As soon as we recover from music lovers' rekindled enthusiasm for bands like The luminaries and other indie rock music from the late 2000s and early 2000s, society must prepare its version of another pop culture staple of that era.
This one is also about melancholic men with an inner glow.
Lionsgate is relaunching his hit “Twilight” film series, which ran from 2008 to 2012, in theaters starting October 29.
Nostalgia has a way of getting to all of us. But have we ever been so interested in information from such a recent past? Can we reflect only on periods that appear in history books and not on Facebook timelines?
In a 1989 piece for South Atlantic quarterlyLiterary theorist Fredric Jameson used the term “nostalgia mode” to refer to the way boomers and Generation X viewed the 1960s through rose-colored tea curtains. Now Rodrigo Muñoz-González, a professor at the University of Costa Rica who adapted his doctoral thesis to the book “Young People, Media and Nostalgia,” uses the term “nostalgia economy” to describe how corporations have monetized that feeling.
In a world where attention spans decrease and pressure increases to make your project stick, of course, this year we'll see a hyper-analysis of the live reading of the “Dawson's Creek” reunion in New York and how alt-rockers Goo Goo Dolls managed to get the summer song 2025 with a hit from the 90s.
“Nostalgia is almost a guarantee that you will be successful in some markets,” Muñoz-González says during a recent Zoom interview. Furthermore, he says, “difficult times, in economic terms, are triggers. Everything arises from an unsatisfactory present.”
This may help explain why AMC Theaters was so interested in returning to film. water with “Sharks” 50th Anniversary Screenings and Why Disney Was Eager for “Freaky Friday” Stars Jamie Lee Curtis and Lindsay Lohan to Appear team up again for a sequel.
It also gives a second life to projects that didn't attract as much attention the first time or that have since found a younger audience through streaming and social media.
One of the best examples of all this is the television series “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend.” The comedy premiered in 2015 on the CW and is about a character so desperate to feel happy that he romanticizes a relationship he had as a teenager at summer camp. His original songs frequently paid homage to the music of the late 20th century or to musicals of that era such as “Les Miserables.” The show was a beloved underdog for most of its run, but its frank stories and songs about the sheer exhaustion of adulthood resonated with a new fan base who discovered it on streaming services during and after the pandemic.
The cast recently reconnected for a brief tour of what they called the show's 10 (or so) year reunion concert, meaning a show about nostalgia benefited from the nostalgia economy. The tour culminated with a sold-out concert at the Wiltern on October 17 that was broadcast live on the Veeps platform.
Rachel Bloom, the series' star and co-creator, believes part of her show's appeal is that “musical theater is inherently escapist” and that there's a reason “why we listen to music when we walk down the street and imagine we're the star of our own movie.”
The cast of “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend” recently reconnected for the show's 10th year reunion concert.
(Scott Everett White/The CW)
Additionally, while the show addressed current issues such as abortion rights and mental health, the stories are general enough to not seem dated. As someone who finds himself romanticizing the '90s even though it was a difficult time in his childhood, Bloom knows why younger audiences connect with his show and the era in which it was made.
“I think they understand that there is a destabilizing effect with all the stimulation that comes in,” he says.
But this is not only seen in movies and television.
Muñoz-González says that never before have we had access to as much information and images from the past as we do now. When it comes to reflection, he says: “The time span has shortened.”
Muñoz-González cites Generation Z's fixation on Obama's presidencyespecially if they are old enough to remember their relative financial stability. Time has also been kind to Obama's predecessor, George W. Bush, who left office with a 34% approval rating, but who younger voters now see as more immigration supporter than the current administration, despite its own policies that were tough on illegal immigration.
Online, Generation Z represents more than half of the users of the former millennial-favorite microblogging site. tumblr while Pinterest's summer 2025 trends report included an increase in searches for “aesthetics of summer 2015”. When asked if this was an anomaly, a spokesperson for the digital dashboard site said similar terms were still “emerging” among Gen Z users; among them “aesthetic tumblr 2015” (up 530% compared to October last year), “2019 outfits” (up 55%) and “2018 outfits” (70%).
Ethan Gibson, North American communications director for auto auctioneer RM Sotheby's, says: “Nostalgia is one of the biggest drivers of collectible cars, if you take away this spec and rarity.” But he says there's a difference between an old car and a classic car: Older cars are about 25 years old. Classic cars are unique. And while middle-aged collectors are interested in the cars that came out during their childhood, it has seen a resurgence of car culture in younger generations attending events just to see a more recent one-off item that wasn't mass produced.
Allyson Rees, senior strategist on the consumer insights team at trend forecasting company WGSN, suspects the word “nostalgia” is in every one of WGSN's reports right now. It is for the reasons we expect: financial uncertainty, pessimistic outlook, general unrest. She says acronyms like FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) and JOLO (Joy of Logging Off) have been usurped by FOFO (Fear of Finding Out), like the anxiety we feel every time we receive a push notification about a potential problem or crisis.
Rees says the pandemic made us feel nostalgic, but it also continues as digital platforms like TikTok have become social gathering places for an increasingly isolated world. Plus, a focus on green consumerism with upcycled fashion sites like ThredUp and Depop means it doesn't take much to make trends come back into fashion.
“People really get to things when they get to them. 1761651071so nostalgia has a lot to do with a time when people knew what other people were talking about,” he says. “Now it's very fragmented and there's that emotional side of things; of wanting to turn inward and be consoled.”
Because nostalgia is not simply about longing for the past. It's about how the past makes you feel. John Koenig has run his website Dictionary of Dark Sorrows, a lexicon of words created to express emotions, since 2009 (a book version was published in 2021). One of his previous entries is anemoia: “nostalgia for a time he never experienced.” Conservative movements like traditional wives (women who desire traditional gender roles) and President Trump's Make America Great Again slogan are intended to provoke a longing for a specific, sanitized version of a period in history. Teenagers who covet a world just before the smartphone explosion are doing the same.
“In the Middle Ages, everyone had a script and the meaning was external and everyone was in these tight little hives where no one could move and you knew exactly what to say at any given moment and what to believe,” Koenig says. “And now we're these autonomous agents. We have freedom. And it turns out that freedom is really stressful.”
When asked if he thinks there could be any positive side to this (if using the Internet to look at the recent past will also teach us about the lived experiences of people in other parts of the world), Muñoz-González smiles and says that this is what early Internet users thought would happen in the 1980s and 1990s. He also says that the media will continue to push nostalgia as long as it remains profitable.
“I always talk about this concept that I call right to the present,” he says. “And I think this is something that's really important for young people, especially in the sense that they have the right to enjoy their present.”
