I was in college in the early 2000s. I've never used a dating app. I have dated since the advent of dating apps.
The generation that has grown up with apps (esp social media apps) for everything has really gotten the short end of the stick in my opinion. There's an image consciousness that underlies everything now. Everything needs to have that Best Life sheen.
Take for example, the differing experiences of getting a tattoo. When I got one, it was a classic impulsive decision. I didn't save up for it for months, I didn't even think about what I wanted until I was in the studio (a word applied loosely here...) looking at a binder of the art (a word applied loosely here...) people got tattoos of. I didn't have a voice in my head that said "picking from the same 50 tattoos as everybody else is BASIC", didn't seek out a renowned artist who might pose with me for a selfie and @mention me afterward, none of that. I was incapable of even forming the thought. There definitely wasn't some heart-rending, inspiring story behind it that would get hundreds of likes on Instagram. I just got a little tipsy, got a questionable idea in my head, went down to a very working class strip mall and bam, from then on I had a tattoo.
Consider also: I didn't try to hide that tattoo from my parents and they still didn't find out about it for nearly an entire year. The other day a friend of mine was able to deduce that in the beginning of the past decade they had slept with someone who was now in a relationship with their coworker/acquaintance based on an internet search, and my parents didn't know I had a tattoo for an entire year! Once everyone could see what everyone else was doing, you couldn't just get a tattoo out of the tattoo binder any more. The average tattoo I see nowadays is far more artfully executed, well thought out and tastefully designed. The freedom to not worry about these things, however, was vastly underrated.
You still had to worry about your image back then, but it wasn't this always-on national pastime. When you were around someone you wanted to impress, you tried to impress them. When you weren't, you just did other things. If you and your friends went hiking and decided to get a photo of yourselves at the top of the mountain? Decent chance the film was never developed at all. Best case, it ends up on someone's corkboard as a happy memory. You could eat a cheesesteak when you visited Philadelphia without the exhausting worry about whether this particular place was the too-famous one that marked you as a lame tourist because everybody knows is strictly for out-of-towners only. You just ate a sandwich and moved on with your life.
Life was better when we weren't so acutely aware that we were being observed.
Dating is harder now. I agree with some of the somewhat controversial comments on here in that it probably is more of a winner take all game now than it was in the past. The mistake to my way of thinking is in throwing up your hands, going full on misanthrope and dismissing everybody who is having success on these platforms as a bunch of Chads and Stacys. You don't have to play the Tinder game even if you're of this generation. It can work even if your not the sort who can just sit down on a barstool and wait for opportunity to find you. Cultivate an IRL social network. You'll be surprised how much mileage you get out of friend of a friend or friend of a friend of a friend dating.