IF you’re in possession of both a Facebook login and an uncle, you’re probably familiar with those ‘You KNOW you were a ‘70s kid if…’ posts.

‘You KNOW you were a ‘70s kid if you kicked a ball about in the street before going off for a shift down t’ mines and spending your last ha’penny on a book of racist jokes we didn’t play the SEGA PLAYSTATION Share if you agree!’.

There are people out there for whom ‘didn’t have an iPhone when I was 7’ is a defining personality trait.

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With a cost of living crisis on top of a pandemic, few could be blamed for looking wistfully to the past. These memes are harmless fun when used purely as an exercise in nostalgia, but there are people whose entire outlook is based on attempting to get back to some idyllic version of the past that never really existed.

It’s this kind of worldview that underpinned Donald Trump’s ‘Make America Great Again’ campaign, in which relentless dog-whistling led many to hear ‘Make America White Again’.

The worst thing that happens to a 51-year-old straight middle-class white man if he has to go back to 1978 is no longer having access to an app that allows him to send ‘Looking hot today hunni xoxo’ messages to 32-year-old Sky Sports presenters.

The worst thing that happens to anyone else in 1978 is considerably more serious.

Another popular trend is ‘You KNOW you were a successful ‘90s English footballer if…’, in which legends from a bygone age of gruff manliness tell us where today’s young players are going wrong off the pitch as well as on it.

After Manchester United players were spotted at a UFC fight, United legend and Sky Sports pundit Gary Neville tweeted: “I remember a time when United players, managers, executives wouldn’t be seen in their local Italian after a draw at home let alone getting knocked out of Europe. This last week we’ve seen a global tour of F1, Concerts, Cricket and UFC events. This lot are Tone Deaf!”.

Neville could always ask his former team-mate Ryan Giggs what he was up to for eight of the years in which they played together. And if he can’t get an answer out of him, he can ask Giggs’ divorced brother.

And then there was former Rangers and now Aston Villa manager Steven Gerrard, who responded to Arsenal’s Buyako Saka telling a referee that he required more protection by saying: “I’m sitting here now with screws in my hips. I’ve had about 16 operations. I’m struggling to go to the gym at the moment. That’s all on the back of earning a living in English football. He’ll learn and he’ll learn quick”.

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At the age of 20, Saka has already played in one more major international final than Gerrard did during his entire 18-year playing career, but he apparently can’t be considered an elite footballer until he accepts that sustaining lifelong physical damage is part of his job description.

Living like a hermit and being repeatedly kicked by opponents might have been considered necessary sacrifices in the macho world of ‘90s football, but times have changed. That’s a good thing.

What the ‘70s uncles and ‘90s footballers have in common is a belief that men were men back in their day. Strong, stiff upper lip, that kind of thing. We now know how dangerous that attitude can be.

Public Health Scotland reported that 71.4% of registered suicide deaths in 2020 were for men. That old-school attitude of repressing your feelings and not opening up has serious consequences.

A 2015 Cancer Research UK survey, meanwhile, found that patients were ignoring warning signs because they didn’t want to trouble their doctor. Dr Katriina Whitaker told the Independent: “The stiff-upper-lip stoicism of some who decided not to go to their doctor was alarming because they put up with often debilitating symptoms”.

The Scottish comedian Mark Nelson recently tweeted: “Always love the ‘Should you be allowed to smack children?’ debate. ‘I was smacked as a kid and it never did me any harm’. Yes it did. It turned you into a prick who beats up children”.

Yes, you might have been able to climb a tree in the ‘70s without ‘bloody health and safety’, but the next day you could have ended up getting beaten with a cane by your teacher. I hope we can agree that your children never having 
seen a Cat o’ nine tails is a good thing.

It’s true that things were better in your day, but not because things were better in the ‘70s or ‘90s. They were better because you were young. There was a point during childhood when you didn’t know rainbows existed, then you saw one and your mind was blown.

All you discover as an adult is more efficient ways of loading a dishwasher.
‘70s kids didn’t eschew iPhones out of some ideological purity. They just didn’t exist. If they had, those kids would have been on Facebook instead of playing on the street.
And ‘50s kids would have been sharing memes moaning about it.