When Social Media Was Actually Fun

Just read Liz Plank’s “Millennials Were The Last Generation to Have it All” and it hit me right in the nostalgia. She captures something essential about 2013-2015 that I’ve been thinking about for a while.

Remember when social media was actually fun? Before everything became content? When we posted blurry photos with ridiculous captions and nobody was trying to optimise their personal brand?

Liz calls 2013-2015 “the best two-year stretch in human history” and I’m inclined to agree. It was that sweet spot when technology connected us without consuming us. When being earnest wasn’t yet embarrassing.

What struck me was how this period coincides with what I observed in my own research on India’s civil society landscape. So many impactful organisations were founded around 2013. Clearly these weren’t just random startups – they were born from that brief window of millennial optimism when structural change felt genuinely possible. Maybe that’s why they’ve lasted. They were created because we believed we could reshape the world for the better.

Originally written for LinkedIn on 7 April 2025. View original →