Our Last Happy Year: How 2016 Is Fueling Today's Joy Economy | Lore

By Evan Santiago

*Post-Digital Reversion Theory, a phrase coined by yours truly, is the idea that once a society reaches peak digital saturation, culture begins to correct itself by reviving analog, embodied, communal, and emotionally restorative ways of living. The theory points to the general public’s growing rejection of AI, algorithmic overstimulation, and short-form content apathy, alongside the renewed cultural appetite for moviegoing, longer format socials content, print media, analog hobbies, sentimental fashion, spiritual practice, IRL community, and experiences that optimize for whimsy and joy.

Something peculiar is happening. Movies are getting brighter, fashion is reaching backward, and there is a growing sense that people are trying to recover a feeling they cannot quite name. Something warmer. Slower. Less mediated. Less hostile to being human.

I started sensing this “peculiar something” in 2023 alongside my dear friend and former colleague, Devin Lewtan. Back then, we formed a thesis about the movement of culture: where we had been, where we were going, and how the future might reveal itself before it fully arrived. Devin and I, in our musings, were loosely inspired by The Strauss-Howe Generational Theory which suggests that history moves in recurring, 20-year cycles of highs (the First Turning), awakenings (the Second Turning), rebellions (the Third Turning), and crises (The Fourth Turning). You’ve probably gathered, by description alone, the theory suggests we are currently living in our generation’s Fourth Turning.

This new thesis, however – the one duct-taped together by Devin and me – was born from a brainstorming exercise for a media company contemplating a tech pivot. Based on my observations of the market and age-old patterns of culture, I suggested we build toward something that brought people together IRL, something communal and undeniably pro-human. The instinct to create something that fills future voids was eventually dismissed as too emotional, exaggerated, or difficult to prove. But three years later, so much of what we imagined might happen is no longer speculative. It is arriving right on schedule.

You can feel it in the way the general public talks about AI. You can feel it in the return of interest in analog hobbies and sentimental wardrobe. And you can especially feel it in the way audiences are flocking to the cinema for films that make a genuine promise to restore them, not brutalize them.

This year, happy films are winning. Box office data promises success for movies that understand that joy is not the opposite of seriousness. Joy can be profound. Joy can be political. Joy can be the most radical emotional register available to us in a world that has made misery our default setting.

Just look at what is breaking through; ‘PROJECT HAIL MARY’ is the finest example of “hopecore” media. It’s a story about friendship, ingenuity, and the almost embarrassing beauty of trying to save one another. Some are reducing the newly-released ‘THE DEVIL WEARS PRADA 2' to nostalgia bait, but it is actually a sophisticated return to glamour and the particular pleasure of watching movie stars behave like movie stars. Its box office success ($433.2 million globally in just 12 days) is not incidental. People want to go somewhere and feel something good. They want the lights to go down and the world to become legible again.

These breakouts are not happening in a vacuum. The world is, by almost every visible measure, spiritually overheated. Wars and humanitarian crises continue to fracture entire regions. UNHCR reported more than 122 million people forcibly displaced by war, violence, and persecution by the end of April 2025. Oxfam reported that billionaire wealth rose more than 16 percent in 2025 to a record $18.3 trillion, while nearly half the world lives in poverty. The World Economic Forum’s 2026 Global Risks Report ranks misinformation and disinformation among the top short-term global risks, alongside cyber insecurity and adverse outcomes of AI. Pew’s recent research on teens, social media, and mental health reflects what many people already feel intuitively: the platforms built to connect us have become engines of exhaustion.

So, yes, moviegoers want joy, but more specifically, they want relief from the machinery of contemporary life. They want to be entertained without their thoughts and behaviors being harvested and to be moved without being manipulated. They want to gather in public, in the dark, with strangers, and surrender to something bigger than life. The cinema, at its best, is one of the last mass rituals we have left. A theater asks something very unfashionable of us: to sit still, together, and pay attention.

