With the start of each new year, we are forced to look with eerie wonder at the distance we have traveled through time. It is strange that our lives up to this moment are already part of history – and that we are moving further into it. There seems to be something important in exposing our own recent past and feeling almost alienated from it: was I really that person, oblivious to everything that would happen between then and now? In another city, in love with someone else? In these clothes?
And so our entry into 2026 has triggered the traditional visit to the photo archives. The narcissistic pull of social media is turning this impulse into a collective phenomenon: everyone pulling out their pictures from 2016 to get a sense of a decade that may have passed quickly but felt endless as we suffered through it.
Some remember their challenges during that time, others their triumphs. Uand still others, what they didn’t know about themselves at the time, how their identity developed.
2016 as a tragedy and the last normality
The crux of the matter is that many remember 2016 as both a hellish tragedy and the last vestige of something resembling normality. For the United States (and unfortunately for the rest of the world), the election of Donald Trump, borne on a swelling wave of right-wing extremism, guaranteed geopolitical instability, economic chaos and relentlessly anti-humanitarian practices for an entire generation.
“I think there’s so much focus on looking back at 2016 because everything in this country kind of went south after that,” one user wrote on In fact, people present their innocent old selfies as if they were portraits of someone about to get hit by a bus.
But we should give ourselves credit for recognizing what awaited us from 2017 onwards. We already knew during the campaign that Trump’s success, whether he won or not, was a very bad sign. We groaned when Hillary Clinton urged us to “Pokemon Go to the polls,” recognizing that her struggle to connect with the electorate left her vulnerable while Trump perfected his vulgar delivery of populist tropes. The Republican nominee was no mystery. A sleazy tabloid figure since the 1970s.
When a country falls apart
And the warnings about what his presidency would look like — including from Republican leaders who later bowed to the MAGA movement — have proven remarkably prescient. Few outside of epidemiology would have predicted a catastrophe like the Covid-19 pandemic. But the garish renovations in the White House, the blatant corruption, the cronyism with dictators, the dismantling of federal institutions and the use of masked thugs against the US population are exactly what the prophets of doom had announced.
That’s exactly what makes these photos from 2016 so painful. Even then, we felt a better future slipping through our fingers and feared that everything we took for granted would be destroyed by lawless, reactionary forces. It was a year that many were quick to call “the worst year ever” to finally turn the page, despite widespread expectations of even greater misery. The sting we feel today when we see these images is a reminder that even back then we were only hanging by a thread.
I began this pivotal year by moving across the country to Los Angeles, a sprawling metropolis that was unfamiliar to me. Shortly thereafter, my long-term relationship broke up, I quit my job to work in a bookstore for a meager hourly wage, and moved into the back room of a run-down shared house that was regularly circled by helicopters. I didn’t like suddenly having to stop short of my 30th birthday. But because the chaos was self-inflicted, I convinced myself I could handle it.
A weak but necessary light of hope
What I couldn’t handle was watching America fall apart. I’ll never forget seeing a man in a Trump shirt at my favorite taco truck—a co-founder of Latinos for Trump had recently appeared on television, scaring viewers by claiming that uncontrolled immigration from Mexico would lead to “taco trucks on every corner”—and realizing that I no longer knew which way was up and which was down. On election night, I took an Uber home from a friend’s house. The driver noticed my depressive rigidity and explained to me that the result was meaningless since the Rothschild banking family controlled the government anyway. This comment was a special preview of the conspiratorial madness that has flourished under Trump.
So maybe 2016 is the year in which we finally lost touch with reality. Fake news and viral disinformation became QAnon, election denial, and eventually deepfakes and government-spread AI garbage. We look at our faces ten years younger and see people who were not yet jaded by it, who could actually believe that there are basic facts that everyone can agree on. They are fearful and worried, yes – but they have tried to convince themselves that reason will survive. And perhaps it can, in a society that outlasts Trump and seeks to undo the profound damage he has wrought.
Whatever it cost, it made it to 2026
That hope is weaker than ever, a flickering flame – and that’s why it hurts to remember that we once relied on it day after day. But if we were remarkably clear about where the years after 2016 would take us, we at least have the ability to imagine a way out of this dark age. You can pity your former self for what it still has to endure – or you can borrow its strength. Whatever it cost, it made it to 2026.