观点英国社会

What nostalgia for the 1990s leaves out

Huge improvements in the decades since are a reminder that even really knotty problems can get better

When I was a teenager in the 1990s, I wrote a journal entry that began: “Dear older me.” I won’t go on, because of course it’s too embarrassing for words, but the gist of it was this: I was anticipating that my older self would at some point feel nostalgic about my teenage years, and I wanted to set the record straight by describing what was boring and unsatisfactory about them.

What I didn’t anticipate was that it wouldn’t be “older me” who would feel nostalgic about the 1990s, but a younger generation which wasn’t even around back then. AI-generated videos set i