The pandemic’s historical significance may also have fostered a specific kind of nostalgia: anticipatory nostalgia, or the feeling of missing the present before it has even passed. Most people are acutely aware that they will remember the pandemic for years to come, and are perhaps living and documenting their days with that perspective in mind. Social media certainly encourages this kind of premature yearning—or at least a sense that the current moment needs to be captured for posterity. In the Netflix special Inside, the comedian Bo Burnham chronicles his own downward spiral throughout 2020, compiling and synthesizing moments of loneliness, mania, and introspection into a portrait of pandemic life. Inside is contradictory to pandemic-nostalgia TikToks in that it doesn’t romanticize the past year, but the artistic intent is similar. In a 2018 interview, Burnham described the way that social media shapes young people’s conception of their own memories by encouraging “living an experience but at the same time hovering behind yourself and watching yourself live that experience, being nostalgic for moments that haven’t happened yet, planning your future to look back on it.”…

As much as the people we spoke with may miss the suspended animation of those early days, they’re also worried about the even more uncertain fall and winter. Some have returned to in-person classes or work, but don’t expect it to last and dread the idea of going remote again. Others are still working from home, and can’t stand it. In that context, pandemic nostalgia is an understandable reaction to pandemic fatigue, and as the coronavirus moves toward eventually becoming endemic, it seems like the early days of quarantine won’t easily fade into the recesses of society’s memories. For many Americans, March 2020 will become a shared reference point; they already remember where they were when professional sports went on hiatus, when Broadway shut down, when they were told they’d have to go home.