Happy New Year to all you Yappers! I hope your return to work has been painless. This year has been insane already. Still, I’m feeling very refreshed and ready to dive back into the slop.

In today’s newsletter, 2016 obsession (which I previously flagged last April!), viral TikTok New Year’s goalsetting, the first viral fight video of 2026, and more.

Let’s start by asking this: What does that even mean? I don’t think people know what they’re saying when they say that 2026 is the new 2016. Many of them don’t even know what 2016 looked like.

This all started when people online began making videos declaring that we should bring 2016 back in the new year. I saw this coming. One of my first ever Yap Year posts last spring was about how 2016 nostalgia has been on the rise. Now that it’s been a decade since then, people want a redo (or something like it).

Since we entered the 2020s, people have been romanticizing the period between 2010 and 2016. At first, 2014 was the shorthand for this era, but when people yearn for 2016 they basically want the same thing: The general feeling of creativity and optimism of the early ‘10s. 

It is the last time people remember engaging with each other, with culture, with the internet, and with the world in a way that didn’t feel so bleak. It was a world before a Donald Trump presidency, before COVID-19, before every influencer felt inauthentic, and before AI. People really look back at this time with rose-colored (Pink Wall-colored?) glasses. Many of the horrors we are grappling with today began in 2016. 

We are over halfway through the current decade and still talking about those short years. It worries me that there is a refusal to let go of this era because it discourages us from looking forward as a culture. I say this as someone who loved being a teen at that time, but I don’t think I (or the rest of my microgeneration of Zillenials) should be so caught up in our adolescence so young. It has been clear throughout my 20s why the nostalgia toward the late aughts and early 2010s has been so intense. With worsening economic disparity, insane world rulers, and a growing climate anxiety in the wake of the AI boom, people frankly cannot envision a future. 

Perhaps that is changing. There’s something about the energy of this new year that feels like people are tired of taking a passive approach to our increasingly divided, overloaded, and digital world. Instead of sitting in the doom and gloom, people seem hopeful that better things are coming and are actually making an effort to make it happen, even if it’s hard. They are going analog to reject the constant dopamine rushes and escapism that social media presents to them.

I loved this piece in The Cut about friction-maxxing. While it’s a parenting column, I think it’s a useful mindset for everyone to partake in. In the past 10 years, every tech company has tried to remove every minor inconvenience from our lives, which has inadvertently chipped away at our humanity. Columnist Kathryn Jezer-Morton argues that all of these services have infantilized adults, rendering us no different from iPad babies. It’s important for us to do the hard things because they build our tolerance for real life. 

If we are to bring anything into 2026 from 2016, it should be the hopeful feeling that quite literally came in the face of imminent disaster. People were mobilized, having fun, and not so consumed with their online presence. If that’s what this year is about, then I think we’re in for a really great one.

I love seeing videos of people setting new goals and creating vision boards for the new year. I saw a lot of folks making punch cards for their 2026 goals, which I thought was so cute. If you are still doing some intention setting for this year, here are a couple videos that I thought were helpful for starting: 1) 2025 recapping so you can reflect before starting anew and 2) goal punch card inspiration.

Anyways, the real 2026 vision that people are talking about online comes from a random TikTok comment (not even a video!). A TikTok user named Abbie posted about her 2026 “rebrand” and someone named Tamara wrote a now-deleted response about how she would commemorate the year. 

“I’m getting 365 buttons, one for each day because I want to do more stuff and I’m scared of time so I want to be more conscious of it,” she said.

People were confused. What did Tamara mean? Was she gatekeeping a new way to thrive in the new year? When pressed on the issue, she said one of the most iconic things ever written in a TikTok comment section: “Hey so it actually only has to make sense to me for me to do it and I don’t feel like explaining it to anyone else.” 

Her response has become a huge meme for obvious reasons, but it’s the perfect energy to bring into 2026. Everyone needs to be more like Tamara now!

Every Monday letter gets a playlist. Here are some iconic songs from 2016. I did not include “Closer” by The Chainsmokers and Halsey (arguably the song of that year) because I hated it then </3

In this week’s playlist:

Other things I want to share with you.