I lost my first year of high school to Zoom in 2020. Not just my first day, or first week, but the entire first year. This jarring start to a new phase of life set a pace that marked high school milestones strangely.

Now, with graduation approaching, I look back on those milestones—the ups and downs of four pivotal years—and reflect. What can I remember? What should I remember? What will I forget?

This is where the yearbook comes into play.

Yearbooks allow us to slow down and take a look back at the previous year. It goes by so fast when you’re in it: a blur of classes, finals, presentations, clubs. But with a yearbook in my hands, I can see the last of everything with my friends. Yearbooks capture the random science lessons we didn’t know we would miss, the teacher who taught us one year and was forgotten about the next, the friends known only as hallway acquaintances, the people we never thought we would connect with but will definitely keep in touch with beyond this phase of life. Even now, I page through my middle and elementary school yearbooks, and I’m instantly transported back to my day-to-day life.

There is beauty in the curation of a yearbook, too.

For as long as I’ve been alive, we’ve had the ability to take a picture and save it digitally—which means our pockets are filled with disorganized fragments of memories dating back years and years. There is something special about having a designated space for specific photos that come together to tell a story, captured in a tangible book that forces us to flip the page and feel the weight of the memories.

Besides, when have we ever been able to hold time in our hands?

When I was younger, I was afraid of the idea that memories were happening all around me—and that forgetting them would feel like losing a piece of myself. That’s when I discovered the power of journaling to hold my memories. Writing would ensure that I could look back on the different versions of myself, and what I experienced: from the mundane things, like what I ate for breakfast on Thursday before school (toast and scrambled eggs with cheese), to my first crush in elementary school (and the red collared shirt he wore on the first day we talked).

Yearbooks, too, help capture how we change—which is why they are especially important for teenagers, who are too young to play with the kids but not old enough to fraternize with the adults.

They are how we remember this transitory phase, and the passage into adulthood—our “coming of age.”

During my freshman year, I joined the yearbook staff. We were forced to figure out how to bring people together digitally in a sea of blacked-out, camera-off Zoom screens. Which also meant we got to know our classmates differently. We saw pictures of their pets, got selfies taken in their rooms, and discovered who’s most likely to fall asleep with their camera on. Our small but mighty yearbook team did it all. We often had to get creative. Instead of prom, we spotlighted pets, instead of field trips, we showcased sidewalk chalk art, and instead of homecoming, we featured our actual homes.

So, while we didn’t have the usual options that marked the high school experience, we got to learn more about each other—like a shared love for the same band through posters hanging on our bedroom walls, meeting classmates’ siblings, and finding out that your dog and a classmate’s cat have the same name.

Yearbooks are a shared experience. Although we experience the same year, the same classes, and the same people, a yearbook is not catered to one person’s version of a story; it’s made up of pieces of everyone’s journey. That’s one reason why that COVID year’s book felt particularly special. The pandemic put the value of people and shared moments into perspective for me. And it’s the people I’ll remember the most from my time in high school.

My favorite part of the yearbook process is exchanging signatures, and as a graduating senior there’s more weight to it this time around. I know I’m leaving a lasting message or a last message, a final impression of the past year with my peers. I like to read the personalized versions of what people remember about our shared experiences. What did they remember about me? What memories did we share that didn’t cross my mind? As much as we walk together through high school, every day is different for each person.

Looking back is bittersweet. When it’s time to receive my yearbook this year and the smudged ink signatures are in place, I will be able to turn the pages and hold on to the memories I was lucky enough to have. To look back on the past, not think about the future, and extend the present.

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Again, we find the ’90s on our minds.  We ride a wave of nostalgia, seeking solace in those pre-COVID, pre-smart phone times. People and groups often feel nostalgic for the past when current circumstances are deficient, leaving us with a sense that something valuable has been lost, an unsettling discontinuity between past and present. Nostalgia often gets a bad rap: Critics dismiss it as regressive or reactionary, a sign that our view of the past is uncritically monolithic, making it easy to adhere to a rigid ideology. However, as those of us who study nostalgia can attest, it is also a complex, ambivalent emotion that can improve our personal and social wellbeing. In times like ours, immersing in a classic ’90s movie like Reality Bites may be a sign of emotional and psychological health, and a way of moving forward.

That millennials and Gen Xers are nostalgic for the 1990s is to be expected—we are typically nostalgic for the times in which we came of age. But the current ’90s nostalgia craze is a broader cultural phenomenon. Members of Gen Z, born between 1997 and 2012, are nostalgic for this decade that they didn’t even live through. Such “displaced nostalgia” is easily triggered by the way particular eras are represented in popular culture. Today we are awash in ’90s nostalgia, as evidenced by the resurgence of Friends and reboots of Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, The Wonder Years, Saved by the Bell, and Sex and the City, among others. In the world of fashion, grunge has returned—witness the prevalence of distressed jeans—along with graphic tees, platform shoes, and cropped tops. Bands from the 1990s are also making comebacks: the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Backstreet Boys, the Spice Girls. And books are dedicated to the decade.

