20 Outdated Things Millennials Still Love

In 2026, it was quietly reported that longstanding fast-food favorite Pizza Hut had, for several years, been gradually bringing back its old-school restaurants, in an attempt to revitalize the business after the brand was sold to new owners. The retro-styled refits—complete with padded booths, stained glass lamps, and classic chunky red glassware—proved pure nostalgia for anyone who grew up in the 1980s and 1990s when Pizza Hut restaurants were at their heyday. (And it proved to make good business sense too, with the rolling out of the retro design costing a fraction of a standard renovation.) 

Needless to say, the refit restaurants quickly proved popular among Millennials—and nor were they the only outmoded things that Millennials still cling to. 

OLD-SCHOOL EMOJIS 

While it’s Gen Alpha who seemingly use the most emojis overall, recent studies have shown that emoji use differs greatly across the generations, with Millennials—who grew up on a diet of Buzzfeed quizzes and MSN Messenger—sticking to tried and tested emojis that the generations after largely ignore. The Face With Tears of Joy Emoji is still the go-to laughter response among Millennials, for instance, but is dismissed as cringe and outdated by Gen Z and younger (who prefer a rather less wholesome skull to show extreme hilarity). And while Millennials so no problem at all with a simple thumbs up, Gen Z finds it passive-aggressive and noncommittal. 

GIFS

It’s not just old-fashioned emojis that Millennials are holding on to, either. More than a third of Millennials regularly use GIFS as a means of expressing their opinions, with two-thirds claiming doing so allows them to convey their feelings more accurately than words alone. The generations behind, however, are increasingly turning their backs on gifs, which are apparently being seen as ever more cringey among Gen Zs and Gen Alpha. 

FLIP PHONES

Millennials might like sending emojis and gifs, there was something about using a simpler screen or a far more complicated handset back in the day. Early 2000s flip phones might have had grayscale screens, shrill ringtones, and next to no battery life, but there was something about flipping a phone open to answer it that a swipe of a touchscreen just can’t match. No wonder the tech world now seems to be nostalgically re-embracing the style more than 20 years later. 

CLASSIC KIDS TV

Speaking comforting classics that you grew up with, one thing Millennials and Gen Z can seemingly agree on is that kids TV was far better back in the day than it is today. These two cohorts watch more repeats of classic childhood movies and TV favorites than any other generation. 

THE BIG SCREEN EXPERIENCE

When it comes to finding something entertaining to watch, Millennials are also near single-handedly keeping the big summer blockbuster alive. With a worrisome one in ten cinemagoers claiming that the summer movie experience has all but died out, Millennials are bucking that trend, with almost two-fifths proudly claiming the opposite and that the summer blockbuster is alive and well. (Perhaps growing up with The Matrix, The Mummy, The Sixth Sense and the first Star Wars prequel all released in the same summer might have something to do with it.) 

STAND-ALONE BLOCKBUSTERS 

On the subject of blockbusters, the big-budget movie experience at the moment is dominated by remakes and spinoffs, or else stories set in some pre-existing universe. Sequels and IP-mining are by no means new, of course, but with almost 40 films in the endless expanded MCU and Disney currently slating more remakes and sequels than original stories, it seems the standalone blockbusters of the 80s and 90s are a thing of the Millennial past. 

Case in point, 16 of the Top 20 highest-grossing movies of the 1990s were either stand-alone or entirely original movies, with only four spinoffs and sequels (Star Wars: Episode 1, The Lost World: Jurassic Park, Terminator 2 and Toy Story 2) listed alongside the likes of Armageddon, Ghost, Twister, and Independence Day. 

So far in the 2020s, the exact opposite is true, with only four of the current Top 20 (The Odyssey, Barbie, Michael and Oppenheimer) not belonging to an existing movie universe. 

DISNEY ORIGINALS

The live-action remakes of Disney classics might be proving big business, but for Millennials—who grew up on hand-drawn and painted classics like The Little Mermaid and Beauty and the Beast—there’s really no comparison. 

