Internet trends tend to come in hot, burn bright for the blink of an eye, then extinguish as quickly as they arrived.

Generally they leave behind very little in terms of a “larger cultural impact”, usually only a mild head-scratching whiplash of “What the hell was that?” KONY2012 anyone?

We’re somewhat in the eye of one of those moments right now, and for many (mostly made-up) reasons, the object of it is 2016. The trend is simple: post a carousel of pictures from 2016 that, in an infinity of different ways, shows how far you’ve come, or how much you’ve changed, or stayed the same, or how much simpler and better life was 10 years ago. The posts, usually on Instagram, are generally accompanied by a caption that tries to capture or rediscover the spirit of a purer, more innocent time.

The context of content

Social media is awash with middle-era smartphone pictures of (mostly) millennials shyly clutching each other at parties, or sweatily holding hands on beaches, or posting cringe haircuts and awkward fashion choices, crying over breakups or not-taken opportunities, nervously getting ready for a first job or not realising that the girl they’re sitting opposite will 10 years later be their wife and mother of their children. The infinity of how life can change is being captured over and over in these posts, and part of what makes this trend so endlessly beguiling is how simply and piercingly it captures someone’s story, the narrative of who they became. Or are still becoming.

I’ve found myself being unexpectedly moved by total strangers’ sequences of cellphone pics and ripped-from-Facebook posts, purely because they tend to do what all the best stories do – give us a sense of where a character has come from. Context is everything, and the 2016 trend seems to be a collective way for everyone to take a moment to acknowledge their own journeys.

Clarity after the Covid smush

My own theory for why this trend is showing a bit more staying power than dumping a bucket of iced-water on your head has mainly got to do with how the Covid years robbed us all of any sense of how much time has actually passed over the past decade. The years 2020 to 2022 are kind of just a gross blob, squatting with no clear, sharp beginning or end. And so perhaps for the first time we’re far enough away from that weird pudding of an era that 2016 has become an unexpected way to unscramble our timelines. To provide an anchor-point we didn’t know we needed.

So, of course, I couldn’t resist doing my own “2016”, feeling weirdly unprepared for what I’d find, beyond all the obvious – greyer, more lines, more body fat. No matter what age you are, a decade will mark your appearance. That I was ready for. The rest felt like being reintroduced to someone you once knew so well before drifting inexorably apart.

Meeting a past version of yourself

The first thing I discovered was that I’d completely forgotten that I started 2016 in Bali of all places. I’d flown there on Christmas Day to escape the sting of a recent breakup – only to find out that mournfully staring at the sunrises on the sewage-y beaches of Legian wasn’t a particularly good way to process anything, and that Australians who go to Bali are all uniformly awful. I left Bali almost as quickly as I arrived and almost immediately bumped into the girl who’d broken up with me, and almost more immediately got back together, then broke up again. This time permanently. Not the best start to my 2016 journey.

Scrolling more, I also forgot that I’d only recently bought the flat I still currently live in and, despite not really having any furniture, hosted weekly game nights – friends who all live overseas now crowding around my long, skinny table to try and stop Trevor from winning Catan again.

I forgot that face-swapping apps were a thing back then and that my first cat was still alive. I marvelled at how much I’d read, and that this was the beginning of my firmly amateur obsession with physics and cosmology. I also couldn’t believe how many weddings I went to – 2016 was apparently a banner year for love. A group of us came third in a potjiekos competition, which would start a tradition that continues today.

It was nice to be reminded that 2016 was also a Great Leap Forward for my career and that friendships started that year are still the backbone of my life today. I cooked. I collected wine. I tried to grow a beard. Realised I couldn’t really. I shaved it off (I still repeat this cycle). The end of 2016 was ushered in with an all-night rooftop party where people weren’t wearing much, and it all felt daring and full of promise.

The feeling I was left with wasn’t really a clear one. In many ways that sliver of my life was instantly recognisable as the one I mostly still live. Sure, there have been changes, both very big and very small, but I didn’t feel like I was staring at something or someone completely foreign. Mainly, it was immensely satisfying to look back at so many little seeds that have spent the past decade flowering.

When last did you have a really good year?

I have a question that I regularly ask people, usually at the back-end of December when all anyone can talk about is how much [insert current year] was a dumpster fire and they can’t wait to see the back of it and how [insert new year] is obviously going to be infinitely better because they drew the Ace of Pentacles in their most recent tarot reading.

The question I ask is simple: when was the last time you generally had a really good year? A year you look back on and think, “Yeah, I absolutely smashed it.”

There is hardly ever an immediate and unequivocal answer. People usually default to big life events to help them pick out something that feels meaningful – getting married, moving cities, new job, kids etc. They’re the convenient handles we grab onto to help us pick out our highlights.

So maybe the real power of the 2016 trend is that it’s just been randomly assigned, something the internet is making us re-evaluate in order to better understand where we’ve ended up, and what might happen next. A patch of time we would not otherwise have forced ourselves to rediscover.

Weirdly, my answer to my own question is 2017. So if this trend is still going next year, I’m looking forward to looking back.