All cameras became higher quality, but you remained stuck at 144p

Can you describe what it feels like to long for something you never experienced?

For instance, longing for a cassette you never held, a Walkman you never turned on, or feeling emotionally moved by a character in the TV series “Super Dad” as if he were your own father—even though you never watched a single episode live...

Our generation—those born in the 2000s—curiously keeps looking back at the past. We claim memories from eras we never lived through. We miss streets we never walked. We defend a time we never emotionally belonged to. It is as if the 1990s were our lost childhood.

But why? Why do people long so intensely for something they never experienced? Why do they feel such passion for a time they never lived in?

We were born in the 2000s, yet many of our souls feel as if they were left behind in the 1990s.

Were the 1990s truly that beautiful? Or is something about today simply so exhausting?

Actually, the issue is not the 1990s—it is the soullessness of today. Everything now happens too fast: messages, relationships, meals, thoughts… all lived out in the span of a story. Even love affairs feel poorly produced. Meetings happen on apps, and goodbyes are hidden in unread messages.

You fall for someone, and twelve hours later you act as if you don’t know them. You start watching something, then halfway through you switch to TikTok. And when everything moves this quickly, nothing deepens. Nothing lingers on the tongue. That is precisely why we yearn for slower times—the excitement of waiting for a letter, the chance encounter with a friend on the street, sitting idly and gazing out the window… We may never have lived these moments, but we long for them as if we had.

There is also a subtle twist to nostalgia: the past is never remembered as bad. The mind takes only the beautiful fragments and discards the rest as if sweeping them away. That is why most people who admire the 1990s forget its crises, its poverty, its limited world—and remember only Tarkan’s songs, pink phones, and neighborhood culture. In truth, when we imagine the past, we find an escape from the darkness of the present.

Perhaps most importantly: we struggle to find a soul that belongs to us. Everything is a copy of something else. Everyone tries to resemble someone else. That is why we cling to what is unique, what was first, what remained unspoiled.

To us, the 1990s appear at first glance as “purity”—a world without filters, fewer screens, more eye contact, less crowds, more sincerity. But the truth is: we belong neither to the 1990s nor fully to today. We are stuck somewhere in between.We are a generation that sees everything but lives little, knows much but feels little, appears free but is constantly exhausted. Some of us are in love with the 1990s, others enchanted by 1980s music, and still others wish they had walked the streets of the 1970s. So for us, nostalgia is not merely the past—it is a dream of belonging.

Perhaps we will never truly understand the 1990s. But our admiration for that era is a quiet rebellion against how much we lack today.

Sometimes in a Tarkan song, sometimes in an old TV series, and sometimes in the false ache of a moment we never lived… we are a generation that does not belong to the past nor fully to the present. Who knows? If we had lived through the 1990s, we might have wanted to know and live today.

We long most intensely for things we never belonged to.

^{Old Photographs in a Brown Box. (}Pexels⁾