There’s a haunting quality to missing something you never experienced. The New York Times recently explored a strange but increasingly familiar phenomenon: Gen Z’s deep yearning for a time before the digital deluge — a kind of “historical nostalgia” for an analog world they never actually lived through. But this isn’t just wistful sentiment or vintage aesthetics. It’s something deeper. Something raw. Something that reflects not a desire to rewind, but a desperate need to re-ground.

According to a 2023 Harris Poll survey cited by New York Times essay author Clay Routledge, “a social psychologist who specializes in nostalgia,” 80 percent of Gen Z worry that their generation is too dependent on technology. More than half of Gen Zers surveyed said technology is doing more to divide people than to unite us. Even more striking: 60 percent of Gen Z adults wish they could return to a time before everyone was “plugged in.” And they’re not just idealizing the 1990s, as the title of Routledge’s article suggests. They’re mining the 2000s, the 2010s, and even their own childhoods for signs of a richer, more cohesive culture. (RELATED: AI Chatbots Are Not the Answer to Alleviating Loneliness for Young People)

In @nytopinion

In a survey, 60% of Gen Z adults wished they could return to a time before everyone was “plugged in” — even if that predates their own lives, the research psychologist Clay Routledge writes. https://t.co/tn4uBnWAcF

— The New York Times (@nytimes) August 24, 2025

At first glance, this longing may look superficial — just TikToks about vinyl records, elementary school trends, or Instagram photos of Polaroids. But dig deeper and you’ll find the symptoms of something much heavier: disillusionment, cultural fragmentation, and a longing for a sense of realness in a world increasingly run by algorithms, artificial intelligence (AI), and the infinite social media scroll. (RELATED: Gen Z Isn’t Just Online — They’re Living in Parallel Realities)

Routledge’s New York Times piece frames this nostalgia as a healthy impulse that “helps people thrive in the present and build a better future.” Counterintuitively, he wrote, nostalgia is “a future-oriented endeavor.”

That insight is key to understanding Gen Z’s cultural moment. The nostalgia we’re seeing isn’t a refusal to engage with the modern world. It’s a survival instinct — a way of grounding oneself when the present feels fractured and the future untrustworthy. Routledge observes that “Gen Z appear to be mining the past to enrich their present lives — especially by fostering a greater appreciation for offline living.” In other words, the past is not simply a refuge. It’s a toolkit and a role model. (RELATED: The Stare That Broke America)

Offline living may sound quaint in a society where every interaction is filtered through a screen, but for Gen Z, it’s starting to look revolutionary. This generation isn’t rejecting technology wholesale — they were raised with it, after all — but they are beginning to push back against its dominance. The revival of old hobbies and media — board games, CDs, printed photos, books with actual pages — isn’t just aesthetic window-dressing. It’s an attempt to reclaim agency in a digital culture designed to steal attention, resell it to advertisers, flatten emotion, and monetize every moment.

The hunger for something “solid,” as one might put it, speaks to a generation struggling to find permanence in a society obsessed with speed, novelty, and image. Today’s social Internet isn’t social at all; it’s isolating. Where previous generations shared a common cultural experience, Gen Z is often filed away from peers with unfamiliar perspectives. They are fragmented into algorithmic echo chambers, each user fed a personalized stream of content tailored to maximize engagement, not understanding. Nostalgia becomes the last place where collective meaning can still be found.

Other generations may scoff, dismissing this as self-indulgent navel-gazing. But the rules have changed — in a sea of digital noise, introspection isn’t self-absorption, it’s a kind of naval strategy: charting meaning in waters that no longer come with a map.

If nostalgia was once a luxury — a wistful indulgence of memory — for Gen Z, it’s increasingly a lifeline. Not because young people want to live in the past, but because the present is too splintered to inhabit. Many Gen Zers feel like tenants in their own country, surveilled and marketed to, but never truly belonging. Parents of Gen Zers must learn that their children internalize the stories they tell about their own childhoods — not simply as sentimental tales, but as a blueprint for building a more balanced and authentic sense of belonging.

Older generations didn’t have to worry much about salvaging the internal impulses and interpersonal foundation of what makes them human; they had external causes to rebel against. In a landscape of disposable trends and disappearing content, Gen Z is reaching backward not only to retreat, but to reroute: to mine memory for meaning and build something sturdier than the 15-second connection they feel with a content creator before the inevitable swipe. The past offers more than comfort; it offers clues. And in a culture that slices identity into fragments, even splinters strike nerves. What bleeds is the heart’s desire to intersect with fellow daydreamers looking to make memories reality, and to make real memories.

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Julianna Frieman is a writer based in North Carolina. She received her bachelor’s degree in political science from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. She is pursuing her master’s degree in Communications (Digital Strategy) at the University of Florida. Her work has been published by the Daily Caller, The American Spectator, and The Federalist. Follow her on X at @juliannafrieman.