The question which was being asked by radio presenters on Facebook this week was: why were the 90s so much better?

My answer was ….because we were all 30 years younger!

Let’s face it, it’s easy to be optimistic when your skin is still fresh with the flush of youth, and when the future looks so promising. Everything is possible, options and opportunities seem limitless and as The Carpenters famously sang, “we’ve only just begun”.

Getting old? What’s that? It did not even occur to us what it would be like to be over 60, and yet here many of us are…we blinked and suddenly we are considered senior citizens and oh-my-god-kill-me-now, that dreaded word “elderly”, which is even more cringeworthy in Maltese, “anzjani“.

The passage of time has a way of blessing us with a selective memory – we only remember the good times, whereas the negatives seem to fade away as the years pass. So it stands to reason that many mentioned that dating was better back in the day when we had more face to face interaction and there was the thrill of going out on a Saturday night not knowing who you might meet. In contrast, with today’s dating apps, potential boyfriends and girlfriends are dismissed with an arbitrary swipe to the left just because we don’t like the way they look. So, yes, it is true that we have become a more superficial society which bases too much importance on appearance at the expense of trying to really getting to know someone in person first, gradually, allowing the attraction to develop over time. Having said that, meeting in person vs meeting online gives no one any guarantees that the relationship will last – otherwise how can we explain the fact that so many couples in their 40s and 50s have split up?

Social media and the over-reliance on our phones (guilty, as charged) have also cut deep into interpersonal relationships and meaningful conversations. Just take a look at the tables around you in a restaurant and take note of how many are scrolling through their small screen, living vicariously through other people’s lives, rather than being present and enjoying their own.

But we also forget that the great leaps made in technology have made our lives much easier. Remember the shrieking, whirring sound as we tried to connect to the Internet through the dial-up system which took ages, while everyone else in the household was menacingly warned not to use the phone (by which I mean, the landline)? That too, was the ’90s. Today, the huge amount of sheer information available to us in seconds with a simple touch on our smartphones has revolutionised all this.

From food to taxis at our doorstep, to googling the name of that actor in the film we are watching to recall where we know him from, to chatting via FaceTime to family overseas bridging the miles and distance like never before, to paying for goods and services, and even scanning our boarding cards when we travel: smartphones have simply changed the way we live.

Some will argue that it is this need to have everything now, instant gratification, which has chipped away at our ability to read books and newspapers at a slower pace, preferring soundbites, TikTok and sensationalist headlines as a way of feeling “informed”. This is also true, as has been shown in studies analysing how too much exposure to screen time has rendered children restless, easily distracted and unable to concentrate for long periods of time. But parents must shoulder responsibility for this as well, as it is much too convenient to keep kids quiet by handing them an iPad or their phone, rather than teaching them how to play with each other and how to behave in public.

In the ’90s you could also get away with all sorts of behaviour and no one would be any the wiser. This is great for ordinary people who were sowing their wild oats, as there is no online evidence of drunken nights and questionable antics. But just think about those who held public office back then who (let’s be honest) had minimal scrutiny of their wheelings and dealings simply because the Internet was not as sophisticated. Today, a few taps on your PC can give you a large chunk of crucial information about anyone in the public eye and it’s virtually (pun intended) impossible to keep things under wraps for very long. And that’s how it should be.

So when pondering the question about whether the ’90s were so much better than now, it is all relative really. 50-somethings are yearning for the ’90s, but for me the ’80s were even better because I was in my 20s and, despite the political turmoil of the time, I was having the time of my life, enjoying Malta’s social scene. Similarly, older generations long nostalgically for the ’70s and ’60s. We all gaze wistfully at old photos with a rueful smile: No wrinkles, no grey hair, no middle age spread – what’s not to like?

Will today’s youngsters look back and say that the 2020s was the best decade ever? Yes, you can be sure they will because it is “their” time to be young, to live life without too many cares and responsibilities, to be footloose and fancy free. That’s life.