I certainly think both can be true, we can have different contexts of technology as we get on the train and go through this cycle Adams describes, as well as fundamentally disagree with a technology's marketing for fundamental reasons. Additionally you could be both and this isn't a conflict.
The thing that's really interesting about quotes like these, and probably adds validity to the fact that they might not be true anymore is not just how outdated they are, but how young they likely are. Before the industrial revolution, things didn't change fast enough for this quote to be valid. Now they change too fast.
My suspicion is that children who are not raised properly or are naturally more susceptible to certain issues, may be more damaged by social media. But it’s also possible that other children are positively benefiting from it, or at least just not negatively affected to the level that everyone assumes.
I’m speculating, but I bet children who are raised properly still have enough offline time doing things like playing outside and having some independence, that they are balanced and healthy.
Kids these days can't even play outside by themselves, let alone explore alone or be unsupervised miles from home with no adults like we could when I was a kid in the 90s and 2000s. What else can they do other than use social media? The creeping infantilization of the youth has robbed them of any chance for socializing or fun that exists outside of a screen.
I'd say it's more likely thanks to more cars and better news coverage, now you hear about every kid being attacked/abused, while in past this was not so widely available knowledge playing into parents fear
I'm not from US, this is problem everywhere, no matter whether you are in China or middle of Europe, actually I'd say there was much bigger increase in car ownership in recent decades outside US than in the US, especially in China and Eastern Europe
so this is my biggest fear with my kids roaming outside - whether someone will hit them with the car, 2nd biggest would be probably potential attacks/bullying by immigrants (kids)
I agree with better news coverage (I'd argue it's more news coverage, in which social media plays a huge role), but I'm not sure I understand your point about more cars?
I think I would agree with that. I don't have kids, but I have a lot of nieces and nephews, and my biggest fear for them playing alone outside would be getting hit by a driver who isn't paying attention.
Helicopter parents and keeping kids "safe" by isolating them started before social media and smartphones. Back then, heavy metal, rap music, video games, Dungeons and Dragons were all ruining kids lives and driving them crazy, not social media.
Doesn’t sound right. I play D&D with my kids and play heavy metal which they hate. I’m scared of trafficking and abductions. That’s what social media trained me on putting it in my face all the time. The TV news did similar. Fear sells and we’ve created a fearful society for profit.
That is subtly wrong for things like social media and AI. 50 year olds can embrace and use these things. However the dangers of these things are well accepted by all adults IMO not just older people. Many of the AI saftey crowd are young.
I'm not sure of 3. as someone aged 61. Some new stuff is cool. E-bikes are fun for example. And re 1. there's some bad stuff that deserved to go - war famine polio etc. Work in progress.
As an old-timer, the biggest difference between now and the 80s and 90s is that in the 80s and 90s entertainment was relatively scarce. An album cost $20, which was a lot in those days. You could get movies, but you had to go to the video store and remember to return them, and the selection was often limited. If you liked some weird band, most record stores didn't have it. In the 80s TV was very limited and you had to get home in time.
So today entertainment is unlimited and everywhere, personalized and you can have more free entertainment than you could ever watch in a million years. This means other forms of entertainment like hanging out with friends, going to the symphony, the opera, or out to the movies, or just hanging out in public are much less valuable than they used to be.
One example: As a teenager, I used to go to a special screening of a Warren Miller film about extreme skiing that they would do once a year. This was a big annual event where we would watch daredevils ski and do tricks with old Warren narrating and pay $12 to get in. They wouldn't have anything like that on regular TV. Now, there is an unlimited amount of that stuff on almost every single video platform on the internet.
Also, one other huge notable difference was pornography was very hard to get a hold of, and now it's available in unlimited amounts for free. This warps society in all kinds of weird ways. For instance, women were mysterious, incredibly alluring, and much more irresistable in those days. Just seeing cleavage was a big deal! Now all that mystery is totally gone for men who don't abstain from pornography, and young men seem hugely demotivated to date.
I've summarized this in some ways as there's nothing weird anymore. Nothing counter-culture. There's this notion some people who grew up in that time have who have become old and cynical which is like "How can anyone who grew up in the 90's be offended by anything. We had South Park!"
I was a teenager when The Spirit of Christmas came out, and the great thing about South park is how strange and transgressive it was. There was nothing like that anywhere. I've become a little bit of a fuddy duddy in my old age, but not because I'm truly offended by off-color jokes, but I miss when things felt like they were really transgressive. Off color jokes aren't really naughty when they're everywhere. I've started to listen to more classical music and read the classics. I'm not like trying to be "edgy" but it feels like one of the few things that is not ubiquitous.
I get some of these but at the same time, I happily watched the same videos, played the same game, listened to the same bootleg copy of some cd I was into over and over again. Point being that sure there is more stuff, but I don't think the absence of that abundance doesn't necessarily mean that people would be doing other stuff than consuming some entertainment.
