“i WaS bOrN iN tHe WrOnG gEnErAtIoN” type beat i have sort of a tiktok-thought-dump-yap-sesh in my drafts on the weaponization of nostalgia, and if i had to have a roman empire, i guess, it would be how people can live through a shitty time period and then go on to romanticize it, conveniently forgetting the worst of it obvious examples are people saying the intro sentence about the 50's and 60's, not only forgetting that a good chunk of us as a populace did not have rights, or that the 60's in particular were some of the most politically tumultuous times in our history, but the glaringly obvious omission of the Threat of Nuclear War™️ but my personal answer to the initially asked question, mostly bc i lived through it, is 2016. i'm aware that 2020 put things into perspective and was objectively worse. however, it continues to baffle me that so many people, who were there to see it happen, talk about it as the “last best summer of our lives,” when, at the time, it was collectively agreed upon as the WORST YEAR IN HISTORY obviously our opinion of celebrity has changed now, but at the time, beloved celebrities were dying left and right. some of the worst mass shootings/hate crimes in our country's history happened that year. you-know-who rose to power, alongside the continuation of the spread of alt right rhetoric and literally, just because the music that summer slapped, everybody wants to go back. MEANWHILE THE WHOLE REASON THE MUSIC HIT EVEN HARDER THAN IT WOULD HAVE OTHERWISE WAS BECAUSE IT WAS DISTRACTING US FROM HOW AWFUL THE YEAR WAS like how does that just slip from your memory!!?! like damn. nostalgia must be one hell of a drug  (n ee waze, if you want to hear someone with more coherent thoughts talk about this subject, there's an excellent article from dazed by haaniyah angus called, “2023: the year culture reached peak nostalgia” that u oughta give a read. link here: https://www.dazeddigital.com/life-culture/article/61592/1/2023-the-year-we-reached-peak-nostalgia-barbie-mean-girls-y2k)