TikTok users are posting nostalgic slideshows of late-2000s millennial culture under the label “millennial optimism,” and Casey Michael Henry argues in The New York Times Magazine that Gen Z is pining for an era it never lived through. The posts run mustache finger tattoos, sun-bleached Polaroids, ukuleles and skinny jeans past retro filters and stomp-clap music from bands like the Lumineers, and the more embarrassing the reference, the more fondly it gets treated. Henry says the appeal comes from the political hope of the Obama years paired with an internet that hadn’t consolidated yet. But that era is the one that produced today’s internet, he writes, and the Polaroid shooters became live-streamers while the stomp-clap musicians became secessionist bloggers.
