I was in high school in 2001 and I am sorry to say but it was, indeed, pretty good. I went to Europe that summer on a music trip / music program. I didn't have a cellphone or an email address or at least not one that I ever checked, I called my parents every few days with a calling card from a different host family's house. Sometimes my parents weren't there and I left a message on an answering machine with a little tape. I felt far away from home, but looking back I think I felt farther away from home than maybe I ever have since or maybe ever will again. No email, no cellphone. I don't think I will ever have that in my life. It's hard to accurately remember the past of your youth. You remember your feelings, but those might not really be accurate representations of the time. Actually, often they aren't. Nevertheless, I try to really see as much of the truth as possible and I am pretty good at being objective, and on the big stuff - it was a good time to be in high school. I hate to blame so much on the internet, especially because so much of my life and opportunities are made possible by the internet, but I am an adult, not a kid, and the internet and the smartphone really has made a lot of life worse for kids and that's what we are talking about here. That's a really big difference that trickles down into lots of stuff. The ways in which that time felt "optimistic" or maybe rather just "normal" are related to the absence of the smartphone more than anything else. By and large the smartphone makes us more unhappy than we need to be. I'm not being nostalgic because I loved high school either. The truth is, I actually kind of hated high school. I was ready to go to college by the time I was 16. Still, it was pretty good. No, the early 00s were not perfect. They were not some golden age of the world. Yeah, of course, you can find problems with any time and there are probably some things that are better today, but all in all, it was a pretty good time to be in high school. I know there are people who like to "akshually" everything and would point to a number of things to try to pretend like it was a terrible time, but that's all crap. It wasn't a perfect time, but it was a fine time. More things were right than were wrong, and particularly the big things. And that's what matters.