There’s a social media trend that’s been going strong for a while now of Millennial women waxing nostalgic about the 1990s and early 2000s. It usually involves reminiscing about girlish trinkets that used to be popular — gel pens, Lisa Frank paraphernalia, Lip Smackers flavored chapsticks, mood rings, and things of that nature.
Some influencers put on humorous skits in which they dress in “vintage” Delia’s or Abercrombie and Fitch clothing and pretend to get ready for school or go to a party. Thick side bangs straightened to a crisp and rings of black eyeliner complete the look.
Sometimes I wonder if Legion, the multi-voiced demon Jesus cast out of a possessed man, is now in the business of haunting iPhones instead of humans.
If you grew up or had teenage daughters during this era, then you know the “look” I’m talking about. It’ll make you laugh and cry at the same time.
All these years later, I still find myself half giggling, half cringing at my four-shades-too-dark Maybelline foundation and my raccoon-ish eyeliner circa seventh grade. I looked like some kind of orange pirate sailing the halls of middle school.
Fun times.
Although I swore off scrolling, I confess: As a Millennial woman in my early thirties, I sometimes break my vow and watch one of these 1990s/2000s throwbacks. I saw a video the other day of a 30-something woman pretending to be a “tween” at Limited Too — the glitter-dusted “it girl” mecca of the early 2000s. Suddenly, I am 11 again — rhinestone-studded denim jacket and all.
This whole thing has me wondering: Is this digital trend among Millennial women just a matter of wistful longing for days past — the techy, modern version of elderly grandmothers decorating their homes with baby dolls from their youth? Or is there something deeper at play?
The nostalgia iceberg
At face value, this fad seems lighthearted and trivial, but a closer look reveals what’s actually fueling Millennial women’s nostalgia.
It’s not some surface-level yearning for our old knickknacks, clothes, and cheap makeup; most of us are not bucking the current trends for crimped hair and jelly bracelets, I can assure you.
A longing for the return of girlhood is what’s really simmering beneath this trend. We miss the days when girls could just be girls — whether that involved platform flip-flops and glitter hairspray or scuffed-up Chuck Taylors and a ponytail. The days when girly girls were still regarded as girls, not mini women who need eight-step skin care routines and figure-flattering silhouettes. The days when tomboys weren’t seen by the alphabet mafia as ripe for the picking.
Most of our girls today don’t get to experience girlhood the way we did, and if they were fortunate enough to taste it, it was just that — a taste.
Enemies of girlhood
I blame the rectangle monsters, the pocket-sized one being the most ferocious among them. These devices, or rather what they’ve become, are enemies of girlhood.
But Millennials had technology, too, right? That we did. Older Millennials had television and video and computer games (which did their own kind of damage) but were fortunate enough to escape smartphones and social media during their adolescence.
Younger Millennials, myself included, were indeed swept up in the iPhone/social media movement, but we were older by the time it became a nationwide frenzy. A good portion of our youth had already happened.
By the time we eventually got smartphones, we’d already racked up hours of outdoor playtime, imaginative games, technology-free school years, natural dopamine hits, and long stretches of brain-fortifying boredom. And when we eventually got social media accounts, we were still years away from the era of influencers, algorithms, and content creation.
I vividly remember getting an Instagram account my senior year of high school. It was mildly addicting, and it fed comparison and competition — those age-old thieves of joy. But there was no indoctrination, agendas, or mindless scrolling through endless reels at that point.
You opened the app, looked at the pictures your friends had posted, maybe posted something yourself, and that was it. There was nothing else to do on the app — not totally unlike the days of radio programs when once a show ended, there was just static.
Not only did this safeguard us against spending our entire lives glued to the screen, but it also kept the scope of things that influenced us relatively narrow. Our malleable brains weren’t subjected to the kind of political and social propaganda that saturates Instagram today thanks to the “for you page.” Don’t even get me started on TikTok.
I was on social media daily in late high school, and while it made me insecure and sometimes jealous, it didn’t reprogram me.
Our girls today can’t say that. They are incessantly, perpetually, hostilely bombarded with a swarm of voices — voices whose sole purpose is to indoctrinate, sexualize, warp, and addict. Sometimes I wonder if Legion, the multi-voiced demon Jesus cast out of a possessed man, is now in the business of haunting iPhones instead of humans.
