The year was 1993. D Ream brought out a song called "Things Can Only Get Better". We all sung it. We all loved it. We all believed that things would absolutely get better. Life was good. There was no reason it would not continue getting better.
Reader, how wrong we were.
Gen X is infamous for saying that the 90s (and early 2000s) were better. Not just better, looking back, perfect.
You know the saying, "You don't know how lucky you had it?" That is Gen X.
Everything was better. Hope, dreams, aspirations; these were all things that seemed possible and attainable. Our music was full of hope and joy and love. Listening to music made you feel lifted. Happy. Like you were unstoppable.
We talked to each other, not just through our phones. We danced all night and into the next morning without a phone or camera in sight. We worked hard and we played hard. We lived.
We were allowed to roam as children and were actually allowed to be children and play. Not living our life through Ipads, phones and social media.
Whether our school lives were good or bad, we could come home and that was our sanctuary. Our safe place. Now children still come home, but they cannot escape social media, or the bullies. There is no safe space from the online world.
We were free. Actually free. Life was on the up. Do you remember everyone always used to say "It's a free country!" (That might just be a UK thing). But it actually was.
Anything was possible. And we believed it.
Now, you cannot escape social media.
We have had the mess that was Covid, locking people away for years in what we now realise was a experiment by the ruling powers to see how far they could push us.
The US has school shootings, practically every other week.
We have had a terrorist bomb a concert and kill young girls, but were told not to look back in anger.
We have had the Epstein files released, with victims doxed, perpetrators at the highest levels of society, but without one prosecution.
We have had hundreds of thousands of girls raped and tortured for decades, but we let more and more of the same kind of perpetrators into our country, while telling us that we are racists for objecting.
Music is no longer inspirational or uplifting. Half the music in the charts are remixes of 90s dance music. The rest talks about guns, violences, whores and sex. It isn't music to make us happy.
In the 1990s we thought "what next?" because life was good and we wanted to see where life would take us. In 2026 we now say "oh god, what next?" Because there is ALWAYS something around the corner and these days, it is never good.
So other generations, don't judge Gen X. We had what was a perfect decade or so of life. And we lost it. We feel sorry for you because you will never experience it and we feel sorry for ourselves because we had it, and never will again.
