We burned hot and bright. Maybe too hot, too bright. An entire generation learned to live beyond its means, to live fast, drive fast, eat fast, talk fast. Our saviour was information technology and our totem was the mobile phone. The economy was our sun - and now our wings are burnt. We're afraid to fly, literally and figuratively. Risk-taking no longer seems an economically sensible option.
The world changed on September 11th, and we changed too. We're only beginning to understand how much.
One day, it seemed, Ireland was at the peak of success. The next, we were plunged into fear, uncertainty, anxiety and disbelief. The global village that had Ireland at its rapidly beating, technological heart, brought us a terror unprecedented even for us, who are used to living with terrorism.
Psychological terror is the new virus of the global village. We feel trapped in a spider's web with a masterful Osama bin Laden at its centre. We don't know what's going to happen next. Biological terrorism? A plane crashing into Sellafield? It doesn't matter if we're personally affected or not. The fear is enough to give our economy cardiac arrest.
What inventive forms of psychological torture will the terrorists surprise us with next? As we struggle to hang on to some sense of perspective, we're terrified to switch on Sky News for the latest fear alert.
Our former confidence and narcissism now seem silly. A world that had become bored with AIDS (a real threat), now fears Anthrax. Cipro, the antibiotic, is outselling Viagra and the manufacturers cannot keep up with demand. The gay 1990s, which in retrospect appear a reflection of the gay 1890s, have given way to the anxious noughts.
Those who lived through the 1980s recession are strangely sanguine. "Thank God we don't have to feel guilty any more," whispers a fortysomething woman whose husband's business thrived during the boom.
"At least we can slow down now," confides another, who found herself seduced by the success culture, then resented its demands.
Those who came of age in the 1990s, who didn't know unemployment and spent their disposable incomes on clubbing and coke, eating out and E, are still in denial.
"There's no recession," said one. "It's just the latest media spin." God help them.
Our lifestyles and habits were due an overhaul, says the 1980s generation. But it's well for them, with their houses that burst with equity and can stand a 15 per cent drop in value. The bold, the brash and the young who never knew recession but could still never afford to buy a house, will have to learn to cope as well as their parents' generation with changing priorities.
The Celtic Tiger, that boring clichΘ, is already being eclipsed by the Celtic Soul - are you ready? Mark Hayward, chairman of the Henley Centre (which specialises in social/consumer forecasting) says that if he could choose one investment in the post-September 11th environment it would be "religion".
The candles of hope lit by New York survivors are our flickering flames too. The frailty and vulnerability of life make us more aware of the spiritual. Says Hayward: "It's a bit early to call. There is too much uncertainty to say how things will settle down, but I think we will react in certain ways. We will live for the moment. We will postpone long-term commitments like houses, holidays and cars. We will realise that personal growth is what it's all about. We will do more uplifting things, like going to church. And we will focus on family. There are stories coming out of New York about people cancelling their divorces, saying: 'Maybe we should just try to get on together'. "
Life was getting too superficial anyway, believes Hayward, who is married to an Irish woman from booming Naas, in Co Kildare. "We all have too many things. Our cupboards are overflowing with too much stuff," he believes.
For many of us, a simpler life won't come as a shock. "We've already worked it out," he says. We'll still spend money, but on feelings of well-being rather than things.
We'll be minimalist, paying more for less. Alternative therapies and "holistic weekends" will do well, predicts Gerard O'Neill, managing director of Amβrach Consulting, which tracks consumer behaviour. If he could invest in anything, it would be "pampering".
"People are very worried about the world as a whole, about the economy and politics, but they are still fairly comfortable personally. At the moment, the Irish have a split personality. They believe things are getting worse, but an economic slowdown is not a reality that has impacted personally," says O'Neill.
He forecasts that consumers will avoid big spending on obvious, ostentatious purchases such as cars, homes and overseas holidays. Instead, they will spend money on "feeling good" - household furnishings and accessories, luxury, self-indulgence, therapies and treats.
The two generations - the one that knew recession and the younger one which lived with the boom - may react differently. Those who have grown up in affluent times will not change as much as the older group, which will "batten down the hatches", O'Neill says.
The beneficiaries of the spend-now, pay-later economy - retailers, the leisure industry, publicans and restaurants - are "not being affected at all", O'Neill says. Two-thirds of people are regularly eating out, compared with one quarter of people a decade ago. "That's not going to change," he says.
"There are 700,000 more jobs than there were in 1991; that's massive spending power. We are still coming to terms with this new- fangled thing of a revved-up economy. A slow-down was predicted before September 11th. Our economy has matured and we will experience modest growth and modest declines, but the cake still gets bigger," he says optimistically.
Greg Craig, public relations officer of Fβs, is equally positive: "Most of the people laid off recently have got jobs in indigenous industries," he says. Employees will have to get used to flexibility, up-skilling and retraining to cope with a changing market, but they will not become long-term unemployed. Good investments in this market are adult education and retraining, he predicts.
Should we dare think that we're not as vulnerable as we fear? Kevin Denny, of UCD's Department of Economics, thinks so: "My view is that people are over-reacting. The economy was slowing down anyway. September 11th has made as big an impact on consciousness as it has on the economy. Whether it has actually changed the world is a question we can't answer yet. Maybe there's a further crisis downstream. But business people are fairly hard-nosed about these things. They don't panic, by and large. I'd be inclined to think it's not going to change Western society as we know it."