That desire for collective joy explains why the cultural pendulum is swinging away from grit, grimness, and self-conscious deconstruction. Last year’s superhero films offered an early signal. ‘THUNDERBOLTS*’, ‘SUPERMAN’, and ‘THE FANTASTIC FOUR: FIRST STEPS’ all arrived in a landscape that had been oversaturated with postmodern darkness, multiverse fatigue, and “badass” emotional detachment. The shift was obvious (color, hope, sincerity, optimism) and this observation matters because superhero films are often among the clearest barometers of mass audience desire. For years, the genre told us that the world was broken and heroes were complicated and justifiably broody. Now we are asking for something simpler and, in some ways, more difficult: please show us that goodness is still possible.

Which brings me to the heart of the thesis. We are craving a return to life before the dread and the timestamp is actually pretty clear. I believe the last time we felt genuine, unadulterated joy was a stretch of ten years between 2006 and 2016, with 2016 being our last happy year.

Not objectively, of course. Bad things happened in 2016 because such is the nature of life. But culturally, emotionally, and generationally, 2016 has become a symbolic threshold. It was the last year before our open-ended future became what could only be described as a countdown clock. After 2016, everything cracked in ways that are now easy to name.

Politically, Brexit passed and Donald Trump was elected into office for his first term. Two events that felt impossible until they happened. The mood shifted overnight from Obama-era hope to post-truth. The news became a battlefield. Reality itself became partisan. The world suddenly felt volatile, reactionary, and unsafe, both physically and ideologically. We entered into an era where every institution felt fragile and every conversation had the potential to become a referendum on existence.

The internet changed, too. Up until 2016 Instagram was still chronological. TikTok, as we know it, did not yet exist. Twitter could still be funny in a way that felt communal rather than militarized. YouTube had not yet fully calcified into ragebait and creator-industrial anxiety. Memes were still accidental and largely non-monetized. Going viral felt like being struck by lightning, not like executing a content strategy. But then the algorithmic internet swallowed the social internet.

Post-2016, discovery became curation and identity morphed into brand architecture. Taste became performance and the feed replaced the forum. Virality stopped being an accident and slowly transitioned into labor. And worst of all, irony curdled into nihilism. Everyone became a publisher, then everyone became a product, then everyone became very, very tired.

And in regards to art, there is the simple fact that 2016 was an elegy for childhood heroes. Alan Rickman of ‘HARRY POTTER’, Carrie Fisher of ‘STAR WARS’, Prince, David Bowie, Leonard Cohen, George Michael, Gene Wilder, and Debbie Reynolds all died that year. It was as though an entire lineage of artistry, glamour, eccentricity, and true iconography exited the stage at once.

At the same time, however, the art being released in 2016 felt impossibly alive, singular, and generational. Lemonade, Blonde, ANTI, Views, The Life of Pablo. On television, Atlanta, Stranger Things, and Westworld arrived with the force of new stories that captivated en masse. Everything felt so peak.

Emotionally, 2016 was a collective sweet spot for younger generations. Millennials were old enough to understand pain but still young enough to believe change was possible. Gen Z was forming its identity online before it would become fully shaped by fear, violence, precarity, climate anxiety, and algorithmic surveillance. And we were all still clinging, however naively, to the idea that adulthood might not be a scam.

COVID was not even a whisper yet. Mass layoffs, AI panic, environmental doom, political collapse, escalating authoritarianism, and the normalization of a permanent crisis were still abstract fears rather than present realities. In retrospect, 2016 feels a lot like the last stretch of daylight before the winds changed and the clouds rolled in.

That is why so much of culture is now reaching backward. Founders are building products with warmer, more tactile, and less sterile aesthetics. Summer collections from American Eagle and Urban Outfitters are reviving the colors, silhouettes, and mall-era casualness of the aughts and early-2010s. Studios are betting on sequels and reboots that are decades overdue. Across industries, the smartest operators are sensing the same thing: the world feels devoid of joy, and the market is starving for someone to fill that void.

The danger now is nostalgia-washing: using the aesthetic of a happier internet, a happier culture, or a happier childhood without restoring the conditions that made those eras feel alive in the first place. You cannot simply put a grain filter on an ad or dress a model like it is 2006, add a flip phone, and call that meaning. The hunger is deeper than styling. People are not only longing for old clothes or old movies or old websites. They are longing for a state of being that is less manufactured and less lonely.

