Gen Z is Right: the 2010s Were Fun. They’re Wrong About Why.

Zoomers are right to be nostalgic for the era of my youth, but not for the reasons they say.

If there’s anything Gen Z can do better than anyone, it’s nostalgia. Sure, as a millennial, I had plenty of peers who wistfully insisted they were “born too late,” and would have been much better-suited to Woodstock in the 1960s, or Italy during the Renaissance. But zoomers will wax poetic over, like, a few years ago. No, really! Just last year, I saw someone getting nostalgic for the year 2020, of all things.

But there’s another recent era frequently regarded with nostalgia—the early 2010s, also known as millennials’ glory days. Fancams of clips from Portlandia, Girls, Broad City and Taylor Swift’s music video for 22 will flash before me on Twitterr alongside artisanal cocktails in mason jars, stop-clap-hey music, and mint green chevron. Add in a little indie sleaze—smoky eyeshadow, digital camera photos, American Apparel colorblock interlock cotton bodycon dresses—to round this era to the late 2000s. What a vibe.

And you know what? They’re not entirely wrong. Recession and all, this was actually a decent time to be a party-loving person in their early 20s. Yes, many of us were clawing at each other to compete for jobs that didn’t actually have salaries at all, but for those of us who were fortunate enough to have jobs, even ones that weren’t so great, I can appreciate the whimsy of this time. I wrote extensively about my time as a young person in San Francisco, both in my book available on Substack and my article on how my husband and I made it work on $20K a year. I don’t want to go back to this time, but I can appreciate it in hindsight.

The zoomers are correct that people did a lot of partying, that having a beard and suspenders was a twee hipster thing and not yet a right-wing trad thing, and that our Facebook feeds were full of Buzzfeed quizzes and listicles. But I think they get one thing wrong—they’re under the impression that life was like this because we were living in a better time, or at least the illusion of one, which gave us optimism about the future. Apparently, that optimism was what we needed in order to drink PBRs and take photos with the Valencia filter. After all, Obama was President (“neoliberal war crimes” aside.) We had reason to believe the country would keep getting more liberal…right? Thus: we had earned the long-fought right to party.

This is where I part ways with the zoomers’ beliefs about the 2010s. No, my identity doesn’t hinge on having lived through the 2008 Recession, nor does it hinge on “having it rough.” I don’t feel the need to shake my cane at them and tell them that they would never have survived a day without Amazon Prime and Instacart. And they’re not wrong that, at least for many people, this time period was rough but blanketed with optimism.

So how exactly do I disagree with them? The optimism of the 2010s (assuming everyone felt that way, which is a big if) isn’t what gave us permission to party, and doomerism (justified or not) today isn’t what’s keeping young people at home and out of the nightclubs. People have partied, drank and fucked through much worse historical moments than 2025.