The Great Disassociation

How GenZ is using nostalgia to shape an American future

The fourth of July has always been my holiday. Some kids preferred Christmas or Halloween, but I was always passionate about July 4. There was something magical about the bike parade down Bay Avenue in Beach Haven, New Jersey. My dad would decorate my bike, and my mom would fix my hair into pigtails with little American flags sticking out of my hair ties.

A neighbor who my dad always referred to as the “mayor” of Beach Haven would lead the parade of kids and parents with a boom box on his shoulders blasting Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the USA.” My eyes would fill with wonder as I watched the fireworks over the bay.

This past July 4 I hosted a gathering of my college friends and home friends, often a contentious collaboration. We got Slurpees at 7-11, a nostalgic treat, reflecting on our memories growing up in America. Rather than wonder in our eyes at a firework display we talked about the political and economic state of the world – uplifting, I know.

Now its December our Slurpees have been traded for cocoa - the fourth of July lingers in my mind as a distant memory. Our college house is draped with handmade paperchains, star garland and hand painted banners celebrating every moment of our senior year. Our laptops have endless tabs open for job applications, new apartments and “2014 cool girl playlist: Spotify.” I have noticed we are turning to nostalgia in coping with the uncertain future of living in America. Wondering if our own children will get to hear Springsteen’s “Born in the USA” coming from a janky old boombox on July 4, 2040.

We are turning to nostalgia as a coping mechanism rooted in the anxiety, we are feeling about economic futures and political instability. Our return to the early 2000s is not laziness or lack of creativity and originality. It’s our human response to scarcity, cynicism and a sense of betrayal by older generations’ unkept promises.

Growing up GenZ has not been easy. We are a generation that grew up ahead of our time and are now fighting off the realization of adulthood. Our high school years were cut short by a global pandemic, a time that is supposed to be filled with Friday night lights, homecoming dances and a newfound freedom in getting a driver’s license. For us it was filled with health anxiety, zoom classes and seeing our friends for brief moments on each other’s driveways, connected merely through screens and the hope of a future without Clorox scented countertops.

Our formative years were forecasted by not one but two Trump administrations forcing our generation to be the changemakers when older generations were too scared to rise up. We saw police brutality unfold daily, watched the government propagandize vaccination and most recently we have seen the militarization of American cities.

It sounds like doomsday; I know but that was our teens being born in the USA. Springsteen puts it bluntly as I can recall muffled through that boombox on Bay Avenue “I’m ten years burnin down the road, nowhere to run, ain’t got nowhere to go.”

This feeling of having nowhere to run and nowhere to go is not an uncommon feeling with people in my generation. The American Psychological Association puts out an annual Stress in America Survey and the results are less than uplifting. We are seeing a loneliness epidemic, job unhappiness and pressure from prior generations to succeed.

In the APA study, researchers found that loneliness is a driving factor in stress levels in American adults stemming from societal division. “The emotional toll of societal division extends far beyond political frustration – it’s deeply personal, and for many, profoundly isolating.” The study found that of Americans that are experiencing isolation from others 61% report societal division as a leading factor of stress. This leads to not only issues with self-esteem but also with planning for the future. 75% of Americans studied reported difficulty in decision making and 65% admitted to neglecting responsibilities at work, home or school. These statistics are all up from previous years. APA also reported that Americans are more stressed about the country’s future than they used to be “concerns about the future of the country are weighing heavily on the minds of many across the country…this heightened anxiety is not just a fleeting sentiment – it reflects a deeper, more persistent unease about the nation’s trajectory.”

Even though people are seeming to give up, GenZ is fighting back in uncommon ways. From the reclamation of the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show to GenZ showing off their record collections, we are basing much of our identities around a simpler time in not only our lives but in American culture as a whole.

Political Communications graduate student Jess Wurpel reflected on her feelings of nostalgia back to the Obama administration saying “I think as we grew up with Obama, the American dream turned out to be whatever we wanted it to be so weather that was higher education or having a family, I think we were promised affordability, accessibility and jobs and I think the way Barack Obama left America we were very hopeful that would continue.”

In other words, nostalgia isn’t a retreat from reality it is a way of holding ourselves together long enough to face it. I first noticed this in 2023 with the Barbie craze. While the movie was a blockbuster, for me it was the first introduction into reclaiming girlhood. A trend we have seen continue into 2025. Billie Eilish’s “What Am I Made For” dawned the question of who we as a generation are and how can we reclaim the childlike wonder we grew up with. In an interview with VarietyEilish said “That has so much to do with my life and the way that I view me as I was growing up.” Eilish cements the idea that GenZ is not looking for the past because it was perfect but because the future feels inaccessible.

In a September article for Profectus scholar Clay Routledge identified how GenZ is turning to nostalgia to combat growing up in a digital time. “Critically, nostalgia has a restorative effect when people experience psychological distress. It energizes motivation to address current concerns.” Routledge found that “GenZ’s engagement with cultural products, media, hobbies, traditions, and aesthetics from pre-digital eras” speaks to our ability to plan for the future. “Gen Z isn’t just passively consuming historical nostalgia; they are actively mining the past to enrich their lives and plan for the future.”

Nostalgic trends are not uniform, they take shape depending on what social issue GenZ is trying to cope with. Scarcity becomes thrifted Y2K fashion turning economic instability into creative identity. Cynicism becomes irony in online discourse framing existential dread as humor. “Delulu is the solulu” reframes delusion as a solution to uncertainty. Even betrayal by older generations turns into retreat as we go back to things that supported us in our youth like Matchbox twenty music or Disney channel rewatches. Nostalgia doesn’t function as escapism but rather as psychological oxygen.

Although I have turned to nostalgia to combat my anxieties of our American future, I can’t help but think about November 9, 2016, when I walked into my middle school to a group of boys chanting “build the wall.” I remember a single tear falling from my eye as I gathered my papers to go to my algebra class closing my locker and taking a glimpse at the Ruth Bader Ginsburg magnet my grandma had bought me at the beginning of the school year.

Nostalgia is a wild ride, it sometimes helps us come up with solutions to escape our current predicaments, it sometimes makes us cry or wonder what we could have done differently but what I hope it will continue to do is build an understanding that a great American future is not lost, it is simply on hold.

So, in the cinematic words of Taylor Swift’s Eldest Daughter, I leave you with this: Now is the time to “shimmer that innocent light back like when we were young.” Like the shimmer of fireworks over the bay on the fourth of July.