Business people know we could go either way this Christmas - choosing frugality out of fear, or spending like crazy because this may be the last Christmas in a long time for indulgence. Dr Maureen Gaffney, psychologist and chairwoman of the National Economic and Social Forum, thinks we will "go mad", which, she adds, is what we should do if we want to keep the economy buzzing.
Consciousness can change the economy, she points out. Economists can predict trends, but they cannot predict what happens inside the psychological "black box", as Gaffney describes it, where a trend shifts from acceptable slowdown to frightening decline and recession.
"We could talk ourselves into a recession," she fears. Ireland's new air of uncertainty has overtaken a period "when the Irish survived by having an unrealistic, narcissistic view of our own invincibility," she says.Celtic Tiger Ireland was like an "infallible" adolescent setting out in the world, and now it has been given a rude shock. "There is a general fear of uncertainty, a free-floating anxiety, about the future of the world. People are ready to panic, particularly considering the biological threat. We're a bit like someone in rude good health who discovers that they have to go in to hospital for tests. There's a fear that everything will fall apart on us," says Gaffney.
The renewed awareness of the randomness of death, which the terrorism against the US brought us, has given us a greater appreciation of our humanity, she says. "In the twin towers, when death was coming, people picked up their mobile phones and phoned families to say 'I love you'. It's all you can fall back on in the end."
When the world is in mourning, for the US victims as well as for victimised Afghans, it's a time to count your blessings and hold your family close.
"People's instincts are to bind together and to love. If that instinct can be built on, on an individual level, if parents of young children can use this feeling by spending more time with their kids, then that's how we will heal ourselves," says Gaffney.
On an economic level, we need our political leaders to be aware that economic confidence is a subtle psychological weapon. Gaffney warns: "There's a people management aspect. Our politicians and economists should be engaging with the complexity of people's real fears. They should be trying to understand what that elusive concept of confidence means so as to engage with it, discuss its mechanism and give them a sense of how they can get control over it. If it's managed properly and if politicians and economists can engage with people's fears, I'm optimistic."
However, the world is a place nobody can control, as anyone knows who has lost a parent or a child, who has been personally victimised by crime or terrorism, who has got that bad result from hospital tests. Despite Gaffney's reassuring words, we all know that we are facing uncertainty as never before.
While the older generation may be philosophical, the young have a rude shock in store, whatever way you look at it. They don't remember JFK's assassination and they didn't experience the 1960s. For them, the world ended on September 11th. Optimism died. And just as the generation born in the 1950s grew up fearing nuclear war, the current generation of children and young people are living in dread of terrorism and biological attack. This is a new fear, and the novel is more terrifying than the old. We would be arrogant to predict how the young will cope with it.
There are no boundaries any more. No city or country limits to cordon off prospective victims. We are all potential casualties. We aren't like the steel-minded Londoners of the second World War hiding in bunkers from the bombs and cheering the Americans. There are no good guys and bad guys, no matter what President Bush would have us believe.
This ambiguity is at the heart of the real spiritual crisis. On the Friday after September 11th, the official Day of Mourning, young people flocked to religious services. One of the people who experienced this phenomenon was Gordon Linney, Church of Ireland Archdeacon of Dublin. "Two of the icons of the materialist age came crashing down - the twin towers. And then the Pentagon, the symbol of Western military superiority, was attacked. The vulnerability of it all was exposed in those terrible events."
"Religion was misused by both sides," Linney adds. "When Bush said 'God Bless America', he was denying the reality that God is not just the God of Christian America. Science has been misused as well, in the way it's being used to create biological terrorism. "People are realising that religion and science are not the culprits - the culprit is man," says Linney.
Our assumptions that religion and science are forces for good have been undermined. "Our sense of stability, our sense of security and material well-being have been taken away and the implications have inspired deep subconscious anxieties."
The young could as easily turn away from religion. "After the first World War, there was a rejection of religion, as people asked how God could have sat back and watched 10 million people die," says Linney.
"God is dead" was the clarion call of the 1960s after the JFK assassination, Vietnam and attempts at "revolution". So could the new spirituality, which the forecasters predict, become a narcissistic comfort zone pandered to by sellers of candles and essential oils? Or will it be a genuine spiritual crisis culminating in a better world? It's too early to say.
Various critics have talked about Hollywood films predicting the World Trade Centre disaster, but maybe the truly prescient film was the bohemian love story, Moulin Rouge, with its motto: "Truth, Beauty, Freedom, Love." Set in 1890s Paris, the film celebrates idealism as an ultimately self-destructive concept. Truth, beauty, freedom and love cannot exist in a world where sex is for sale and where beauty, freedom and love are marketing opportunities.
Faced with recession, will we dare to find "beauty" in a painting we cannot own? Find "freedom" in public transport rather than a car? Discover "love" in families that stick together no matter what? And find "truth" anywhere at all, in a propaganda-rich information age in which the economy is the centre, the religion, the sun? God - whoever you are - be with us all.