So, here we are. To steal John Lennon's cheery thoughts on the subject: another year over, a new one just begun. It is the time of year where every newspaper, every magazine and every TV station thinks it has a duty to look back over the last twelve months and nod knowingly about contemporary culture and changing times.

But frankly, what is the point? When popular nostalgia gets as far as the mid-noughties and the beeb gets around to making "I love 2004", probably some time next March, what will it be getting nostalgic about? What will stand out as the crazy trends that, older and wiser, we will look back on and mutter "I can't believe we liked that . . ?"

The only candidates I can see from my rather London-centric view of the world are art school indie and haircuts that make you look like a crow. The whole of 2004 has felt conspicuously short of new ideas.

Doctor Who is coming back, bringing Billie Piper with him. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy has gone one better, returning in not one but two media several years after its writer’s death. And however good new bands like Franz Ferdinand and the Scissor Sisters are, they render questions such as "who are your influences" superfluous.

Again, almost ten years after her creation, Bridget Jones still struggles to hang on to Darcy. Even that silly habit of skirts being worn over trousers is just a flashback to 1999. The world is getting like summer Sunday afternoons on BBC1: endless repeats with just a touch of religious fanaticism for flavour.

The feeling that we have been here before is not a new one either. As far back as the mid-nineties, critics derided Britpop as a slightly less interesting rerun of the sixties, while the ravers were already complaining that the glory days were over.

It is no better in politics. New Labour and New Democrats were conceived in the early nineties, based on the idea that it was better not to have ideas. Ideology was out: management culture in.

Today, Britain's three party leaders all scorn the notion of "big ideas". On the other side of the Atlantic, while I still feel John Kerry would have made a better President than George Bush, I have to concede that the incumbent had a point when he said that nobody had a bloody clue what Kerry stood for.

In his 1989 book, The End of History and the Last Man, Francis Fukuyama argued that we had reached "the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind's ideological evolution".

Politicians seem to have taken Fukuyama at his word, and promptly abandoned having new ideas, as if under the mistaken belief that they were Amish – irritatingly, Fukuyama's prediction that liberal democracy was about to triumph as the unquestioned form of government has yet to come to pass.

Whatever you say about Thatcher – and, believe me, what I say is unflattering – she undeniably had new ideas, a view of the world and an idea of how to remake it in a way that was, to her mind at least, better. But such grand narratives have been conspicuous by their absence from British politics ever since.

Labour, burnt by its experiences in the early 1980s, swapped ideas for management ethos. The Tories, meanwhile, remain stuck in the groove they slipped into twenty-five years ago, unable or unwilling to move on. The party leadership seems unable to deal with the fact that much of Thatcherism – weak unions, free market economics, elevating the individual over the group – has become common.

Howard goes on fighting battles that have already been won, and then gets confused and annoyed about Blair stealing his thunder. Until the party comes up with a new idea – or at least, stops pushing its old one – it will continue to look like it is trying to solve yesterday's problems and is irrelevant to today's world.

But they are not alone. The whole of Western culture seems to have jammed some time in the late eighties. In the cult movie Donnie Darko, the world ends on October 31st, 1988. It is a good choice, coinciding neatly with the beginning of the end for original thought.

This was a time when Reagan, another man with a plan, was about to leave office, Thatcher's position was severely diminished and Labour had begun edging towards the centre. Although it would be another twelve years before they took the White House, even the neo-cons, having come together during the Reagan administration, already had a plan to remake the world.

By the end of 1988, the second summer of love was over: soon Groove is in the Heart would be upon us. A few bursts of originality would still take place in the US – notably grunge and hiphop – but the UK would never again see a movement on the scale of the mods, hippies, punks or ravers. History had dozed off.

Instead, it has all been endless nostalgia, cultural flashbacks since. Retro fads, I love 1960s, I love 1970s, I love 1980s, music designed by committee rather than those with something to say, reality TV that involves no creativity almost by definition, britpop, boybands, girlbands, remixes, remakes, New Labour, New Democrats, nu-metal – none of which had much new about them – and a regression to 1950s paranoia and values in the US. No new tunes, just variations on a theme.

This is not the ranting of a middle-aged guy complaining that the great days are behind us –you will have to go to Michael Howard for that. I was born in 1980. I have spent ten years waiting for my generation's cultural zeitgeist – not, admittedly, doing much in the way of creating it myself – but found nothing but commercialised music and a hundred splintered interest groups with nothing to bind them but the use of the Internet. It says something that one of what passed for the fads of 2004 was for "eclectic" DJs – they created nothing new, they merely rearranged the old in a more interesting way.

In 1985, Turner Prize judges short-listed artist Ian Hamilton Finlay for an enormous stone carving, now housed in the Tate Modern, that read: "The world has been empty since the Romans."

If only he had known.