I loved last week’s Super Bowl halftime show. While mystified boomers were complaining on Facebook and blasé Gen Zers were probably doing some sort of sad dance thing on TikTok, I couldn’t get enough of Snoop Dogg, Dr. Dre, 50 Cent, Eminem, Mary J. Blige (with guest Kendrick Lamar). It took me right back to my adolescent heyday: the mid-90s to early aughts. For context, Mary J. Blige’s “Family Affair” and Eminem’s “Lose Yourself,” both featured prominently during the show, were released in 2001 and 2002 respectively, when I was in junior high.

Superstars Dr. Dre, 50 Cent and Eminem were three of the Super Bowl halftime performers who took me back to my junior high days.

Meanwhile, The Sopranos-inspired Chevy commercial brought us all right back to the early 2000s, as did Dr. Evil and his minions pitching for General Motors, a spot featuring Lindsay Lohan for L.A. Fitness (with a cameo by Dennis Rodman) and Jennifer Coolidge from American Pie and Legally Blonde chowing down on paper towels for Uber Eats.

It’s the latest in a long line of nostalgia marketing pushes with Gen X and millennials in mind. There’s a reboot of Fresh Prince of Bel Air on Peacock, and Michelob Ultra just hosted an activation experience in Cleveland called “Enjoy It Like It’s 1993” – with limited edition cans, of course – based on the classic arcade game “NBA Jam” during the NBA All-Star weekend.

What’s going on here, I ask myself as I scroll nostalgic Instagram posts showing inflatable furniture from Limited Too, Delia’s catalog pages, bedrooms decorated with NSYNC and Backstreet Boys posters and American Girl dolls (I had it all).

As I see it, there are two phenomena at play. I realized during the halftime show that as a millennial, I’m now the target customer along with Gen X. We’re next up in building our careers, settling down and have more disposable income (though inflation is putting a damper on that). We’re the ones checking out electric vehicles (The Sopranos and Austin Powers), getting into cryptocurrency (Larry David), looking for intuitive workflow tools (ClickUp, one of my favorite commercials from the game), shopping for utilities (5G internet from Verizon, featuring Jim Carrey in ’90s comedic mode) and much more. From front to back, the Super Bowl was a culmination of all the nostalgia we’ve been seeing in recent months. For millennials like me, it was our night.

Best halftime show imo!!! pic.twitter.com/85IhvvpdLK

— ⚜️Steph⚜️ (@nolasaintsteph) February 14, 2022

The other reason for all the wistfulness: we want to escape the challenging present. Yep, we’ve been contending with COVID, but now there’s also sky-high inflation, empty shelves at the markets, rumblings of war with Russia – it’s all making adulting a little difficult right now.

Nostalgia affords me a temporary escape to a simpler time, when my biggest concern was choosing between stud earrings at Claire’s or the new Goosebumps book at B. Dalton. (Philly area retailer Five Below currently sells Goosebumps T-shirts – yes, I snagged one).

“I loved all of this stuff so much,” said Jade Buchanan, a social media influencer who creates digital content for fans of ’80s, ’90s and ’00s nostalgia and who recently joined ASI Media’s Social Angle podcast. “It genuinely did stick with me, and that’s the feeling I try to channel when I create something, that sense of wonder and happiness and a safe space that it gave me at the time.”

The promo industry, of course, is serving up the nostalgic trend too for millennial and even Gen Z audiences, including oversized sweatshirts and Y2K-inspired denim jackets. Trend experts say they’re expecting a resurgence of bold geometric patterns, florals and grungy plaids like those that were popular during the mid-’90s. And nostalgia itself is cyclical; last decade’s ’80s infatuation is this decade’s ’90s bonanza. Retro merchandise and activations with a pop culture twist have become really big business.

“We’re looking at trends through the lens of where we’ve been,” said Vicki Ostrom, futurist and trend analyst at Top 40 supplier SanMar (asi/84863), during a PromoKitchen trends report webinar for the promo industry last week. “We lean into nostalgia when current times are scary and hard to understand.”

The warm fuzzies I felt during the Super Bowl demonstrate in a simple, primal way that nostalgia works, and savvy companies know that. We’re more than 20 years into a new century, we’re supposed to be making giant leaps forward in every respect, and yet here we are, still hung up on Fresh Prince and Eminem. And I’m totally fine with that. We deserve a little escapism these days. Now excuse me while I go practice the Macarena.