Harry Styles. Louis Tomlinson. Liam Payne. Niall Horan. Zayn Malik. The most iconic group of boys arguably since the Backstreet Boys. Since Simon Cowell’s ingenious idea to put the five boys together in 2010, they have made five albums and stolen the hearts of millions of teens across the globe.

According to DailyMail in 2017, each member is worth over £50 million, or $71 million. When they went on hiatus in August of 2015, fans were incredibly heartbroken. The news came nearly five months after Zayn made the decision to leave the group. After all of this chaos, fans had a hard time accepting the idea that there wouldn’t be any more music from One Direction as a whole.

However, since then I would say that the split was the best thing that could have happened to the fans.

First of all, instead of waiting for AGES to get an album from them, which had between 12 and 14 songs, fans now get five times the music as each singer is creating their own incredible albums. In 2017 alone, fans got 10 songs from Styles, 12 from Horan, three from Malik, four songs from Tomlinson, and two from Payne. And these are all within a year!

In addition, bands don’t typically do collabs, so once the band broke up it allowed them to branch out and work with other artists.

Each artist also seemed to find their own sound, which means that fans can listen to all different kinds of music by their favorite people! Each artist went in a different direction (no pun intended) when it came to creating their own music. Fans soon learned that Zayn, Liam, and Louis had styles that vibe pretty well with mainstream music (which is definitely not a bad thing!)

Harry’s music resembles more indie or indie rock, which is pretty much what everyone expected. Niall’s music is the closest to One Direction’s original sound, but has made it his own.

While I wholeheartedly agree that some fresh One Directions songs would be amazing, I recognize that the boys cannot perform together forever.

Since breaking up, both Liam and Louis have had children, and I assume that it is easier to be with them when you don’t have a whole band relying on you. Plus, it is good that they split when they were on good terms because as sad it was, if they had split because they fought or kicked someone out of the band it would be way more heartbreaking for fans. However, it’s incredibly unfortunate that the boys will (most likely) never come back together, meaning I completely missed my chance to see them all together in concert.

Overall, I obviously miss the band like crazy and wish that they could make just one more song, but I am also incredibly proud of all that they have achieved since the split and I really like their new music (most of it anyway…). Hopefully, maybe one day they will have a reunion tour because I think we all deserve some closure. If not, we still will forever be #directioners.