Millennials took to their camera rolls like ducks to water when the first whispers of 2016 nostalgia began to circulate. It started with the disbelief that a year which feels like yesterday had, in fact, happened a full decade ago. Then came the news that Fetty Wap — the rapper who soundtracked that era with “Trap Queen” and “679” — was set to be released from prison. Suddenly, it felt possible that we might relive 2016 all over again: the final year of Obama’s America, the moment a woman ran as the first presidential nominee of a major political party, and the year Rihanna released music for the last time (though we didn’t know it then).

And so we scrolled. We selected. We screenshotted and posted.

In response to the flood of archival imagery came commentary. Creative director Terrence O’Connor argued that we’d overshared — that these photos revealed too much about our former selves. Influencer-comedian Grant Gibbs took to TikTok to warn people against “outing” themselves as hotter ten years ago. “Some of y’all look better in 2016,” he said. “If a glow-up hasn’t taken place, don’t post it.”

As I gleefully swiped through my friends’ crinkled iPhone 5–quality pasts, I noticed something beyond the heavy makeup — the overdrawn matte brown lips, the severe brows, the experimental hair colors. What stood out most was body diversity. Many of us, myself included, were simply bigger ten years ago.

GLP-1 medications have been one of the most consequential developments in modern medicine, and their cultural impact will be felt for decades. Alongside them has come one of the most dramatic shifts in beauty standards in recent memory. After decades — from the early ’90s through the late 2000s — of only slight variation, uniform thinness has once again become the norm. So much so that seeing a fuller-figured Adele on the cover of Vogue in 2016 now feels almost shocking — not because of her later transformation, but because a woman larger than a size two once occupied that level of celebrity visibility. In the wake of this year’s Golden Globes, one creator even asked what it would take for an actress to attend an awards show “bravely as a size eight.”

In 2016, I was somehow both bigger and far less image-conscious — and, in hindsight, it makes sense. The prevailing ideal was the Kardashian hourglass, amplified by Kim’s Kimoji era and the afterglow of Nicki Minaj’s “Anaconda,” released just two years earlier. Big butts were celebrated. Mannequins were shapeshifting. We were standing at the edge of a body-positivity movement that still felt revolutionary. 

Even without semaglutides, we might have ended up here. The development of video-sharing apps has meant we are both more aware of what we look like than ever before, while our access to information has exploded.  In 2016, I couldn’t have articulated to you exactly what a calorie was, let alone how many were in any given meal. Now, living in a world of of protein and fiber targets, Pilates vs. lifting debates, and step counts, that ignorance sounds

Maybe the nostalgia for 2016, then, isn’t really about the music, the politics, or even the Instagram filters. It’s about remembering a brief moment before relentless optimization took hold — when we policed ourselves far less. A time when we were less visible, and therefore more free. Now that we know what we know, and are constantly barraged by more information and imagery magnifying our insecurities, we may never fully recreate that feeling. But we can still try to find our way back to it.