Some thing has obviously changed in society, but what are the other people doing who aren't so insular like we say most of the new generation are? Why doesn't it affect them?
Agreed. Though I hated it at the time, in retrospect I am grateful for how often I was bored, growing up in the 80s and 90s. I'm sure I owe my career to it, I started programming computers from a lack of anything else to do.
A thought I often have - older millennials and younger Gen X have a unique obligation to fix certain parts of society because we are the youngest generation old enough to remember how to operate in and enjoy a world that wasn't A/B tested into a gray, lifeless background hum.
I am 51 and a Gen X. I did my part, I voted for policies to increase the social safety net, universal healthcare, etc.
This is the world that people wanted. I have the Ben Kenobi plan, I’m going to disappear somewhere and when the evil empire comes for me, just give up and die and then it becomes the younger people’s problem.
Given that we have written record going at least as far back as Socrates bitching about the kids these days, I think it's pretty consistent. But it's different this time, I'm sure of it.
I'm not sure about hubber but in the UK monoculture white english is still there is some places. Like Hertford where I grew up is kind of like that. But it's a bit boring - I prefer London which is all sorts of cultures and nationalities. (Hertford https://metro.co.uk/2023/02/07/hertford-is-the-fifth-happies...)
If you want to sum up the 90s in the UK for people like me who became adults then, it would be the song, "Things can only get better". A little embarrassing, yes? Naive? and yet there really was an optimism then. If things weren't great (and objectively it was a poorer country), they were getting better, and they could get better, and they would. Happiness is more about cake tomorrow than cake today, and in the 90s you really could believe it. Do we have that belief now? Managed decline, it feels like, is the best the UK can offer.
To make this a bit more pithy: in the 1990s we were excited about the coming 21st century. In 2025, do we think the 2030s are going to be better, really? Or are we looking down the barrels of one maturing catastrophe over another?
Exactly. I think everyone in the UK of a certain age would just think New Labour if they heard that song.
Also made a bit of a comeback with the Starmer govt, after it was played at the election announcement and tapped into the 90s revival with Oasis & Britpop coming back in vogue.
I haven't heard a frankly optimistic piece of pop music in a very long time - the example I can think of from the 80-90's in the US is 10,000 Maniacs ("These are Days" was a Clinton campaign theme song.) Some people bash them is trite "concern rock", but at the time there really was optimism that society could be (and would be) improved.
I was hoping this would be more fleshed out as an article, but the sentiment is understandable.
Want to throw some of my knowledge of digital music, as you called it out specifically.
In the late 90s most digitally arranged music production was relegated to trackers (think Amiga trackers) and sequencing samples and loops, because the storage simply didn't exist.
Then that would be committed to tape, sometimes on a 4-track, sometimes on studio-quality tape, sometimes on ADAT.
Fully digital music production like we have now was out of reach for most people until roughly the early-to-mid 2000s, when you see an explosion of people, even in local music scenes, quantizing drum parts and using virtual instruments (usually VST) that would normally require tens or even hundreds of thousands in hardware.
Tracker music was always a hobbyist thing, with a few exceptions. Not really relevant in the greater music scene.
But digitally produced music was of course a huge thing in the 90s. Countless genres of electronic music – techno, trance, house, whatever have you, all of that made on computers. And of course pop was almost all synth – digital synth – just like today.
I was specifically talking about end-to-end digital music production being used to "clean up" recordings per the article. Not whatever "scene" you are conjuring.
> Computers helped you make things louder, cleaner, faster.
For people with limited resources (i.e. indie musicians without huge budgets), digital multi-track recording was not democratized until the introduction of low-cost hard disk storage at sufficient capacity to allow digital multi-track recording at home, roughly around 2002~2003.
Of course I'm aware of synthesizers, etc. I was an electronic musician myself during this period, and I lived it. I had the gear racks, ADAT machines, etc.
We did not have the resources as independent musicians to use non-linear digital editing software broadly until storage became cheaper.
Again, a lot of that music was typically done with looping and sample hits arranged on a midi sequencer, similar to trackers, but with distributed infrastructure.
Listen to older KMFDM, for example, the looping really stands out due to the limited storage they had when arranging, they would arrange sample hits and loops as I was talking about above.
Musicians with studio backing and infinite money could afford giant digital productions suites and were using crude versions of Pro Tools by the early '90s, am well aware.
They didn't mean digital music production, they meant digital downloads/streaming of finished music products. As in later in the early 2000s and beyond iPods and mp3 players and then streaming changed everything as far as accessibility.
That's the trouble isn't it? If we can't even agree on the meaning.
I didn't read it that way specifically because of the use of "you", which to me feels like an invocation of the audience or the royal "you" so to speak, to refer to musicians themselves, rather than the concept of digital streaming and distribution.
