This week’s deep philosophical discussion centres around a photo from the early 2000s (or “the beginning of the century” as I like to call it). The grainy photo posted on TikTok depicted a fairly typical scene from a teenage house party. In it, four couples were pashing next to one another on a huge black leather couch. The caption read: “Facebook albums were crazy because what do you mean you’d go to a house party then upload a picture like this THEN TAG EVERYONE?”

Umm, yes. Yes, we did.

Although I was well past my teenage years by the time Facebook came along, I was not above posting a whole heap of pics from a night out, mostly taken on my tiny digital camera that I carried around with me because iPhones weren’t invented yet. We would have to pull the memory stick out of our camera and plug it into our clunky laptops to upload the pics, then transfer them to a Facebook album en masse. Oh, simpler times. A bunch of slightly out of focus, almost identical photos showing the progressive degradation caused by industrial amounts of Bacardi Breezers? Sure. Let’s add that to our digital footprints. Why not?

Here’s why it was so exciting to us. Because I’m from the generation where if we wanted to take a photo of something to commemorate an event, we had to load film into a camera, take the photo, take another 23 photos, take the film out of the camera, take it to the chemist, wait a week, go back to the chemist, pick up the photos, discover that in 18 of them your thumb was partially covering the lens, pick the best few, put them into a physical photo album and wait until someone came over and then force them to look.

Can you imagine how much we lost our minds when we could delete photos we had just taken? Or upload them immediately? Or take our memory sticks to Officeworks and print them out? Or yes, put them on Facebook for our 28 friends to see? These were heady days, my friends.

And so I look at the kids of today (not in a creepy way) and see how proficient they are at posing, editing and filtering their photos. They are selective about what they present to the world. They know not to post 30 pictures of the same thing because one photo where they look hot is enough. They also know that their social media feeds are often the first thing that new friends or love interests look at, so they know how to put their best foot forward.

Meanwhile, us gen Xers over here are still scarred from school ball photos, where we borrowed our mum’s lipstick and ran a brush through our hair, because it was a special occasion. We might’ve even plucked the bejesus out of our eyebrows, but there was not a drop of fake tan to be seen anywhere. Now girls heading to the school ball look like they’re international models. None of them are wearing dresses made by their mums, I can tell you that much.

Mind you, they also all have six-step skincare routines comprised of products they saw on TikTok and bought at Mecca. No wonder they look good. My skincare routine as a teenager consisted of Aapri exfoliating scrub, witch hazel toner and a dab of Ponds cream, which was so awful and bad for my skin that I abandoned any sort of skincare until my 40s. I’m now attempting to right a lifetime of wrongs. I should be the one with unfettered access to Instagram filters. Pop a Paris on me, it’s the least I deserve.

Of course, last century was a simpler time. If we wanted to talk on the phone to a boy, it had to be done in front of the whole family because, in most houses, the phone was in the kitchen ATTACHED TO THE WALL. The height of sophistication in our sheltered little worlds was a phone with a long cord that could be carried into another room. We literally dreamt about it. Alas it was only for the rich (and therefore popular).

Now kids have phones in the palm of their hands and still they don’t talk on them. They spend their whole lives messaging one another on an array of different platforms.

But at least they look good doing it.