Excerpt:
Clay Routledge is a Washington, DC-based researcher who specialises in the psychology of nostalgia. In 2023, his team found that 60 per cent of gen Z adults wished they could return to a time before everyone was ‘plugged in’. By 2025, the number of gen Z adults who reported feeling nostalgic for eras before their lifetime was 65 per cent, with two-thirds saying exploring those periods helped to calm their anxieties about modern life and the future.
“One thing we see right now is, ‘We love technology, but we feel a little too dependent on it, too manipulated by it, too surveilled by it,’” he says, which explains why it’s the 1990s — the liminal decade between analogue and digital lives — we’re hankering for rather than the more distant past. Looking back at the ’90s, it’s clear what technology has cost us: spontaneity, boredom, community, boundaries between our online and offline lives, plus unkinked necks, RSI-unafflicted thumbs and two spare hands.
Read the full article at Elle.
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