In the song XX of ‘Inferno’ of divine comedy, Dante bursts into tears when he meets the magicians, astrologers and fortune tellers. They have been condemned for wanting to know the future, for seeing too far, and now they wander eternally with their faces turned back, so that their tears roll down their backs.
Emily Segal, author of the novel Mercury retrograde (Cielo Santo, 2024) and trendhunter for large companies, goes to this scene to describe the nostalgic moment of generation Z. According to the expert, young people have stopped looking to the future. Like the lost souls of Dante’s Inferno, they seem condemned to look back. The products they consume –remakes, revivalfollowed and it restarts– they are sewn from scraps of the 20th century, especially those from the late 90s and early 2000s. Everything new is known.
“There are still changes and innovations that change the world,” Segal says on the phone, “but the dominant cultural landscape is saturated with remakes nostalgic.” He cites as an example the fascination for vinyl, Walkman, VHS cassettes, polaroids or the recurring use of archive fashion or vintage on red carpets. Let us remember that the philosopher Mark Fisher had already detected this “cultural strangulation” ten years ago, as he explained in his speech The slow erasure of the future. “His maxim that ‘nothing dies’ is still valid 11 years later: we are still surrounded by the same forms of zombies as back then,” Segal says.
Nostalgia swings. Some generations are more so than others. And not everyone is the same way. Psychologist Clay Routledge, author of Passed forward. How nostalgia can help you live a more meaningful life (From the past to the present. How nostalgia can help you achieve a fuller life, 2023, unpublished translated into Spanish), has been studying this phenomenon for years. According to a survey of 2,000 Americans, 60% of Generation Z would like to return to a time when they were not “connected,” even if that time precedes their lives. 68% are nostalgic for the times before birth, 73% are drawn to the media, hobbies or styles of those times, and 78% think current technology should integrate design elements from the past.
For Routledge, the curious thing about youth is that “it is not nostalgic for past moments that belong to its own life, but for a historical era that it did not experience.” He explains that the key is to observe that the desired time coincides with the moment immediately before the emergence of new technologies. “They have an ambivalent relationship with technology: in surveys many say they enjoy its advantages, but at the same time express concern about its consequences. Hence their connection with the pre-digital era”, he underlines in a video call.
There is a very illustrative example of this particular type of nostalgia. They are viral videos, some real and others made with artificial intelligence, showing groups of kids from the 1990s leaving an American high school. They don’t do anything too interesting or fun. Seeing them interact without a cell phone, however, produces an almost hypnotic effect. That feeling of nostalgia is reflected in the comments: “I’m 20 years old, I wasn’t even born when this video was recorded, but it leaves me feeling empty. My high school experience wasn’t like that.” Another user writes, “I graduated in 2015. Seems like a good time. Not a phone in sight. People actually talk face to face. Wish I could grow up in a time like this.”
More and more initiatives are emerging that seek to counteract the dominance of technology over our lives. For years, the European Union has been funding youth exchange programs, known as Youth Exchange, which in some ways incorporate “digital detox” experiences. In the United States there has been talk lately of dumbphone (dumb phone) boom to describe the popularization among Generation Z of basic phones, such as Nokia. Offline parties have also become fashionable, to which it is forbidden to enter with a cell phone. And there are those who even talk about the return of the slow internet, of blogging before the era of social networks.
The young philosophical communicator Leo Espluga, with more than 80,000 followers on TikTok, declared in one of his latest videos that he has been trying to reduce his digital presence as much as possible for some time. He recommended going out and walking without a cell phone, trying to reach places without looking at Google Maps. “It’s amazing the energy you have, the number of hours you have to do things, how active your brain is,” he said.
The danger of idealizing the past
Different readings can be drawn from this phenomenon, which envisages an industry of déjà vu, with thousands of young people determined to save the codes of the past. The philosopher Diego Garrocho, author of Speaking of nostalgia (Alianza, 2019), underlines that feeling out of step with one’s times can have two effects: opening up new possibilities for the future or fueling a nostalgic look towards the past. “There are judicious, balanced and realistic ways of looking at the past, and others that border on the mythological.”
The data shows that Generation Z, especially males, tends towards more conservative positions. A study conducted by Ipsos and King’s College London reveals that 60% of men of this generation in 31 countries believe that “gender equality has gone too far”. Democratic dissatisfaction is also growing: according to a survey published in 2025 by Circle (a private university in Tufts, Massachusetts), only 36% of young Americans believe that democracy can solve the country’s problems, and only 16% of them believe that “it works well for young people”.
For Mario Ríos, political analyst and associate professor at the University of Girona, youth nostalgia is a symptom of his reactionary turn. “The parties of the radical right are always nostalgic because they appeal to a mythical past,” he explains over the phone. According to him, it is a temporary reaction to the lack of horizon. “They live in an increasingly complex and uncertain world. They look to the past and try to undo decisions that they believe tore us apart as a society. They idealize the 1990s, when neoliberalism promised continued progress as long as markets continued to grow.” Routledge makes it clear that nostalgia isn’t always a sign of regression. If properly understood, it can be the opposite of stagnation: a form of creativity and drive. “Generation Z looks to the pre-digital past in search of what they perceive as valuable to reformulate their present,” he explains.
Garrocho defends the inspirational potential of nostalgia. He argues that the fact that all political communities are based on a founding myth – always false, to a greater or lesser extent – demonstrates their usefulness. “Dreaming that there was a bucolic past, that we were once better, or that our history was inhabited by heroes can fuel reasonable and fertile hopes for imagining a better world. If we were better (or at least dream of being better), we would be more likely to be confident in the possibility of embracing excellence again.”
