A time without Wi-Fi: is it nostalgia, or a longing for what we never had?

A red car packed with kids, the tailgate open on a country road. A ball rolling down a cobblestone alley while two kids play tennis with a single racket. Hands stained with tomato breaking off pieces of bruschetta in the sun. A ride on a Vespa along the waterfront, without a helmet. The images scroll by, all looking the same, especially in the summer, across dozens of accounts: grainy film, low light, no smartphones in sight. The caption, almost always, says the same thing. Once upon a time, there were summers without Wi-Fi.

A genre that thrives on repetition

The format works. Posts dedicated to “summers without Wi-Fi” are multiplying with thousands of shares. The writing is recognizable: the intercom ringing instead of a notification, the bike tossed on the grass, the sun dictating the schedule, foosball, scraped knees, songs memorized because they played on the radio just once. It’s a genre now, with its own rules and quirks. And like all genres, it thrives on repetition.

The interesting part isn’t the nostalgia itself. It’s who feels it. Because it’s not just forty- or fifty-somethings who actually lived through those summers who get emotional looking at those cars or red Vespas. It’s also—and increasingly so—young people who weren’t even born yet during the era being evoked. They long for something they never had.

A word for the longing for a time never known

There is a word for this. Anemoia: the nostalgia for a time or place one has never known. The term was coined in 2012 by American author John Koenig in his *Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows*, and since then it has become a recurring lens through which to describe Gen Z’s relationship with the past. It is not a recent invention of sentiment (19th-century Romantics felt something similar when rediscovering the Middle Ages), but it is the first time it has circulated at this speed and with this intensity, fueled by the very feeds it is supposed to reject.

The mechanism is well-documented. Nostalgia, scholars of the phenomenon observe, grows in moments of uncertainty and discomfort: during the pandemic, it reached a global peak. For a generation raised amid constant digital overstimulation, it has become a form of emotional self-regulation, almost a tool for psychological survival. We do not, however, long for the real past. We long for its romanticized version—cleaner, more aesthetic, more accessible. Those summers are not reconstructed with historical accuracy. They are rewritten emotionally.

Real film, not just the filter

The detail that closes the circle is material, not merely sentimental. The same generation sharing grainy photos is bringing real film back to life. The market for analog cameras, after years of decline, is growing again: over a quarter of consumers under 35 buy film cameras, and the revival is driven precisely by youth adoption. The reasons emerging from analog communities are always the same: tactility, anticipation, imperfection, delayed gratification. In a culture that moves fast and then moves even faster, shooting on film is a way to slow down. Grain isn’t a nostalgic filter: it’s the physical result of a slower gesture.

The short circuit of the feed

Here lies the short circuit that makes the phenomenon a cultural phenomenon and not just a simple trip down memory lane. Those summers were celebrated as undocumented time: there were few photos, but the memories were crystal clear. Yet today they exist only because they are documented: they live on through screenshots, reels, and carousels optimized for the algorithm.

The message is that we weren’t trying to live something to show off; we were truly living it. But the message comes through the medium of the show, perfected for sharing. Pre-digital freedom becomes high-yield digital content.

Not a memory, but a desire

It’s not hypocrisy, and it’s important not to read it as such. It’s rather the way a generation processes an absence. Sixteen-year-olds today have never known friendship before the Snapstreak; they have never experienced an afternoon that was truly out of reach. Those images do not recount a memory: they recount a desire. The desire for a slow time that was never possessed, evoked in the only space available to evoke it: the infinite gallery where everything is already a photo.

One question remains, and it is worth leaving it open. Can a nostalgia constructed for what has not been lived still be called memory, or is it already something else? An aesthetic, a language, a new way of inhabiting the present while pretending to look back. Perhaps those red Pandas do not speak of the past. They speak of now, and of everything that now cannot be.