The machine evolves
As I’ve mulled this over, an image keeps coming to mind. I’m certainly not the first to imagine modern society as a machine, but the metaphor has expanded in my mind’s eye. The wires that snake from the machine and plug into us have evolved into umbilical cords. They still connect us to the cosmic, pulsating Mother Machine, but now they also feed us. And it’s 98% poison.
Most adults can’t navigate this well. For children — impossible.
In the far more poetic words of British writer and society-as-machine thinker Paul Kingsnorth:
The Machine makes us — is designed to make us — homeless. It rips up our roots in nature, in real cultures connected to time and place, in our connection to the divine centre. In their stead we are offered an anti-culture, an endless consumer present: planned, monitored, controlled, Smart, borderless, profitable and soul-dead, increasingly detached from messy reality, directed by who-even-knows, mediated through monitored screens.
While this insidious machine he describes is far more complex than just smart technology and social media, those are the specific parts of the larger apparatus that are feeding our children and undermining the values and ethics their parents, churches, and maybe even their schools are trying to develop in them.
The results are cataclysmic. Everybody knows that our kids are drowning in a mental health crisis the likes of which human history has never seen before. Everybody knows that record numbers of minors report feeling confused about their gender and sexuality. Everybody knows that kids spend minimal, if any, time reading or exploring outdoors.
But do they know why?
Do they understand that the internet — rife with pornography, secularity, rage bait, sexual predation, social conditioning, addiction, harassment, and demonic ideology — operates as a second parent for the majority of kids? Yes — even those whose cautious parents implement screen time and parental controls, which I believe (call me a conspiracy theorist) are intentionally designed to be ineffective. To be effective means to compromise lucrativeness, and I don’t think tech companies have the moral compass to choose the better option.
Change on the horizon?
I don’t watch much TV, as I’ve been on a mission to unplug from the machine, but I did recently watch Netflix’s new British crime drama series “Adolescence” after hearing that it was well worth the time investment.
It was.
The show brilliantly captures the insidious epidemic of children raised by the internet. In the show (and I’m not really spoiling anything for you because there’s no big reveal) two “normal” parents must contend with the reality that their 13-year-old son Jamie brutally murdered a girl in his class.
They’re shocked because: How? Dad doesn’t go to the pub; he’s happily married to Mom; they both love their son; Jamie’s up in his room most of the time, not out causing trouble. The family’s problems are well within the scope of typical. Dad works longer hours; he’s got a bit of a temper, but no one ever gets hurt.
By all measures, there’s no reason this couple should produce a murderer. But they do.
The police investigation unearths the why behind the horrific incident: Instagram. Jamie was first sexualized on the app with semi-pornographic images, and then he was ruthlessly bullied by his classmates, who label him an “incel” (involuntarily celibate), his victim being one of the worst offenders. He is consumed with hatred of himself, which then morphs into hatred of his tormentors.
Unbeknownst to Jamie’s parents, an app, or rather a cesspool of darkness, was secretly co-parenting their son right in the “safety” of their home.
I hope every parent watches “Adolescence.” It can hardly be called fiction — and the unique cinematography makes it clear that the writers and producers intended that. This is no dramatized whodunnit. It is a bleak warning and a call to action that I am truly shocked came from Netflix of all places.
The show has risen to the top of the charts almost instantly. I hope its popularity speaks of growing awareness and change to come.
I hope it means that Millennial women’s nostalgia over lost girlhood on Instagram will translate to cultivating a real childhood for their own kids — one where hair bows and Hot Wheels survive beyond age 5. But that will ironically demand the banishment of the very apps they use to reminisce on the past, certainly for their children but maybe for themselves as well.
I’ve been chewing on the idea of deleting my own Instagram account, which I use mostly to keep up with distant friends and family. I’m reluctant to do it because it is the easiest way to stay updated with others I care about, but if I’m honest, my convenience is starting to seem idolatrous. Should it outrank modeling what’s best for my son, who is only 11 months old right now but still watching my every move? I think I know the right answer.
I’ll end with a quote from social psychologist Dr. Jonathan Haidt’s must-read book “The Anxious Generation.”
“Social media is a fountain of bedevilments. It trains people to think in ways that are exactly contrary to the world’s wisdom traditions: Think about yourself first; be materialistic, judgemental, boastful, and petty; seek glory as quantified by likes and followers.”
We can do better for both our kids and ourselves.
The post Why Millennial women can’t stop reliving their tween years online appeared first on TheBlaze.
