Were We Born in the Wrong Decade?
Picture this: a 16-year-old walks into a record store and starts flipping through a set of dusty vinyls, and pays real money for an album they could stream for free on their phone. Sounds strange, right? However, this is happening everywhere. Welcome to the age of “rewind culture”, where teens are getting nostalgic for decades they never lived through.
Look around. Wired headphones are back. Film cameras are showing up at parties. Some are even changing their smart phones for basic flip phones. And we can see that it is more than just a vibe with some numbers. According to the Recording Industry Association of America, US vinyl sales grew for the 19th year in a row in 2025, passing 1 billion dollars for the first time since 1983, with 46.8 million records sold compared to 29.5 million CDs.
Cameras are also having their own comeback. Fortune reports that in 2025, 35% of the 42 million active film-cameras users worldwide were between 18 and 30 years old. Fujifilm has even said its QuickSnap disposable camera is especially popular with Gen Z. Meanwhile, HMD, the company that makes Nokia phones, reported that its flip phones sales doubled between 2022 and 2023 which it linked to the comeback of the Y2K aesthetic in fashion and the trending hashtag in TikTok #bringbackflipphones.
So why would a generation raised on instant everything choose things that are slower, and sometimes even more expensive? The answer might be because they are slower. When you take a photo on a film camera, you don't see it right away. You can't retake it fifteen times or add a filter directly. You have to wait days to find out if it even came out. That wait makes the photo feel special, and more special since we are used to having everything immediately nowadays.
The same idea goes to vinyls. You can't skip songs with a tap. You put the record on, sit down, and actually listen. In a world of endless scrolling and 15-second videos, that kind of focus feels rare. And I also think it has to do with actually owning something, since now everything we have is digital. If your Spotify subscription ends, your playlists are gone. While a record or a printed photo just stays on the shelf.
For flip phones, the reason is more about screen time. An article in The Conversation explains that a lot of young people use them as a kind of digital detox to spend less time on their phones. Some people don't even get rid of their smart phones, they just switch to the flip phone on weekends or when they're hanging out with friends.
Additionally, there's even a word for missing a time you never knew: "anemoia". And it comes from a book called The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows by John Koenig. It means nostalgia for a time or place one has never experienced. Thanks to movies, TV shows, and our family's past stories, many teens imagine the past as simpler, a time with fewer notifications, less pressure to be online and more face-to-face hangouts.
The biggest difference between us and our parents is that they didn’t have a choice. They used film cameras and flip phones because it was all they had, and most of them changed to smartphones as soon as they could. For our generation, using older technology is something that we pick on purpose. That's why I don't think we were born in the older decade. We just grew up with so much technology that using less of it became an interesting option.
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