No teenager has known life without smartphones

No modern teenager has lived a world without screens

No teenager has known a world without screens. That is the fact that opens up a discussion which starts in the present and almost always ends in an argument about which decade was the best one to be alive.
The diagnosis repeats with a tone of lament: they grew up with a mobile phone in their hand and, it is argued, they don't know what real life is like. The complaint has centuries, but the object has changed.

The nuance arrives quickly. The 2000s were not analog either: screens were already everywhere, and the mobile-less world had long since died out before the nostalgia suggests.
Those who claim the purity of the past have to go back to the 70s, 80s, or 90s, and that is where any consensus breaks down.

The real fight isn't about the phone, it's about the decade

The conversation abandons the smartphone in the second paragraph and turns into a generational reckoning. One current holds that the cultural peak of the fifth [decade] was in the 90s. Another defends that it was the 70s. And a third, more uncomfortable one, rejects the whole exercise: attributing decadence to young people is a cheap way to inflate one's own ego and point out something that is merely different as flawed.

That reproach to nostalgia is not new. Each generation has looked at the next with the same mixture of alarm and disdain, and each time the trinc one has turned out equally well and equally badly.

Why the 80s are so divisive

It is the most debated decade of all. For one part of the analysis, it was a glorious era in music: the textbook argument is The Police, formed between 1977 and 1979 but with the commercial takeoff in the first half of the 80s. For the other part, the same decade was excess, drugs, grit, and a political class that was beginning to become entrenched, with heavy metal and dirty rock as the soundtrack to decline.

Both readings coexist in the same temporal stretch without apparent contradiction. And both agree on one thing: today's music deserves little.
There, nostalgia stops being an opinion and becomes a shared dogma.

Nostalgia as the measure of all things

The vital impulse, the street, creation, going out into the world: the past is described as something solid and palpable compared to a present that is accused of lacking soul.
On the table, too, are aesthetic and formal complaints against young people who remain on the surface and fail to explain anything.

Additionally, there is a current that suggests deterioration didn't begin with screens, but before: distrust in institutions, mass consumption, and adolescent boredom were already there when the mobile phone was a science fiction novelty.
That is the hardest rebuttal to offer.

When the last person who remembers an analog world passes away, no one will miss what they never got to live. The prediction is reasonable, although history suggests that nostalgia does not disappear: it is inherited badly, recycled, and returns with a different object under scrutiny in each generation.