Opinions

2016 Was Actually a Very Mid Year

BYKhaoula Ghanem

January 21, 2026

It’s like one person peaked in high school and now we are all being forced to re-live 2016. I can’t scroll through social media right now without seeing endless photo dumps with screenshots of Snapchat selfies with dog and flower crown filters, blurry party pictures, and captions mourning what was apparently “the last good year.” Apart from the fact this trend is just data-farming for AI and you’re all feeding it , 2016 was actually a very mid year and what we are witnessing feels like mass revisionist history and collective amnesia.

I am old enough to remember that when it was actually 2016, people could not stop talking about how cursed it felt. Hating 2016 became such a shared experience that it turned into a meme. In fact, there was an entire subreddit called r/f*ck2016 that people would reference whenever something terrible happened, which was often.

Fast forward ten years and suddenly 2016 has been rebranded as a cultural peak. The vibes were apparently unmatched, except, the overall atmosphere of 2016 was not radically different from what we are experiencing today. Culture was already fragmented and political polarization existed, even if it had not yet reached its current level of hostility and extremity.

For large parts of the region, the year 2016 was not just stressful or chaotic, but actively catastrophic. The war in Syria reached some of its most devastating moments; In Yemen, the humanitarian crisis escalated dramatically; Iraq was still grappling with the violence and displacement caused by the fight against ISIS; Libya continued to fracture under competing governments and militias; Egypt was deep into its post Arab Spring counterrevolution; and Palestinians too, experienced 2016 as a continuation of violence marked by ongoing occupation, deadly clashes, and home demolitions.

None of this aligns with the fantasy of a carefree global moment that people now project onto 2016, and globally, fear was already saturating daily life. The Pulse nightclub shooting in America marked a horrifying escalation in violence against the queer community; Philando Castile and Alton Sterling were killed by on duty police officers within two days of each other; Brexit fractured Britain’s relationship with Europe and normalized nationalist rhetoric built on exclusion and resentment; Meanwhile, the internet was being flooded with right wing propaganda amplified by foreign interference that would later be exposed through Cambridge Analytica and the Internet Research Agency. All of this culminated in the election of Donald Trump (need I say more?)

It is genuinely difficult to reconcile that reality with the way people now speak about the year. For many, the dominant emotional memory of 2016 was not joy but dread. There was a constant feeling of impending doom that seemed to grow louder as the year went on. Every breaking news alert carried the possibility of catastrophe. But LOL Harambe, right?

And then there was the death. So much death that it became a defining feature of the year. David Bowie, Prince, Alan Rickman, Carrie Fisher, Muhammad Ali, Gene Wilder, Harper Lee, Anton Yelchin, Alan Thicke, Zsa Zsa Gabor, Kenny Baker, Doris Roberts, Frank Sinatra Jr., and countless others died within the same twelve months. The losses felt relentless and symbolic, as if entire cultural eras were collapsing in real time. It is literally the reason why so many people still feel a jolt of anxiety when a celebrity’s name starts trending online.

There were good moments, of course, but they have been wildly inflated. Pokémon Go immediately comes to mind. That moment was real and genuinely special—but it also lasted a few weeks, not an entire year. The music was also really good, with Frank Ocean, Solange, Beyoncé, Drake, Rihanna, Bon Iver, Kanye West, and David Bowie releasing albums. Great art, however, does not automatically mean a great year. Actually, bad times often make good art.

A lot of this romanticizing comes down to how humans have always remembered the past. People almost always view earlier decades through rose tinted glasses. There were members of the Silent Generation who missed the 1940s, despite the fact that the decade was defined by a devastating world war. Nostalgia rarely accounts for suffering. It prioritizes personal memory over collective reality.

What people actually miss about 2016 is not the year itself but more likely who they were back then. They miss being younger, less burnt out, and less aware of how fragile everything really is. They miss an internet that felt smaller and less aggressively monetized. They miss a time before every moment was instantly dissected, branded, and politicized. Nostalgia thrives when the present feels overwhelming and the future feels unclear. But turning 2016 into a golden age requires ignoring how much unrest, violence, and fear defined that year for millions of people.

To be clear, I don’t hate 2016. My issue is that it is being treated like it was exceptional when there was nothing particularly special about 10-years-ago compared to the years that followed. The same forces shaping the world now were already in motion back then. The same political tensions, cultural fragmentation, and media cycles existed, just in earlier forms.

So let 2016 go. Don’t let flower crowns and great music keep you in a chokehold forever.

2016 Was Actually a Very Mid Year

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2016 Was Actually a Very Mid Year

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