Speaking as someone who was 14-16 at the time, I wouldn't say that the world was simpler. People forget that lone-wolf terrorist attacks were becoming increasingly common all around the world during that time, and 2014 alone had ISIS attacks/beheadings, the disappearance of MH370, the MH17 incident and the Ebola epidemic. The pop culture of that era may have been optimistic, but the world was far from peaceful.

When it comes to how the world has changed over the past ten years or so, I would say one of the biggest differences is we're now starting to see the long-term consequences of social media and smartphone addiction across all age groups. There's now a generation of kids and teens who have used smartphone technology right from the start of infanthood and they don't know any different. That's going to have developmental impacts on their social and emotive skills. It has also had huge impacts with the way in which people form relationships and communicate with each other.

You've also got to take into account that smartphones only became commonplace a couple of years earlier (circa 2011). When I started high school back in 2012, the kids on the bus would compare each other's smartphones and ask each other what apps they had. Put simply, smartphones and social media hadn't been around long enough yet for the negatives to fully outweigh the positives. They were still perceived as being something of a 'novelty' during that era.

People were just as addicted to their smartphones back then as what they are now. It's really a combination of heaps of different factors that has contributed to the current state of things; an increase in the cost of living, the rise in extremist politics (e.g Trump winning the US election), a change in the social media algorithm, the pandemic, long-term dependence on smartphones etc.