Some members of Gen Z are feeling so pessimistic about the future of the country and modern technology that they want to hop in a time machine.
Nearly half (47%) of adults ages 18-29 said if they had the option, they’d choose to live in the past, according to a new NBC News Decision Desk Poll powered by SurveyMonkey. One-third said they’d pick a time period less than 50 years in the past, while another 14% said they’d choose more than 50 years in the past.
Meanwhile, 38% of Gen Zers said they’d prefer to live in the present, 10% said they’d go less than 50 years in the future, and 5% chose more than 50 years in the future.
The results were largely consistent across gender lines and partisan divides, though young Black adults were less likely to say they’d prefer to live in the past (33%) than young white adults (52%) or young Hispanic adults (47%).
The broader sentiment underscores the negative outlook many young Americans feel about their future prospects and the state of the country. The poll found that 62% of Gen Z respondents said they expect life will be worse for them compared to previous generations, compared to 25% who said it will be better and 13% who said it would be about the same.
And 80% of Gen Z adults said the United States is on the wrong track, the highest share of any age group in the survey.
In interviews with NBC News, young adults said the desire to live in the past is shaped by their relationship with technology and a growing discomfort with being connected to the internet at all times. Nostalgia for a previous era can bring a sense of community and comfort to Gen Zers who are anxious about an uncertain technological and geopolitical future, they said.
Modern technology shapes Gen Z’s outlook
The desire to live in the recent past is part of a growing trend among young adults interested in the culture, fashion and technology of the 1980s, ’90s and early 2000s.
Just look at the growing resurgence of claw clips, baggy jeans and strappy tops among young women. Or the flourishing markets for cassette tapes and iPods and the recent social media obsession with ’90s figures like John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette, prompted in part by the FX TV series “Love Story.”
Some members of Gen Z, born in 1997 or later, wish to live in an era “right before social media and computers mediated life,” nostalgia researcher and existential psychologist Clay Routledge said in an interview.
If you yearn for a time too far before the ’90s, he said, “you don’t have some of the advantages of societal progress.”
Several members of Gen Z who participated in the latest Decision Desk poll agreed with Routledge’s hypothesis.
Ben Isaacs, a 20-year-old student in Colorado, said he selected “less than 50 years in the past” in the poll as the period he’d live in if he could choose.
Isaacs specifically pointed to the 1990s as a time with “a lack of phones, more personal experience, but also still some of the ease of modern technology.”
A smartphone, Isaacs said, “draws away from people’s ability to just look at each other, have a conversation, and exist outside of the realm of the phone and what happens on your phone.”
Skyler Barnett, a 28-year-old construction worker in Missouri, also cited the internet and smartphones as one reason he didn’t select the present as the ideal time to live in.
“There’s so, so much internet nowadays and so much just bullcrap that goes along with, you know, internet,” he told NBC News. “And these kids today, they got so much stuff going through their heads that’s just not relevant to the outside world.”
Seeking comfort and community in the past
Some of Gen Z’s interest in the recent past, Routledge said, can be explained by the phenomenon of cultural nostalgia.
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“When there’s a lot of disruptions — political divisiveness, or, you know, worries about AI or other kinds of societal, technological or social, cultural changes — people tend to become more nostalgic for the past to help them with the things that they’re worried about,” he said.
Looking back at the 1990s, Routledge said, offers Gen Z a version of the world before everyone was tied to the internet, which can be attractive and comforting.
“If there’s this fear that it’s going in a direction that’s unhealthy or that they can’t control or they don’t understand, then you could imagine it being like, ‘Well, instead of jumping in that hypothetical future … I’d rather take the time machine to the time before it got to that place,” he said. “It’s almost a little bit like a reboot.”
Routledge also said that an increasing share of Gen Z has begun to recognize certain detrimental mental and cultural effects of modern technology and have taken more “agency” in the push to have a more healthy relationship with it.
“They’re the ones driving … many of these consumer retro trends that, again, aren’t throwing the smartphones away, but they’re saying the smartphones can’t, shouldn’t control us,” he said.
Alex Abernathy, a 25-year-old part-time student in Michigan, said in an interview that she’s “about the iPods.”
“I think it’s important to get back to technology being made for one thing at a time, and not people having, you know, a supercomputer that you walk around with,” she added.
In the poll, Abernathy said she’d prefer to live in a time period less than 50 years into the future, mostly because she’d like to see more social and political progress. But she added that what excites her about the future is finding more opportunities to gather with offline communities and spend less time on her phone.
“I use social media as a way to find other people and find events and find community,” Abernathy said, adding: “I think that community, like, real community — showing up for each other when we’re tired or when the other person doesn’t have the energy or the resources ... I think that that’s going to be the biggest part moving forward, because we’ve all been so divided and told how we should treat each other.”
She added that she’d recently connected with a 67-year-old woman at a political protest who shared similar values and interests.
“We get this put into our heads where it’s like, ‘Oh no, the older people don’t care. It’s all up to us,’” Abernathy said. “And it’s really, there’s so many people in different age groups and different walks of life that actually think the same way.”
The NBC News Decision Desk Poll powered by SurveyMonkey surveyed 32,433 adults, including 3,009 adults ages 18-29, online from March 30 to April 13. The full sample of all adults has a margin of error of plus or minus 1.8 percentage points. The subgroup of adults ages 18-29 (Gen Z) has a margin of error of plus or minus 2.4 percentage points.
