I remember my childhood mostly as a happy, oblivious one, affordable food, the usual disagreements between liberals and republicans, but nothing unhinged (say taxes, migrants or abortion). At least it looks reasonable today.
Now it’s like everything is unhinged: politics seem to be based on purely emotional reactions and the other side is hell bent on destroying the country: texas starts heavily gerrymandering to secure 5 extra republican seats at the next midterms? california starts lobbying for doing exactly the same and dismantling an independent redistricting commission texas never had.
When I was younger it seemed politics were more rational and cruelty never seemed to be the point of doing nothing. Now we execute people with nitrogen gas, meaning a conscious person has to breathe something he knows its going to kill him during 4 minutes. This is somehow not cruel and unusual. And nobody bats an eye.
I still don’t get how populists can be so popular now, they simplify complex issues most people without a degree in the matter, cannot grasp. This includes me.
I’m now 35 and wonder if I’m already talking like an old person who misses his young days so hard. I see that in people in their 60s and hoped never to become one of them, but here I am. To a younger person I may look like one of those old guys who lives to rant.
Am I going to feel even more detached and depressed with each passing day?
Person born in the late 70’s here
Although birth of social media took a gigant shit on peoples general mindset and world feels more divided, right wing and missing “street level” empathy, world is still better.
For example in the 80’s autistic people were just mentally retarded, dyslexic people were just stupid, bullying in schools was normal behaviour and part of being young, violence among teenagers was more commonplace, attitude that animals were just biological machines with instinctual reactions and just appearance of some cognition was more commonplace. 80’s yuppie culture made it fashionable to be a wealthy asshole.
In the 90’s home computers became common. Recession had bankrupted many high rolling yuppies. Nerds were no longer beaten for knowing how tech works. Gamer culture was no longer niche phenomenon. Cold war was over and nuclear armageddon was distant thing. Youth culture still had this doom and gloom attitude. Everyone was a flannel wearing tortured skater boy/girl. 90’s was the “tomboy era”, where girls were allowed to dress and act like boys without being socially ostracised. More attention was focused on mental health and colorful spectrum of human mind.
Late 90s and early 00 internet really started rolling, smarphones started to appear, social media was born. World became very small and everyone who wanted was a content creator. Suddenly large portion of population communicated with people outside their country on a daily basis.
This was the best time in the Internet. Search engines started to actually work and new webpages were sometimes an actual joy. Algorithms weren’t corrupting things and polarizing everything. Autogenerated content was yet to come. Internet and social media was infused as essential part of our lives.
2010’s the enshittification started and commercialization was on full gear. 2020 has become the era of stupid. AI, autogenerated content, polarization and dead internet.
But even with all this, I still think it’s now better for the average person than the cold war paranoia world of the 70-80’s.
We are however on a downward spiral and I’m hoping for a counter reaction in coming decades. Hoping that ignorances of past world are just making noise and attracting attention before they vanish for good.
Are you American? I’d really like to know.
Nordic
The Matrix was built to resemble the late 90s-00, “the pinnacle of civilization”
Oh shit.
It can be both. This is also very specific to the western world and america in general, as other parts of the world have very different experiences, both good and bad
When I was younger it seemed politics were more rational and cruelty never seemed to be the point of doing nothing.
The cruelty was outside our borders. The rational, reasonable debate was for domestic issues. Foreigners got the bullet.
As the empire collapses the cruelty turns inwards i.e. fascism.
“We were just minding our own business invading other countries for oil.”
I’ve (36m) asked my mother and grandfather if I’m overreacting.
My grandfather (104 when he died. He was so “dust bowl” he mother died of the dust in the dust bowl. Dust pneumonia. Yeah can’t get more depression era than that without also being a shoe shine boy at a carnival ): I killed the nazis once. I can kill them again
My mother (80f I asked here again just now. Right now face to face): I’ve never seen this cult behavior before. Never in my life. People will bury their trump flags in the ground and deny they ever supported him. Like the nazis did.
Yes this bad. It’s historically significant how bad it is. People will read about this moment in history and think “I hope my grandfather wasn’t a trumpet” as the look up their ancestors. Grandfathers will lie to their families about what they were doing right now. They will even shame me because all I did was comment online.
It’s specifically bad right now.
40 here. Your sentiments are my sentiments.
Fuck this place. But also we gotta fix it.
The era of Pax Americana is over. There is a global realignment underway. The future is more uncertain than any of us have known in our lifetime.
For a while there was an idea that globalization would elevate the world. This post war era was the first part of our lives. It turns out America and Europe decided it isn’t acceptable when the world actually started having it good. So now we have to burn it all down and enter a phase of heightened global conflict. We’ll kill each other until we’re tired of that. Then maybe there will be another period of relative peace. Seems to be the nature of humanity.
