Just like the 1960s, the cliché runs that if you can remember the 1990s, you weren’t there.

It’s true. It was the party decade. Just as baby-boomers had the sixties, GenerationX had the 1990s. Back then, we thought we were living at the end of history. That’s what all the big brains - which turned out to be rather small - told us. Instead, the 1990s were really the great holiday from history.

After the dark 1980s - a decade more like the fifties than we acknowledge - the 1990s brought Ecstasy, cheap flights, rising incomes, credit on demand (which would later feed us despair), and politicians who seemed "nice", even "normal": the Blairs, the Clintons. How dumb we were. Though I suppose trance music and pills do that.

Unsurprisingly, then, GenZ is embracing the 1990s. Oasis, Friends, Sex and the City, the lads mag Loaded, and 90s fashion, are all back thanks to under-25s. Academic websites like The Conversation dissect this cultural boomerang moment.

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I get why it’s happening. It's a dire time to be alive, especially if you’re young. The hedonism and innocence of the 1990s offers - if you don’t dig too deep - old-fashioned judgement-free fun in an era when everyone, left or right, acts the self-appointed Sunday school teacher.

The 1990s seem all sex and drugs, high-fashion, quick wits, ironic detachment, cool tunes and late nights: an antidote to anxiety and puritanical "self-care". Why wouldn’t the young love that?

My generation did similar. In the 1980s, GenXers jumped on the 1960s. Instead of Thatcherism and Reaganomics, there was the Velvet Underground and LSD. Sixties tracks re-entered the charts. Morrissey was a living kitchen sink drama.

Like now, nostalgia for times we’d never experienced was pleasing anaesthetic. But there’s darkness in nostalgia. When GenX imbibed 1960s "peace, love and understanding", we overlooked Vietnam, Charles Manson, and racism and sexism of such deadly intensity it scalds. Not all 1960s kids dropped acid in Hyde Park watching the Stones.

Today’s young make the same mistakes we did in the 1980s. They forget the darkness of the 1990s. That’s understandable. The 1990s darkness can be hard to discern because the decade seemingly shines so bright. But la Belle Époque wasn’t so belle.

If you remember hard enough, though, you see the rottenness emerge. The 1990s was the decade when it all went wrong - where every gain made since the Second World War started to be squandered. In that sense, it truly was an historic end-point.

Back in the 90s, the decade had an allure: the power of peace throbbed everywhere. Peace in Ireland. The fall of communism. The end of apartheid. We came of age imagining that we - our righteous anger and street-protests - had changed the world, ushered in a new idyll.

Looking back, youth’s folly and hubris is forgivable. We did play our part, just not as much as we imagined.

Certainly where I’m from, Northern Ireland, peace would have come much slower if we - the peace generation - hadn’t marched, protested and rejected hate and the gun. But all our efforts would have been in vain if our parents and grandparents hadn’t bled themselves white, exhausting ancient reservoirs of vengeance.

With hindsight, peace was a powerful soporific. It put us to sleep. While we celebrated Polish Solidarity and events in Ireland and South Africa, we forgot the places which now haunt us.

Instead of bringing Russia in from the cold after the USSR’s collapse, we strip-mined the country. I remember working in St Petersburg in the mid-90s, horrified at the alcoholism, prostitution, poverty and squalor. Our self-interest permitted Putin - a man who should be chained in the dock at a modern-day Nuremberg trial - to murder democracy.

Likewise, hopes of peace in the Middle East disintegrated before our eyes. The Oslo Accords offered a brief glimpse of a different future. Now, look where we are.

We smiled vacantly as a so-called socially-democratic party in the guise of New Labour embraced Thatcherite economics (what changes?) setting up the 2008 crash, which upended the world just as much as any shot to an archduke’s head in 1914.

Indeed, 1990s narcissism - because what were we if not narcissistic in our endless partying and sardonic dreams of "cool’" - was the grit in the oyster of the 21st century. Narcissism became the binding agent of the last two decades - from reality TV, a gift straight from the 1990s, to populism.

The most monstrous find in any archaeological excavation of the 1990s, though, is the screen. In the 1990s, the internet arrived. We began looking at each other differently - literally and metaphorically. We mediated our lives through screens and that led to this death of empathy we see today - where the screen permits dehumanisation.

There's a revival of interest in the 1990s hit Sex and the CityThere's a revival of interest in the 1990s hit Sex and the City (Image: Channel 4) he same. Yet there’s another dark impulse in both the nostalgia my generation showed for the 1960s, and the nostalgia kids show now for the days of my own youth.

So I don’t judge poor old GenZ seeking fun where it can - because we did the same. Yet there’s another dark impulse in both the nostalgia my generation showed for the 1960s, and the nostalgia kids show now for the days of my own youth.

Both risk rejecting what’s good in the here-and-now. Within GenZ there’s a sense that "woke" - whatever that is - is being discarded in this urge towards 90s hedonism.

Many GenZ boys yearn for that "get em out for the lads" attitude that soaked Loaded’s pages. The spirit of online misogyny runs strong today. To a lesser extent, the trad wives movement sees young women turning to traditional - and submissive - role models.

Back in the 1990s, the yearn for 1960s wild abandon was, partly, a rejection of feminism and "the New Man" concept - where young men knocked their macho edges off, happily accepting their feminine side.

To me, the equality and acceptance that both GenZ and GenX represent is their most precious attribute. Both generations, largely, rejected racism, sexism and homophobia. GenX, while we partied and allowed the world to go to hell, at least maintained those beliefs amid our nostalgia kick.

So, to any GenZers, I’d say: indulge your nostalgia, you deserve it, times are hard. But remember there’s a darkness there, and most of all: hold onto the good your generation stands for; as you get older, you’ll realise that in a squalid world those are the moments of youth that matter.

Neil Mackay is the Herald’s Writer at Large. He’s a multi-award winning investigative journalist, author of both fiction and non-fiction, and a filmmaker and broadcaster. He specialises in intelligence, security, crime, social affairs, cultural commentary, and foreign and domestic politics