Things can only get better. Can’t they?

Dear Owen,

In the documentary film No Maps for These Territories — an excellent watch, by the way — the science fiction author William Gibson said that most people are happiest living about ten years in the past from whatever moment they find themselves in.

The 1990s are more than ten years ago, but his point is a good one. The recent past is a time that we remember with clarity, or at least enough clarity to think about it without again experiencing the whiplash of the shock of the new.

You are not the first person who has spoken to me of that decade as their salad days. On a visit to Ireland in December, a friend said to me that he, too, missed the ’90s. I don’t.

For me, that was an era when I was a callow youth: a clueless schoolboy so out of touch with the culture of the era that he listened to The Sisters of Mercy, Pop Will Eat Itself and the then unfashionable Leonard Cohen rather than Blur or Oasis. The Britpop phenomenon was lost on me, I’m afraid.

Schoolyard sophisticates used to debate the merits of Parklife vs. Wonderwall — but at my school, they used to do so fag in mouth. Yes, smoking was allowed at my school, albeit in a designated area, so I grant you, it was a less puritanical time. Obviously things are better for me now: I live in Paris, and whatever fondness I may have for the cities of my youth, neither Dublin nor Belfast is Paris.

My life is not a scene from Le Fabuleux Destin d’Amélie Poulain, of course. I have my problems. Don’t we all? I don’t own a home — a fact I shall return to in a moment — and I worry about my ageing parents. Frankly, I need to earn more money than I do.

The very late 1990s were an era of expansion of my horizons, it’s true: I went to art school, made new friends, and began daring to dream that the future existed.

And yet, even into the 2000s I had no idea that I could be a journalist.

Instead I worked a series of low paid administrative jobs and failed to apply even for a graduate entry job to the civil service because I didn’t understand that such things were open to me.

I hope you don’t mistake my view for a panglossian paean to limitless possibilities. You and I both experienced the 2008 crash at a pivotal moment in our lives. I don’t know about you, but for me, living in Dublin, it was nothing short of a nightmare. It beggared me. This is why I do not own a home. The experience of this slow motion horror, I am convinced, informs a great deal in politics today, with people driven mad by lies of self-improvement and the impossible dream of a middle class existence.

Left and right alike, it seems to me, rage against futures both imaginary and likely: the imaginary one a past echo of stability and prosperity; the likely one where we are all locked into precarious lives by the tyranny of algorithms, with the demiurges of Silicon Valley preaching flexibility and self-improvement to the uberised masses while they enjoy a new gilded age.

That, I believe, is the most significant challenge we face today, and the current excesses of political discourse can be understood in light of it. On some level I might be a crude materialist, but I think that there is sufficient justification for arguing that money matters more than most things.

You mention that sexual politics today is prissy and puritanical — but how serious is it? People still meet and drink and dance and have sex, they set up homes, have children and do all of the things they always did.

These things come and go. In his comic autobiography Things Can Only Get Better John O’Farrell paints a picture of the excesses of the 1980s left in a fashion eerily similar to today. It wasn’t even new then. None of the arguments being played out, either on social media or in the pages of broadsheet newspapers, are at all novel: no-one who has read up on how, and why, the New Left of the 1960s abandoned the working class could be surprised by any of it. Conservatives horrified by today’s new-New Left should perhaps shed a tear for the shop stewards of yesteryear.

Anyway, for both of us, then living in Northern Ireland, the 1990s were a watershed time. Peace came to the streets, if not an actual settlement. I think that the significance of this cannot be overstated.

Truthfully, I wasn’t entirely sold on the Belfast Agreement — and still am not. To me, it seemed to entrench sectarianism. Nonetheless, it brought some semblance of normality, so both then and now I have reined in my criticism of the peace process — as I know you, too, have done.

Speaking of politics, you write of John Major and Tony Blair as steady hands on the tiller of the ship of state. Fair enough, but to the young me — a youthful socialist — it was a time of torpor, of arse-paralysing boredom in which the realm of the possible was a one penny rise in the rate of income tax.

What has really changed between now and then is that the wheels came off the credit-fuelled expansion of the economy.

You mentioned Blair going off the edge over Kosovo. This was a pivotal political moment for me; one that solidified my view that imperialist powers like Britain (sorry! I am Irish . . .) had no more business meddling in civil wars, no matter how horrific, in the name of “goodness” than they did doing so in the name of . . . whatever it was that allowed the British, French, Portuguese, Italians, Spanish or anyone else think they had a right to run other people’s countries. That was in 1999.

Nonetheless, I take your point. The 1990s were certainly a calmer era. In today’s febrile times I look back on my sense of ennui and am minded of the Chinese curse “may you live in interesting times”.

But, aren’t you a Brexiteer? I realise that you are not cut from the same cloth as Nigel Farage, but I presume that when your pencil hovered over the ballot paper you drove toward the “Leave” box with some sense of possibility.

The title of O’Farrell’s book was a riff on Blair, of course, who famously used the D:Ream song of the same name as his theme tune. Clearly it was also a double jeux.

But it’s true, isn’t it? Things can only get better. Or if they can’t only get better, at least they can get better. Can’t they?

Your friend,

Jason