Young adults find solace in nostalgic childhood media – The Mirror

Many of your favorite shows may come from your childhood, shows like Spongebob or Rugrats. When times get tough, exploring past memories brings a sense of comfort and nostalgia.

Many born in the 2000s look back on their childhood and long for it. Their frontal lobes develop and suddenly they despise the world around them.

Living in the present with all the stress that surrounds us is difficult to cope with. To find solace in reality, many turn to an untouchable, nostalgic time in which they relive their childhood from the dead.

Many are returning to their favorite media from childhood. Maybe they had a favorite YouTuber that they watched when they were young, or maybe a song that they listened to often. Streaming old TV shows and cartoons like the first four seasons of “Spongebob Squarepants” could also be a popular option.

Others are turning to fashion and adopting 2000s styles today, like Y2K and kidcore.

They may also have spent their childhood on the internet. The early internet landscape is something that many think of nostalgically, including crappy internet memes, chat rooms, and anime torrents.

Many of these elements of childhood have now been transformed into aesthetics, with people preferring the look and feel of things similar to those of those youthful years. Nostalgia itself has evolved into the aesthetic subgenre nostalgiacore, with a strong focus on the 2000s era.

After all, today’s young adults also grew up during this time.

Literal memories of the past have now become part of people’s identities.

People have also found solace in more troubling nostalgia.

“Liminal Spaces,” empty images of transitional places, illustrate this disturbing atmosphere of vague familiarity. Despite the disturbing atmosphere, people clung to these images. Many have remarked that liminal spaces acted as an eerie comfort to them, reminding them of memories from a distant past.

This could also be the reason for the popularity of Nostalgiacore and other various aesthetics. As we grow older, each generation yearns more and more for the simplicity of their youth. It is an escape from the present back into the past.

This shared longing tends to bring people together, including via the Internet. Every now and then an Instagram reel or TikTok video gains attention. These videos show childhood memories, only something is missing. All that fills the screen are blank, lifeless images, without a single person in sight. Images of classrooms, birthday parties, TV shows, toys – all of these things with the same grainy and blurry filter – all ask the same question: “When did we forget?”

This question is difficult to answer. It’s hard to accept that those days are no longer within reach.

People today, especially those who left their childhood years ago, do not like reality. It is a difficult transition period from the life of a child to the life of an adult. More responsibility, more expectations, more worries.

So looking back on those nostalgic days can be painful. After all, it was much easier than it is now.

To recapture the inner child that disappeared all those years ago, many return to the memories associated with a past long gone, but with comfort still present.