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 in the 1990s and 1980s have been popping up on social media this year in which teenagers hang out in video shops, ride the streets on their bikes, and talk about how good life is compared with 2025.
What’s going on? Agnes Arnold-Forster, author of the book Nostalgia: A History of a Dangerous Emotion, told me that “nostalgia for a period you haven’t lived through – whether you’re young or old – is pretty common and has been around for a long time”.
Today’s youth might not be unusually nostalgic, then. But nonetheless, in honour of my clear-eyed teenage self, I feel compelled to highlight some of the ways in which life is much better now than it was in the 1990s.
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The air is much cleaner, for a start. In my home country of England, levels of PM2.5 – fine particulate matter which is widely seen as the most damaging pollutant to human health – have plummeted. A report by the Institute for Fiscal Studies describes “remarkable progress” over the past two decades. Between 2003 and 2023, the average level of PM2.5 roughly halved in every region of England.
This was achieved thanks to regulatory limits on industrial and transport emissions, together with a big reduction during the pandemic which did not rebound, possibly due to lower industrial output and the introduction of more “clean air zones” in large cities.
The roads are far safer, too. Almost 13,000 pedestrians were killed or seriously injured in Britain in 1994; by 2024 the number was about 6,000. For children and teenagers up to the age of 15, the reduction has been even steeper, from almost 5,000 in 1994 to roughly 1,000 in 2024. There has been a similar reduction in deaths and serious injuries for car passengers. Here, too, better rules have played a part, such as the proliferation of 20-mile-per-hour zones. Improved safety technology in cars has also helped.
[ The Irish Times view on 1990s nostalgia: don’t look back in angerOpens in new window ]
Then there is violence. When I was growing up, there was a low-level undercurrent of threat on the streets that I remember well, even if it was only kids attacking other kids. Anecdotal? Sure. But the statistics for England and Wales do show that violent crime peaked in the 1990s. Since then, it has declined substantially. This one is harder to explain, though there are similar patterns in many countries. Theories vary, from the impact of technology and changed lifestyles (more young men staying at home on video games, for example) to the impact on people’s brains of removing lead from petrol.
What does all this amount to? I do not present these facts in order to dismiss the feeling, expressed in many of those AI videos, that something precious might have been lost in the era of smartphones and the internet. But it is only a short hop and skip from thinking “some things are worse now” to thinking “everything is worse now”, and from there to “things won’t, or can’t, get better”.
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These huge improvements since the 1990s are a reminder that even really knotty problems can, in fact, get better.
In the meantime, if people are nostalgic for life without smartphones (young or old), there is an obvious option. Just put your device down and go outside. It’s a lot like the 1990s out there, only the streets are safer and the air is cleaner. – Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2025