Grew up watching news of Palestinians and Israelis killing each other. Good thing that was 40 years ago.
In late 2023 there was a video of a tower in Gaza being hit by israeli missiles, and the media were calling it misinformstion because it was a clip from like Jan of that year
Free Palestine
If you’re in the west then it’s worse now because capitalism is reaching the stages of systemic collapse. For people living in countries like China or Vietnam the picture is quite different. They see their lives improving each and every day. They have clean cities, great infrastructure, and a rate of technological progress we can only dream of. Those of us living in the west are living through a similar collapse to the one that happened in USSR in the 90s, but the west is only 13% of the world population.
Climate change alone makes it objectively worse. The widespread rise of fascism also I think makes objectively worse. So yeah it’s bad.
Welcome to being a Doomer. 90s was according to several sources the best time ever in human history, the peak that is.
“The crux of the problem is that, geopolitically and demographically speaking, for most of the last seventy-five years, we have been living in that perfect moment. At the end of World War II, the Americans created history’s greatest military alliance to arrest, contain, and beat back the Soviet Union…What is often forgotten, however, is that this alliance was only half the plan. In order to cement their new coalition, the Americans also fostered an environment of global security so that any partner could go anywhere, anytime, interface with anyone, in any economic manner, participate in any supply chain and access any material input – all without needing a military escort. This butter side of the Americans’ guns-and-butter deal created what we today recognize as free trade. Globalization. Globalization brought development and industrialization to a wide swath of the planet for the first time, generating the mass consumption societies and the blizzard of trade and the juggernaut of technological progress we all find so familiar. And that reshaped global demographics. Mass development and industrialization extended life spans, while simultaneously encouraging urbanization. For decades that meant more and more workers and consumers, the people who give economies some serious go. One outcome among many was the fastest economic growth humanity has ever seen. Decades of it…But all things must pass. We now face a new change in condition…”
- Peter Zeihan, The End of the World Is Just the Beginning: Mapping the Collapse of Globalization
This book is: Something
Top comment here describes it better then I can;
https://goodreads.com/book/show/58782897-the-end-of-the-world-is-just-the-beginning
This is a very US-centered comment. It’s ridiculous to say the 90s was the best time in human history during the same decade when the USSR collapsed and living standards for millions of people dropped substantially. That should automatically exclude the decade from “best in human history”, if you consider humanity to include all of humanity.
You’re completely correct.
I stand corrected.
Apart from politics, which is always pretty up and down, my two biggest concerns for the world are
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Nobody seems to know how to build things any more. Watching companies fumble around trying to build almost anything that has the same usable life as something built 60 years ago, with fewer materials and almost no computers, is infuriating.
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The environment is in a MUCH worse state. I was born in the 80s and I can say anyone my age or older who tells you climate change is a myth is either lying or never went outside. I remember seeing large flocks of birds overhead several times at dusk. Now there’s almost nothing. Insect- and bird-life have largely collapsed, forests look sad and unhealthy, we are getting hot days earlier in the year and rainfall is nowhere near as consistent as it used to be. Do humans move farmland to places where rain now falls? Nope, they pump the rivers dry and make even more problems downstream. The situation is unsustainable and, with so many global leaders in the pockets of oil and gas companies, it is going to get a lot worse.
That said, I would say general quality of life, especially through medical advances has made a lot of people’s lives better.
My observation is that the accomplishments of older times would be entirely impossible today, like basically all the public services we enjoy wouldn’t be possible if they were proposed as a new thing.
Take the post office, if somebody had a big idea for the government to build tens of thousands of buildings and hire over a million people just to move around pieces of paper - they’d be laughed out of the room. Impossible, the government couldn’t and shouldn’t do any of that. All public services: the fire department, the police department, and especially public libraries, that all couldn’t be created in the current political environment if it hadn’t already been built.
In a similar vain, I enjoy rewatching Chernobyl and thinking “what if this happened in the USA instead?” I just can’t imagine the government and people mobilising that quickly. Everything would have to wait for tender responses, companies would price-gouge for their efforts, people wouldn’t take “you will do it because it needs to be done” as an answer. The catastrophe would be way worse and clean up would have taken longer.
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the contradictions are piling up and things are more openly fascist, economic opportunities are shrinking in the west, income inequality is off the chart, yeah things are actually worse
I think its time for you to do some self reflecting and ask yourself if it really was that good of a time for the rest of the world or just you due to your immediate context (being american).
In terms of politics, yes. But we are better in almost every other aspect.
My dad said that everything “went to shit” once they started privatizing hospitals and public infrastructure.
