• A friend or a lover would still go through all the trouble to make you a mixed tape or a mixed cd
  • Politicians couldn’t build a career from their twitter account…
  • SMSs and some emails covered all your digitial connections
  • A friend or a lover might, occasionally, still send you a handwritten letter
  • You made friends in bars, not online
  • 15 year old kids didn’t become millionaires playing FIFA on YouTube
  • The only motivational speaker you had ever heard of -perhaps- was called Tony Robbins
  • Your friends didn’t maniacally invite you to like their very own Facebook page as though they are a celebrity
  • Only fairly talented people got to be celebrities
  • We could still dream that a cool black guy could change American imperial politics (he so did not, this poster boy for the military industrial complex, Wallstreet, drone warfare and everything else the US excels at) Obama was just the same shit, but from a better brand name… (Yes, I admit it, I can’t stand the guy, people just fall for his speech style, that’s überphony if you ask me. Though I can stand Trump and Hillary Clinton and any Republican presidential candidate even less. The last Republican president I liked was Abraham Lincoln)
  • It looked like the cold war was over (who knew we had merely taken a break from that mess?)
  • You could still have the illusion that one regular job would pay your bills
  • Flying cost money and no huge pile of marketing shit was forced down your throat while flying to compensate for the ‘low cost fare’
  • Bill Gates was the only billionaire you could name
  • None of your friends were obsessed with becoming rich
  • Apple was just a company not a ‘life style’
  • God wasn’t called Elon Musk or Steve Jobs or Gary V.
  • You didn’t have to worry about being publicly crucified for expressing sexual interest in an adult (in Belgium you did already have to sweat blood  if you so much as looked at a child, thanks to mister Dutroux and his helpers)
  • If you sat up all night chatting you almost always still did  it face to face
  • The ‘everyone is an entrepreneur heading for success’ craze hadn’t started yet
  • Lifehacking wasn’t a real word yet
  • Marihuana was still edgy unless you were Dutch
  • 14 year olds didn’t run massive internet companies making you look like the dumbest person on earth
  • The then equivalent of bitcoin was known as ‘gold’ and it wasn’t becoming the biggest bubble since tulips
  • Not everyone was obsessed with getting a passive income, realizing his or her ‘potential’
  • ‘The secret’ hadn’t caught up everybody in a wave of ‘positive visualization’ yet
  • Genocide seemed to belong to the past, finally… (ha!)
  • Celebrities dying at 27 could still be seen as some weird cooincidence
  • You could look forward to the next movie with Robin Williams
  • There were more alternative cinemas
  • As far as I remember porn was still fairly tricky to get to, as you had to risk a major virus if you downloaded it, or go and rent or buy it at store
  • Your 12-year old cousin hadn’t seen infinitely more porn than you had at 23
  • When you met up with friends you didn’t sit down to stare at a small screen
  • You rarely ordered stuff online, at least not in Europe
  • When you needed to arrange something at a bank there was an actual human being you interacted with, not a machine or a computer
  • So many firms hadn’t relocated to low wage countries yet
  • Nobody was too big to fail and nobody was too big to jail
  • Most of us still thought that you made money by actually producing something real, not derivatives and other shady financial ‘products’
  • You NEVER took a picture of your food
  • What’s a selfie? Is that slang for masturbation?