In the early 1990s, my dissertation advisor, Jerry Markle, and I conducted a study that asked over 200 college students the question: “If you could step into a time machine and press any year to go to—forward, or backward in time—what year would you pick and why?” The majority of students, young Gen Xers at the time, chose decades they never knew firsthand, the most popular being the 1960s. Respondents, likely reacting to the ways that decade had been mythologized in pop culture, perceived the 1960s as a time when young adults had more freedom. As one student, who chose 1969, told us, “This was a time where it was acceptable to be lost and confused and not have an understanding of where tomorrow is going. We can’t do that today.” Students’ comments showed they associated the 1960s with music, free love, and drugs. A student who selected 1968 did so because “there was love in the air, lots of good drugs and the Grateful Dead had just begun…also, there was no AIDS and everybody was having sex.”

If we were to conduct that survey today, what would we find? What explains Gen Z expressing displaced nostalgia for the 1990s? Popular culture again may give us clues but there are other factors that explain the trend. Consider the key events that have shaped Gen Z: the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001; the Great Recession of 2007-2009; gun violence (Gen Z has been called the “School Shooting Generation”); weather disasters caused by climate change; extreme political polarization; and COVID-19. Faced constantly with disaster, it’s no wonder young people seek escape beyond their times.

They also seek escape beyond their technological milieu. The 1990s were the last decade before the internet and smart phones took over people’s lives and changed the way we consume culture. We still made mixtapes for ourselves or our friends, taking great pleasure in compiling songs onto cassette tapes. There was also more excitement in chance encounters—when you heard your favorite songs play on the car radio, or when a particularly juicy, train-wrecky installment of Behind the Music aired on VH1. Today, with streaming, we can binge almost any television program over a weekend. The built-in anticipation of waiting to watch your favorite shows on a particular night of the week is gone.

Technology has transformed face-to-face interactions and relationships, too. MIT social psychologist Sherry Turkle has warned of technology’s deleterious effects on our ability to meaningfully communicate with one another and build empathy. As much as our technological devices can do, they are no substitute for authentic human relationships, which feature raw emotion, complex verbal and nonverbal cues, and genuine concern about others’ wellbeing. Our young people, the born-digital generation, experience a great deal of digital stress.

In recent years, during class discussions about technology and stress, many students in my sociology classes have expressed a desire to opt out of social media platforms, and to put away their phones for a while. They report feeling an obligation to be reachable, all the time. And the inevitable social comparisons that social media platforms facilitate has concerning implications for mental health, as well.

A big part of the appeal of Friends, and perhaps a reason for its huge resurgence, could very well be the novelty of seeing young adults navigating relationships and experiences with one another, and not through digital devices. When the characters meet at Central Perk, their local café hangout, they interact face-to-face. In real life today, coffee shops are often filled with atomized individuals tuned into their phones or laptops. Cell phones have become a ubiquitous “involvement shield”—sociologist Erving Goffman’s term for a social cue indicating that the individual is not engaged in the physical space they are occupying. Surely, the (over)use of digital devices has adversely affected the vibrancy of public spaces, the sense of shared community with others, and awareness of what is happening in one’s surroundings. Perhaps the current nostalgic turn to the ’90s can facilitate an intentional rejection of being so glued to our phones.

Social psychological research shows that nostalgia can facilitate continuity of identity, protect against loneliness, and promote healthy connections with others. In times of great uncertainty, it may be healing to put on some ripped jeans and a baggy t-shirt, invite some friends over, and play your favorite mixtape (which probably features songs by Nirvana, Boyz II Men, and R.E.M). Nostalgic reverie can give way to a future-directed nostalgia that envisions a brighter future. It may be that we can all find some inspiration in looking back.

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In times of stillness one will use their way of being to avoid and some will use their way of being to search. We are certain ways in certain places. You don’t think of who else was here but what it was they made when they were. I want you to know I was here once. I want the world to know I was always here.

Please forgive me but the first time dreaming took place you were there and in the times since it has always been a different you present. When someone describes a first time there is so much sadness knowing there were other times too; the first time you waited for rain, nothing changed.

You describe the last light and then I put the fragile thing back together in secret. You carry the baby’s breath in your pocket and I consume the citrus whole and halved. You name nine moons and I look over your images. It is unclear which one of us will admit having nothing to give and nothing to take have never meant the same thing.

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