Hala Marouf Associate News Editor

If you’ve been online lately, and let’s face it — you have — you may have come across moodboards featuring girls in twee-style fashion, carefreely dancing with their hands raised, or stacked vinyl collections and hipster men with handlebar mustaches wearing suspenders whilst pouring artisanal lattes, paired with 2010s pop-folk music, and the term ‘Millennial Optimism’ appearing somewhere in the caption.

The online space has found yet another time period to romanticize. Whether it’s the longing for the 2000s as an era of flip phones and Juicy Couture tracksuits, or even the roaring 20s’ flappers and speakeasies, young folks have always grasped onto different eras and molded them with the well-meaning, but clumsy, hands of nostalgia, albeit often a nostalgia for a time they have not experienced.

So, what is Millennial Optimism? Are the 2010s back? And if so, why?

Broken down, the term ‘Millennial Optimism’ pairs Generation Y, those born between 1991 and 1996, who were the first generation to grow up with the internet in the 2010s, with the term ‘optimism,’ denoting a supposed hopefulness as the spirit which pervaded this era.

In an attempt to trace this optimism back to the time period, I discovered that this optimism may have been a political type of hope. Millennials were the first to embrace an inclusive politics, revealing a stark ideological and partisan gap between themselves and their predecessors, the demographic cohorts of Gen X and the Baby Boomers. According to research by Shiva Maniam and Samantha Smith, in 2016, a majority of Millennials (55%) identified as or leaned towards being Democrats, with 27% describing themselves as liberal Democrats, the largest portion of any generation. In 2015, gay marriage was legalized in the United States, and the late 2010s’ left-leaning politics, though overshadowed by the election of right-wing presidential candidate Donald Trump in 2016, were defined by ‘#resistanceliberalism,’ the online movement of democrats protesting, albeit superficially, his first presidency.

Moreover, the emergence of the internet in the 2010s as a space for connecting individuals worldwide through forums and chatrooms, as well as a platform for accessing information of all kinds, undoubtedly strengthened the imaginative capacity for a future ripe with potential for change and growth.

In 2025, political hope is sparse and scarce for the left. Even superficial movements like ‘resistance liberalism’ have died off as quickly as they came on. One year in particular stands out against the backdrop of online nostalgia for the 2010s – 2016, despite, or perhaps because of, the election of Donald Trump that year. It could be that 2016 was the last year when the imaginative capacity for change seemed present in the realm of politics.

Still, it stands to question, are we exercising a selective memory of the 2010s’ politics? The millennials came into adulthood against the backdrop of the 2008 recession, and though a democrat was in office during the early years of the decade, Barack Obama sanctioned the disastrous invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. The answer to this could be twofold — yes, the rose-coloured glasses of nostalgia are distorting the time period, and there indeed at the same time seemed to be an optimism that imbued the youth of the 2010s.There’s another aspect of the Millennial Optimism trend that I have neglected, till now – the aesthetics of it all. This nostalgia has come in the form of moodboards, with images depicting the trends of the era alongside what has been dubbed by the online space as ‘stomp-clap-hey’ music, that indie pop-folk sound specific to the 2010s, with free and easy phrases like ‘we are young,’ ‘we are free,’ anthemic songs fit for the hipsters of the era, and representative of this optimistic zeitgeist.

In a lot of ways, the Millennials’ pop culture is still here. Gen Z is mimicking the Millennial love for the artisanal latte, their movement towards the analog, represented by the growing trend towards physical media, and even the mustache, which recently came back into style for the ‘performative male,’ that being a whole other can of worms, and a descendant of the hipster. Even the quaint, vintage ‘2010s twee’ style with its Peter-Pan collars and 60s mod silhouettes is infiltrating Pinterest boards.

So, is ‘Millennial Optimism’ back? It is certainly trending. Why? Because our generation’s ‘Doomerism,’ this belief that humanity is condemned to a catastrophe of its own making, by way of climate collapse, some AI-related apocalypse, or political upheaval, is exhausting. The 2010s serve as a simpler time to project the little hope that exists onto. Perhaps the nomenclature of ‘Millennial Optimism’ stems from the fact that Gen Z is afraid of calling that optimism their own.