That is why so many recent technological fantasies have felt dead on arrival. The Metaverse. The Vision Pro. AI wearables and companions. The concept of AI-generated movies in theaters. Automated short-form clipping. These products misunderstand the direction of the human spirit. They assume the future is deeper immersion into machines, when the cultural evidence suggests the opposite. People are beginning to understand, consciously or not, that the technologies sold to us as connection have often produced separation. They have divided attention and flattened taste. Envy has intensified and loneliness has accelerated and ordinary life just feels so f*cking insufficient. Once consumers reach full realization, many businesses that seem to be thriving now will die slow, painful, and very gruesome deaths.

This is also why “AI slop” has become such a useful phrase. It names not just a category of bad content, but a broader, visceral disgust. Slop is what happens when creation is processed without memory, authorship, friction, or soul. It is the aesthetic residue of a system that believes the point of content is to exist and circulate and extract value. It is abundant in volume, but it is empty. The next cultural rebellion will be against that emptiness and the timeline is already visible.

The rise of short-form content led to content addiction; content addiction led to algorithmic overstimulation; that overstimulation led to content apathy; content apathy is now creating a renaissance of print, long-form social content, consistent moviegoing, and meaningful storytelling. The next generation always rebels against the conditions it inherits. If the status quo is hypervisibility, addictive platforms, AI saturation, and social performance, then Gen Alpha – the first generation born with a phone camera shoved in its face – may become one of the most offline and private generations in modern history.

It is unlikely Gen Alpha will be Luddites, but it is reasonable to assume they will become hyperselective. Private. Tactile. Communal. Tastemaking geniuses. They may rediscover simple pleasures that previous generations abandoned or commodified: routine dinner parties, church on Sundays, field days, book clubs, chess clubs, nightclubs, board games, handwritten notes and snail mail, neighborhood gatherings, amateur art, gardening, picnics, education, philosophy, and classic human wisdom. The things that sound almost embarrassingly wholesome now may become aspirational again precisely because they cannot be fully optimized by a feed.

Spirituality has long been the most common source of unity, so I also suspect religion will experience a revival of surprising scale in the next generation. Not necessarily in the exact institutional forms we inherited, but as a hunger for structure, mystery, ritual, moral seriousness, and koinonia (a Greek word that translates to mean fellowship, communion, joint participation, or sharing in common). When the world becomes too chaotic, people search for patterns. When technology makes life feel disembodied, people search for something sacred. When every institution fails, people either collapse into cynicism or into each other. My bet is on the latter.

And, obviously, cinema belongs in this same movement. A movie theater is a secular chapel. It has architecture, darkness, silence, ritual, a moral code, and communion. It gathers strangers around a story and asks them to feel together. In an era of privatized attention, that is no small thing. Mark my words, within the next five to ten years “Hollywood” will fully recover and a new golden age for the industry will begin.

Life pre-2016 cannot return exactly as it was and it would be childish to pretend otherwise. We cannot unknow what we know. We cannot unlive the pandemic, the political ruptures, the algorithmic poisoning, the AI panic, the grief, the acceleration. But, we can rebuild some of the conditions that made joy easier to access back then. We can make technology less predatory. We can make culture less disposable. We can reward human authorship. We can create spaces where discovery feels alive again. We can tell stories that have happy endings and we can really believe them. We can build products that do not merely mimic the aesthetics of a lost era, but restore its emotional architecture with curiosity, sincerity, play, presence, and collective wonder. Lore is doing a pretty good job of leading this charge, if I do say so myself (and I do).

This is where culture is moving. Away from slop and compulsory cynicism, toward the things that make us feel human again.

Maybe our longing for a movie with a happy ending and Y2K-inspired products is not a trend, but a flare sent up from the collective unconscious and perhaps joy is coming back because it has to. Audiences are telling us, very plainly, that they are tired of being strong in the way the world has required them to be for the last ten years. I can only hope that in ten more years, we will look back on this moment as the beginning of a necessary correction and a narrow escape from a miserable future.

Long live that glorious period of time between 2006 and 2016 – may we build a future that avenges your light.