Ask a kid what they would do if they were a grown-up for a day, and you’ll probably find their ambitions are in line with their size – more likely to be “stay up till midnight”, or “eat a ton of sweets” than go to space, say, or broker world peace. That’s because life is small when you are too, meaning modest ambitions feel radical.
And while you would hope that, by the time a given child actually grows into that longed-for autonomy, their dreams would have grown alongside them, that doesn’t seem to be the case for my fellow millennials. What do we want, now that we’ve got (some) disposable income, even children of our own? The same snacks we ate in primary school, please!
At least, that’s what the sudden rash of nostalgic food rebrands would seem to suggest. Everything from Nik Naks to Walkers (and Bacardi Breezers, for older millennials) is tapping into 30-somethings’ apparent yearning to return to our 90s childhoods: a simpler time, when the worst thing that could happen was being sent to bed before Top of the Pops, and the best was being allowed an extra snack.
It’s easy to sneer at millennials’ infantile impulses – scorn is the water we swim in, having gone from uppity snowflakes to hopelessly past-it oldies. But while you’re snickering, you have to admit that we’re far from alone in our retrograde impulse. Every generation loves to romanticise the good old days, whether or not they were actually better. Thing is, for my generation, they were.
In the 90s, when I was born, houses cost four times the average salary, instead of eight times, as they did in 2023. Cool Britannia meant the UK was a trendy place to live instead of a global pariah, and the election of New Labour made it feel like a fairer society was just around the corner. Meanwhile, the internet hadn’t yet melted our brains – nearly half of young people today would prefer a world without it – or artificially accelerated trends to the point of meaninglessness.
In that context, Walkers launching their first new permanent flavours in 20 years truly feels like a return: not just to the brand’s former glory, but the manageable tempo of a bygone era, too. From food to music (how else do you explain the baffling appetite for the Oasis reunion tour, two ageing blokes running through their ageing hits?) the signs are clear. We want the 90s back, and we want them now. When you consider the country’s change in tenor since then, is it any wonder?
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That decade wasn’t just rosy because we were looking at it through a child’s eyes; economically, politically, culturally, life was objectively brighter. The fact that it coincided with the simplest time in millennials’ own lives doesn’t invalidate that – on the contrary, it only underscores it.
As we all eventually discover, adulthood has less to do with staying up late and eating sweets, and more with making rent and keeping your head above water. As such, snatches of freedom come from opting out rather than diving in. Grapple with looming property taxes, the rise of populism, any number of wars raging around the planet? No thanks, think I’ll try the new Sticky Teriyaki crisps instead – it’s what eight-year-old me would have wanted, and all that 32-year-old me can cope with.
I’m not saying such wilful oblivion is productive; just human. No doubt, it is tragic that adults across the land are eager to reach for the safe, familiar brands of childhood, but it’s also tragic that the country’s economic reality means that many will never be able to afford the milestones of maturity we took for granted just a generation ago.
After graduating into the 2008 recession and seeing our burgeoning careers cut off at the knees by the pandemic, if millennials are caught in a state of arrested development, then it’s not one of our own making. Slogging through that shit-list, who could blame us for yearning for a taste of a time when things showed every sign of being sweet, savoury, simple?
Proust had his madeleine; let my peers and I enjoy our novelty flavoured Nik Naks in peace.
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