Gen Z-ers on TikTok are nostalgic for 2013 and everyone is feeling very old

Cast your mind back eight years ago to 2013 – when Daft Punk were getting lucky, Miley Cyrus shocked everyone with her foam finger antics at the VMAs and, perhaps crucially, One Direction were thriving. Do you feel old? Or do you feel a major sense of FOMO?

The answer to that question will depend on whether you’re a Millennial or part of Gen-Z, with TikTokers from the latter generation now sharing their regret that they were too young to enjoy some of that year’s best pop cultural moments.

It all began when TikToker zayla.tpwk made a video using the popular sound “are you on drugs” to answer the question ““why do you want to be a teenager in 2013?”

Zayla went on to explain why she wished she’d been a teenager that year, using various images of boyband One Direction – who were one of the biggest music acts in the world at the time, before taking a hiatus in 2016 – to illustrate the point.

One Direction in 2013, where the band were extremely popularGetty Images

As she reminisced, the TikToker captioned the video: “A dream I will never live.”

The video, which you can watch in full here, has since been viewed 450,000 times, with 124,000 likes and thousands of comments from people who were just as nostalgic.

One person said: “Yeah you had to be there.”

“I truly peaked in 2013-2014 because of them,” another person wrote.

For those who were teenagers at the time, though, the TikTok served as a sobering reminder at how old they’re getting.

Someone else wrote: “I’m checking myself into a nursing home.”

“No way is this a thing now,” a fourth person said.

TikToker Bianca made her feelings very clear on the matter by staring back at the camera in shock with the text caption: “Not us entering the ‘I was born in the wrong generation’ stage please i’m only 22.” You can watch the full video here.

One TikToker couldn’t believe that younger people wanted to go back to 2013TikTok/abejab and zayla.tpwk

In another TikTok, a user named Libby reminisces about the early 2010s, with a number of images from Tumblr – a social media that was immensely popular between 2011 to 2016.

“I wish I was 16-18 during 2014 so I could have this aesthetic,” she wrote. You can watch the full video here.

But perhaps this sentiment is not surprising. Pop culture writer Brian Raftery said in 2017 that social media time is making time move faster, according to Newsweek. As a result, nostalgia cycles have shortened due to how quickly internet moves on from trends.

A recent example of this is TikTokers reminiscing on the first quarantine during the coronavirus pandemic where Doja Cat’s Say So was popular, and everyone was making trendy whipped iced coffees too.

TikToker Jah-niece shared her nostalgia for last year’s strange events and people seemed to agree with her as the video has had 1.5M views, 540,000 likes, and tens of thousands of comments.

In the video, the text read: “I really had the audacity to complain abt my first quarantine, sis i was playing fortnite for like 2 hours w my friends, on facetime til 5 am, waking up at 2 and following my own school schedule with no teachers, taught myself for 4 months, working out, listening to new music, on tiktok 24/7, tried chikfila for the first time, had time to myself, TANNED FROM MY WINDOW, dyed my hair a lil purple. I had no reason to complain.”

You can watch the full video here.

Maybe it won’t be long before the internet gets nostalgic about 2021...