Corporate Superflat and Alegria “art” makes you want to slit your wrists in comparison.
And I could go on and on.