What is "fakestalgia"?
Fakestalgia is a term that describes the fake feeling of nostalgia. Basically, it's nonexistent nostalgia that people pretend to feel though they were either too young to remember or not even alive at all when it was popular. This is a very popular thing with Gen Z kids on TikTok and Twitter who think the 80s were all about the Golden Girls and Madonna, or who think the early 2000s were only about vibrant caricatures of sea creatures and MSN.
What are some popular examples of fakestalgia?
The following aesthetics are very common to see people being "fakestalgic" towards:
Frutiger Aero
Frutiger Metro
"Flipnotecore"
Old YouTube/Windows Movie Maker
Uptown Girl/Miscellaneous 80s girl aesthetics
Webcore
While there are obviously many more aesthetics that have become popular with the soft TikTok teen crowd, these are the 6 major ones you will see.
Why is fakestalgia a problem?
While fakestalgia is mostly harmless, it is good to point out why it is a problem. For one, a few aesthetics that have sprung out of the 6 major fakestalgia aesthetics romanticize trauma and abuse, such as one literally called "traumacore". These aesthetics are also very oversaturated, due to these aesthetics being so easy to replicate. It may seem cool at first, but then you'll be feeling sick to your stomach the next time you see people fetishizing Windows 98. It also ignores the stuff that was actually happening in the world at the time; for example I think more people were worried about another 9/11 happening more than making their Geocities page be filled with cutesy GIFs. Most people who were actually alive at the time these aesthetics supposedly existed aren't nostalgic for them as they were a much smaller thing than people realise.