The COVID-19 pandemic of 2020 was a profound social ordeal that permanently changed the way we work, live, and perceive the world: it claimed millions of lives, left hundreds of thousands unemployed, triggered an economic crisis, and brought healthcare systems to the point of collapse.
Care to guess when the first signs of nostalgia for that period appeared?

The article "Please stop romanticizing the pandemic" was published in Vox on March 9, 2021. In it, journalist Rebecca Jennings writes about a peculiar TikTok trend: users were making videos en masse about how they missed the early lockdown — the empty streets, whipped coffee recipes, Zoom parties, and Chloe Ting workout routines. By 2023, the topic of "quarantine nostalgia" had amassed over 84 billion views on TikTok.
And this is not the only case of such "premature nostalgia." 2014-summercore, 2k17, the Moscow party scene of 2007* — it seems that today, absolutely any year will do for nostalgia. The main thing is not to think about 2025.

The fact that we are willing to flee into any other era just to avoid confronting the present is difficult to frame as merely a symptom of a general "nostalgia trend." That alone cannot explain the collective obsession with the past that has overtaken contemporary culture.

When we talk about a "nostalgia trend" from the vantage point of 2025, what we are actually pointing to is a problem of far greater magnitude — a collective paralysis in conversations about the future.

French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard (1) diagnosed the death of grand shared narratives as early as the 1970s: Marxism, liberalism, Christianity — all of these metanarratives about the meaning and direction of our collective history had long since lost their persuasive power for us.

In the 1990s, historian Francis Fukuyama (2) went so far as to declare "the end of history": after the collapse of the USSR, no alternatives to neoliberal capitalism remained, so what was the point of thinking about the future?

Already in the twenty-first century, philosopher Mark Fisher (3) wrote about "lost futures" — a contemporary cultural condition in which the future has been reduced to a perpetual repetition of the present, only with faster computers and a deteriorating environment.

And anthropologist David Graeber (4) identified a strange contradiction in the promises of technological progress. Twentieth-century futurists dreamed that by the twenty-first century we would have flying cars and space colonies; what we ended up with are better screens (and more sophisticated ways of staring at them).

One way or another, all of these observations point to the same problem — we have stopped inventing shared stories that help us understand what might await us as a society in the future.

(1) Jean-François Lyotard, La Condition postmoderne (1979)
(2) Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (1992)
(3) Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (2009)
(4) David Graeber, Of Flying Cars and the Declining Rate of Profit (2012); Bullshit Jobs (2018)

And yet the need for grand shared stories has not gone away. We still try to assemble them from fragments of reality in order to construct anchors for the future.

By 2025, we have replaced grand narratives with a stream of micro-trends. The function remains the same — to fill our information environment with meanings that provide a sense of predictability and stability.

The problem is that contemporary "trends" (or what we call trends) are, more often than not, entirely disconnected from reality. Their purpose is not to explain or reveal anything new, but to function as memes — short signals that capture attention and drive engagement.

Labubu or Dubai chocolate were never meant to carry profound cultural significance — they are simply strange enough and sweet enough for us to like the unboxings, save the recipes, and repost the funny TikToks about them.

Matt Klein (Head of Foresight, Reddit) argues that in the age of the internet, a substitution of concepts has occurred and the word "trend" has lost its essential meaning.

Trends used to denote significant societal shifts — new collective values or behaviors. Now, memes, hashtags, and ephemeral aesthetics (#corecore) are taken for "trends."
As a result, we confuse what has become a "trend" on social media with real trends that reflect deep changes in society. And that leaves us without the tools to talk about what is actually happening to us as a society.

Futures researcher Geraldine Wharry calls this cultural condition a "hypercycle." The contemporary trend agenda is an ultra-fast conveyor belt of production and consumption, where new products, ideas, and aesthetics replace one another without pause and without cultural meaning.

The result is that we are perpetually engaged and perpetually informed, yet barely understand what is actually happening or where it is all heading.

According to Wharry, the only way to break out of this cycle is to relearn how to fantasize. To reclaim the right to invent shared stories that reconnect us with reality, building our collective imagination around hope for the future rather than fear of it.

The twenty-first century declared itself the era of the creative economy and the age of the creator.

We have built entire industries around individual creative self-expression — and there is genuine value in that.
Creativity matters. But creativity and imagination are not the same thing. The difference between them lies in the desire and intention to think collectively.

Creativity works with the actual: it takes existing elements and recombines them in new ways. It is focused on form and effect — on making things that work within current systems and structures.

Creativity is not always grounded in the present, because it often emerges "for the fun of it" rather than out of cultural or social necessity (we are not diminishing the power of fun — simply noting the fact).

A creative output does not have to be "meaningful." It just needs to hook (or solve a client's business problem).
Imagination works with the possible. It is collective by nature, because it asks not "what can I make?" but "what kind of world could we live in?"

Philosopher Cornelius Castoriadis (5) called this the "social imaginary" — the capacity of a society to collectively generate images of meaning and worlds that do not yet exist. For him, the "imaginary" lies at the foundation of all institutions: democracy, markets, science. They are not "given" by nature — they were once invented and formalized as a shared conception of what is possible.

As long as attempts at imagining remain contained within individual blogs, portfolios, websites, and projects, we have no shared "where to?" We are extraordinarily good at optimizing existing systems, but have nearly forgotten how to imagine different, better ones.

Imagination is play — an exercise without a product goal or KPIs. That is why the mode of imagination is far freer than the process of creativity. For fantasies, it is useless to gather references; they are assembled from scratch, from within, from everything one wants to believe in.

(5) Cornelius Castoriadis, L'institution imaginaire de la société (1975)

Try imagining right now. Two or three minutes.

No, really. Right now. Stop. Lock your phone screen or dim your laptop display.

We even came up with questions for you:

(1) What future do you want to find yourself in?

(2) What is happening there?

(3) If you personally continue to live, think, and work the way you do now — will that bring you closer to the future you desire?

(4) Is there a place for the way you work / live / think now in your future? Or does where you want to end up require different narratives of thought and behavior?

(5) How do you communicate with people in that future?

(6) How do they feel?

(7) And you?

The rise of populist politics, global ecological crises, the development of AI, and the resulting challenges to human agency confront us with a question about a new sincerity and the relevance of ideals.

And we are answering it with awkward (for now) attempts to imagine new versions of idealism.

Monastering, the solarpunk movement, "locking in" culture, knightcore and contemporary fashion's fascination with the Middle Ages, the vibe-coding sermons of Rick Rubin and Anthropic — all of these are different variations of the search for greater meaning in everyday life. Attempts to build anchors not in profit or consumption, but in values and moral orientation.

The indifference dictated by postmodern modes of thinking is gradually receding into the past.

"To give a shit" is trending again.

Fortunately, this is no longer just about hustle culture and the relentless pursuit of success. It is also about building anchors in collectivity, in faith in more refined forms of living together and in stronger moral bearings.

It turns out that even in 2025, there is still room to act from the heart and with integrity for an idea, a project, or a field that is larger than personal ambition. That it is genuinely possible to believe we can live in a better world — and that we possess enough agency to influence it.

Yes, the future is dark and unpredictable.

But it seems we fail to realize the extent to which our desire to close our eyes to that future is shaped not by real concerns, but by fears we have imposed on ourselves — because we have collectively lost faith in a better tomorrow.

What if we simply allowed for the possibility that we are capable of inventing a different future? One in which we actually want to find ourselves someday — all of us, together?