Jon Bon Jovi posted a carousel of decade-old photos in January captioned “Heard we were taking it back to 2016,” joining a viral social media trend that insists 2026 is basically a rerun of ten years earlier.

Key Points

• Bon Jovi’s Instagram post included a shot of himself in front of a PEOPLE magazine cover from November 2016 and closed with a photo of bandmate David Bryan at the piano, per AOL’s coverage.
• The “2026 is the new 2016” trend took off around January 1, 2026, with users flooding Instagram and TikTok with throwback photos and videos, according to The Week.
• Travis Kelce and Jason Kelce are among the other celebrities AOL reports have joined the wave.
• The Week traces its roots to an ironic Gen Z bit called the “Great Meme Reset” — an attempt to flood the internet with classic 2016-era memes to push back against AI-generated content.
• Signature 2016 imagery driving the trend includes flower-crown Snapchat filters, VSCO-girl photo edits, chokers, Vine clips and Pokémon Go screenshots, per The Week.

What makes this round of nostalgia strange is the math: 2016 isn’t a milestone anniversary by any normal measure, and the people driving the trend are mostly too young to be nostalgic for it in any traditional sense. It’s nostalgia running on a compressed timeline — the internet cycling back to a version of itself from one decade ago instead of three or four, because the pace of online aesthetic shifts has sped up that much. The Week notes one expert calling 2016 “the golden age of memes, right before the perceived decline,” which says more about how people feel about the internet today than it does about 2016 itself.

It’s also, by most honest accounts, a selectively edited memory. The Week points out that 2016 also delivered Brexit, the Pulse nightclub shooting, a string of police killings that reshaped the national conversation on race, and a bruising presidential election — hardly the “simpler time” the trend’s flower-crown filters and acai bowl photos suggest.

For a site that traffics in genuine decades-old nostalgia, watching a ten-year-old moment get the vintage treatment is a useful reminder of how relative the whole concept is. If 2016 counts as a bygone era worth mourning online, it’s not hard to guess what a 2006 phone camera photo or a scuffed cassette single might be worth to the same audience in another few years.