Netflix! Deliveroo! Whatsapp! How ever did we do without them?

Getting an Uber home from a Tinder date. Bingeing on Netflix while ordering a cheeky Deliveroo. Listening to Spotify in your Airbnb while on an Instagrammable minibreak. For millennials, these are the standard stages of any relationship, but a mere 10 years ago, they would’ve been the babblings of a mad person with a penchant for made-up words.

Similarly, back in 2010, if you’d heard someone talking to Alexa or Siri, you’d have assumed they had some exotically named friends, who they bossed around and barked questions at. How rude. I don’t know why Alexa and Siri put up with you.

Technology moves terrifyingly fast, transforming our lives and language with each decade. This past one has seen mobile phone apps become buzz-verbs in themselves: Whatsapp that message; Shazam that song; Tiktok that dance; Facetime that friend; Dropbox that file; Monzo that money and hush that mouth before you disappear up that backside.

Photo-sharing social network Instagram launched in 2010 and we didn’t hear of ‘influencers’ until 2016. Before that, nobody was declaring ‘sponcon’ (sponsored content), let alone ‘sliding into your DMS’ (the 21stcentury equivalent of chatting someone up in a provincial nightclub).

Similarly beloved by ‘da yoof ’ is multimedia messenger Snapchat, which arrived in 2011, bringing with it those cutesy face filters that make people resemble deranged cartoon puppies or doe-eyed Disney princesses. Kind of endearing for schoolgirls, markedly less so for actual grown-ups.

Ten years ago, nobody knew what a meme was. Frankly, many of us still aren’t sure. (It’s pronounced ‘meem’, by the way – ‘mee-mee’ or ‘may-may’ will get you laughed out of the hipster coffee shop, clutching your flat white of shame.)

Emojis originated in Japan in the late ’90s, but didn’t gain widespread popularity until added to Apple and Android phones between 2011 and 2013. How did we communicate without those cry-with-laughter faces, heart-eyes, fires, fists, flamenco ladies and (sorry Mum) the occasional poo or aubergine? Well, we used words. And occasionally punctuation-based emoticons if we wanted to be all modern :-).

Apple’s first tablet computer wasn’t released until April 2010, so it’s only in the past decade that ‘ipad’ has become common parlance (especially for harassed parents of young children, for whom it’s a de facto babysitter). See also relatively new gadgets such as smartwatches, Airpods, driverless cars and, worst by far, selfie sticks – aka Satan’s extendable arm. Inspector Gadget has a lot to answer for.

The video-gaming crazes of the past decade have undoubtedly been Minecraft (build stuff!) and Fortnite (kill stuff!). The planet also became obsessed with two games that aren’t actually games: fantasy franchises The Hunger Games and Game of Thrones. Just don’t mention the final series of the latter

– it’s still a raw subject with Westeros geeks. Bran the Broken, guys, really?

Our TVS 10 years ago weren’t just smaller in screen, thicker in girth and unsmart in functionality, but were mercifully free from the reality dating phenomenon Love Island and its attendant lingo: ‘melt’, ‘mugged off ’, ‘pied off ’, ‘grafting’, ‘bev’, ‘salty’, ‘snakey’ and their semi-literate ilk. But ‘it is what it is’, as the villa dwellers can’t stop staying.

We can arguably also blame the humping ’n’ dumping guilty pleasure for such regrettable trends as neon bikinis, perspex heels and microbladed eyebrows, not to mention all manner of body anxieties in young viewers.

Musically, the last decade has heralded the arrival of grime figurehead Stormzy, boyband alumnus Harry Styles, pop princess Ariana Grande and, unlikeliest megastar of them all, carrot-topped troubadour Ed Sheeran – a man who looks like he’s come to clean your gutters, rather than rock your world.

Their cinematic equivalents all seemed to be called Chris (Hemsworth/evans/pine/ Pratt) or Ryan (Gosling/reynolds). But not Chris Ryan. He’s an SAS type who’ll probably abseil through the window any second because we’re talking about him.

Our increasingly eco-conscious age has made as much of a cultural impact as an environmental one. The phrase ‘climate change’ has largely replaced its predecessor ‘global warming’, while we now suffer eco-guilt, ponder purchasing electric cars, worry about carbon footprints and food miles, and debate the merits of Extinction Rebellion.

Plant-based diets have become so mainstream that the most talked-about fast-food item of recent years was the Greggs vegan sausage roll. Who saw that particular pastryencased surprise coming? Not Mr Ginster.

A decade ago, nobody was a virtue-signalling snowflake or labelled as woke. None of us were glamping, ghosting, admiring Gareth Southgate’s waistcoats or eating avocado on toast, washed down with kombucha or matcha. Best of all, we’d never heard the word ‘Brexit’. Ah, if only we knew.