Why is 2016 haunting 2026? On Postnostalgia, time loops and lost futures

One Sunday, my mother casually mentioned how much she hated Sundays as a teenager. It was the first time I had heard her speak about her upbringing. She recalled the past with critical fondness, acknowledging her weekly domestic labour at her parents’ house. Meanwhile, I was growing tired of my own recollection, of the memories that I keep circling back to. To me, the past has become an atmosphere I study, inhabit and convey; to my mother, it is the structural foundation of who she is, shared with almost no one. And yet we met somewhere in the blur between past and present at the point where memory weakens under repetition; hers because it has carried a life, mine because it can no longer anchor me. 

Around the same time, Instagram feeds have declared that 2016 is the new 2026. Carousels of memories from a decade ago surfaced across the platform, and the collective desire to reclaim a bygone time was palpable. Cultural returns once relied on longer cycles, twenty-year revivals, or generational shifts, but now the past returns prematurely, because the present cannot stabilise enough to generate anything new. The resurfacing of these old aesthetics, songs, and viral moments feels both familiar and unsettling; the past is no longer something we recall, but something that algorithmically insists on itself. 

This is what I call postnostalgia, a cultural and emotional state where the past perpetually resurfaces, repeating itself until it loses meaning, stripped of direction or consolation. Jacques Derrida described hauntology as the way the past continues to “haunt” the present, not as straightforward memory, but as a ghostly, unresolved presence. Decades later, Mark Fisher expanded this idea, observing that contemporary culture is haunted not just by what has been lost, but by futures that have never arrived. In a world shaped by acceleration and rising precarity, where the future feels inaccessible, we cling to the repeatable forms of memory. 

I noticed this collapse of time in the smallest, most ordinary moments while visiting a friend in Sharjah. Her childhood bedroom was a purple dream, the bed, the curtains and the sofa washed in layered shades, as if the room itself lived inside the colour. I had never been there before, yet stepping inside felt like a memory I already had. Her childhood held a comfort that felt internal, as if the residue of our shared years expanded backwards into a past I had never experienced. Only at the time of writing did I understand the familiarity; when I was ten years old, my room in Tripoli was similarly purple. My friend’s room returned a memory I had forgotten, proving that memory does not belong to the past, but to the moment that summons it. 

Weeks later, my cousins, siblings, and I gathered in my grandmother’s living room to recreate a winter sleepover from years ago. Each of us occupied a corner of the room, drinking hot chocolate and watching Tunisian talk shows. My sister pulled a deck of cards that read “questions for my grandmother”, and each of us picked a question. My grandmother recalled the happiest and saddest days of her life, and the more questions we asked, the more tired she became. I could see how my grandmother’s life, which spans decolonisation, migration, and revolution, started to loop, as she recalled the same memories to different questions. Nostalgia turned from sweet to bitter as she recounted deferred dreams, foreclosed futures, and the grief of lost loved ones. 

It is disturbing to witness the simultaneity of everything at once; images of destruction, displacement, economic collapse, and political failure appear a scroll away from soft-focus nostalgia edits and aestheticised memory. The contrasts produce an emotional dissonance that is difficult to hold. When memory recurrently circulates instead of integrating our lives, it becomes tiring, not necessarily due to the weight of the past, but because it no longer fits in the present. Our remembrance is no longer internal, but is shaped by a feed that collapses time and place, grief, longing and entertainment into the same rhythm. Postnostalgia is not just cultural; it is an emotional depletion.

Postnostalgia feels like death because of the reality it presents: the emotional and imaginative capacities of the past can no longer be restored. Hauntology suggests the past will emerge as ghostly presences when it matters, but what happens when there is a constant, deliberate resurfacing? And what is the end goal of remembrance practices when the archive itself feels exhausted?

This tension is not only personal; cities also loop the past, risking becoming untraceable. In Abu Dhabi, where I research urban change and nostalgia, redevelopment moves so quickly that buildings and neighbourhoods seem to appear overnight, while old streets are renamed, monuments and emblems of the past are demolished or neglected. In this pace of change, memory struggles to accumulate. But some things persist despite their altered forms, like areas or streets still being referred to by their old names, images online of past forms circulate, calling for preservation or recreation, and artists and scholars attempt to preserve what has or will disappear. Andreas Huyssen observed that a boom in remembrance often produces a boom in forgetfulness. In landscapes where preservation accelerates, erasure follows, as the act of remembering paradoxically can dilute what once felt grounded. 

After dinner on New Year’s Eve, we sat in my grandmother’s living room, watching a rerun of Shoufli Hal, a famous Tunisian sitcom. Across from me, a portrait of my late grandfather is hung on the wall; in the photograph, he wears sunglasses, but if you look long enough, the outline of his eyes is visible. I wished to see his eyes again. I excused myself to my aunt’s old room, where I lay listening to the blend of voices, as images and memories circulated in my mind without resolution. In repetition, absences endure, reminding us that memory cannot be fully recovered, only felt, anticipated and imagined. 

I did not make any resolutions for the new year. The calendar is constricting, favouring accumulation instead of experience. I prefer seasons as a measure of time. Seasons return, but the years never do. I long not for another year, but for another winter; with oranges piled in the kitchen, cosy mornings on my grandmother’s couch, and another summer, perfectly sweet watermelons, cousins playing at the beach, and the restful fatigue after the sea. 

Postnostalgia points towards what can come after the saturation of memory. Longing can provide a horizon wide enough for imagination to thrive alongside remembrance. When the past no longer grounds us, when memories no longer renew us, we can reach for something larger, such as the repeating seasons, the textures of life, and the possibility of living in the present again.