When I was younger, back in the late 1990s and the early 2000s, the future didn’t feel so bleak. I don't think this is merely nostalgia for youth. It may have been naïve, but the world that I lived in, in the UK, felt like it was on a good trajectory.
The Berlin Wall had fallen a decade earlier, the South African apartheid regime had been consigned to history, and the new century seemed to carry a promise of progress, brightness, and betterment. The internet was miraculous new technology that could connect you with like-minded people around the globe, not yet today’s endless miserable scroll of bad-faith outrage, hostile state propaganda, and shivering heaps of AI-generated slop. The most ordinary things were cheaper, too: food, rent, energy bills. Pints were cheap, and a night out at a club felt less like an act of financial self-harm than an uncomplicated joy.
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