PRACTICAL EFFECTS

Is it fair to say Millennials grew up at the best time for movie effects? Millennials had the best of both worlds in the 90s and early 2000s, with movies like Jurassic Park and Terminator 2 seamlessly blending practical effects with cutting-edge CGI, while others, like The Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter movies, built stunning practical sets and used real-world locations to bring their universes to light. Modern big-budget extravaganzas that increasingly rely on green screen and LED backlots just don’t seem to match up, and don’t have quite the same immersive quality. 

EMO MUSIC

If you’re a Millennial who fell deeply into the emo subculture of the early 2000s, then you might have heard your parents say that it was just a phase. Not so, it seems, as Millennials are still proudly holding on to the bands, artists, and music that defined them more than two decades ago and supporting their music still today. 

VINYL RECORDS

On the subject of music, though, Millennials have long been the driving force behind the recent resurgence in popularity of vinyl records, too, all but single-handedly steering the decades-old format through the choppy waters of the streaming era. Having brought LPs and record players back from the brink, however, more recent research is showing that Gen Z are catching up too and are jumping on the Millennial bandwagon as the biggest buyers of vinyl records in the mid 2020s.  

MIXTAPES

Curating a Spotify playlist just isn’t the same as burning a bespoke CD or recording a uniquely compiled cassette tape, is it? 

PHYSICAL MEDIA

It’s not just vinyl and mixtapes, either. Millennials and Gen Z alike are increasingly expressing a preference for physical media of all types—from CDs and DVDs to old-school gaming consoles and cartridge games. Turns out paying for streaming platforms that don’t stream the movie you want to watch when you want to watch it (and can delete it even once you’ve bought it) isn’t the best business model. 

BOARD GAMES

The pandemic made board games fashionable again, leading to a resurgence of interest among Gen Z, but for Millennials they never went out of favor. Two-thirds of Millennials admit to being board game fanatics, with almost 40% claiming that they enjoy regular board games as a hobby. 

ARCADES

Not that Millennials only played dice-rolling games back in the day, of course. A pocketful of loose change was all you needed to have a good time when video game arcades were everywhere—although these too, it seems, are starting to enjoy a renaissance as the edge continues to wear off in the digital age.

PEN AND PAPER

In an era when you can make a note of absolutely anything on your phone, there’s a growing trend among Millennials and Gen Zs for re-embracing pen and paper. As well as giving the opportunity for some much-needed time away from a screen, there’s something satisfyingly tactile in making a to-do list by hand and scratching each job off as you do it. 

ONE-TIME PURCHASES

Speaking of things that used to be simpler back in the day, it used to be the case that if you needed, say, a new program for your computer, you would buy it, install it, and it would be yours in perpetuity. Nowadays, everything is a subscription service—so that one-off fee has been switched to a steady and increasingly infuriating drip-feed of monthly payments and constant downloadable upgrades.

WORKPLACE PROFESSIONALISM

From the “Gen Z stare” to the rumbling debate over whether or not you can take an iced coffee into a job interview, much has been said in recent years of the different social mores of Millennials versus Gen Z and beyond. With Boomers now retired, and Gen X not far behind them, Millennials are becoming the elder statesmen and women of the workplace—and in that capacity are steadfastly defending the professional etiquette of the past against an ever more relaxed and less demanding style of professionalism that’s emerging among the generations behind. 

AN AI-LESS INTERNET

Use a search engine today, and chances are you’ll be shown an AI-curated overview of the search results, rather than the results themselves. Scroll a social media feed, and you’ll likely end up wading through a morass of AI slop. Try to order something online, and you might get an AI chatbot asking you what you’re looking for and if there’s anything they can do to help (if it hasn’t already made things worse). Things really were better, easier, and more human back in the day. 

ONLINE ANONYMITY 

On the topic of the early internet, it’s easy to forget that influencer culture is a relatively recent phenomenon, and there was a time in the not-too-distant past when people did not live their every moment online, and we were all largely anonymous. Sure, there were Facebook pages and MySpace profiles, but people typically kept themselves to themselves and used them to expand on real-life, in-person friendships and relationships, rather than build new parasocial ones with strangers. 

DOWNTIME 

There was a time when your downtime was genuine downtime—not time spent still scrolling feeds, watching shorts, and digesting headlines. And what’s more, Millennials seem to be figuring that out, with studies showing more and more Millennials are switching off when they really don’t need to be online. 

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