"Computers helped you make things louder, cleaner, faster...you still needed a band...or a mate that could actually play something..."
Does the streaming/digital industry no longer have a need for a mate that plays drums? I guess you can read it that way.
Maybe I'm the odd one out, but I read it as almost like a lamenting of the emergence of the "one man band" and cheap throwaway music production by the ease of creating digital recordings at home, and even replacing musicians in the broader music industry with digital replacements, which I also kind of disagree with as being necessarily a negative thing. Toro y Moi, Washed Out, etc., would not be possible without such technology, but the metal music production industry itself has largely replaced drummers with drum machines, not streaming and digital distribution companies.
BTW those of us on the internet earlier were downloading mp3s as soon as 1997 or 1998.
Quality of life has a lot to do with how you choose to spend your time.
I know lots of people that have no idea what Reddit is. They’ve never had a Facebook account.
Those aren’t happenstances - they are the result of the choice on what they spend their time doing.
I’m not surprised people who spend most of their time exposed to the rage bait that fills social media think the world is falling apart. Especially if you’re not aware that it’s not an accurate or balanced view of reality.
Something new to grapple with though is that (in the US) we have the most extremely online White House in history. Our highest ranking officials, with their departments, are on social media day in and day out, and make decisions motivated by it.
I've seen a few people point this out in this thread, but, seriously? There's a generation that are going to say the 2020's were the best decade?
I think that suggests:
1) Things are getting worse from decade to decade and,
2) If you weren't alive in an earlier decade you don't know how great it was.
(Personally, I saw the creek start running with shit when cable TV exploded and at the same time trash AM talk-radio began. The 70's were the last decade when we weren't hating each other.)
Black people in the South may disagree with you that were still feeling the remnants of Jim Crow - which my still living parents grew up in. I can guarantee you a lot of people “hated them”.
Ask Ruby Bridges - 71 years old - how much people hated her for just going to elementary school.
Of course things were great for White men when an entire part of the US population were kept out of opportunities by law. “Separate but Equal” was the law of the land from 1898 to the 1950s. As were laws against interracial marriage until 1969.
This isn’t de facto marginalization this was encoded into the law.
But this implicitly assumes everyone experiences the 2020s in the same way which is not true. Yes it's a shitshow for many people but for an a not insignificant proportion the 2020s are pretty great.
The problem is that they are both correct _and_ they were young back then. What happens then, is their arguments are dismissed because of the latter.
Another issue is it's difficult to explain something to somebody that has no frame of reference of experience of it. He talks of "delayed gratification" a few times. Try explaining how not getting everything you want is good for you to anyone under 40.
College grads have it worse in every way than I did graduating in 1996 from a no name state school in South GA in CS.
I had a job waiting for me in Atlanta after graduating based on an internship that was easy to get. I was able to get a house built at 28 for $170K. Even fast forwarding to 2016 I had a 5/3 3500 square foot home built in the northern burbs of Atlanta built for $335K in the good school system. 8 years later we sold it for $700k and downsized to a condo in Florida for half the price. It would be a stretch for me to buy a $700K home now.
For non college grads in my hometown, there were four or five factories that employed plenty of people with good jobs, all but one is gone.
I don't think it is, so many kids watch stranger things and ask if kids really did have that kind of freedom back then. I get why many things objectively better today, but suicide rates are up. I don't think people's mental health and happiness follow like objective statistics very well. And why would we assume it's true? This concept of "I wish I was. tween/ young teenager in the X0's" has probably only been true for like 100 years.
I'm conflicted on that myself. On paper their life is certainly so much easier and more comfortable.
On the other hand, I feel like there's some intangibles missing. Not having instant access to everything made for patience and appreciation. Not having laptops and cellphones meant having to converse and interact with those around you. It's hard to describe why any of that is better than today, but it just feels like it was to my old brain.
not every.
I have not lived in 90s at all, I am from the current millennium, but.. I am nostalgic about 90s. This is strange, but I feel nostalgia about times I never live
Yes of course I am. This is the best possible time quite literally. Barely any conflict. The entire world, including 'poor' countries, are getting richer. Like the world of 2100 is going to be F'ING amazing.
We are making our way to a post scarcity world and it's amazing.
All the negative news you hear everyday are just distractions from what's actually going on.
The last century was characterized by two mega wars that killed tens of millions and social changes / revolutions that killed tens of millions as well. This century is off to an AMAZING start. Perhaps unprecedentedly good in world history.
And of course before this century, resource scarcity, lack of modern medicine, etc meant a grueling life of farmwork, living in a hovel, and being sent off to random wars. Now people complain because they can't get a 1500 sq ft home and garden. Come on guys be real.
Not to mention brutal state violence being commonplace , punishments being swift yet often unjust, etc. of course even previous conflicts used to show a brazen disregard for life. Thirty years, 100 years of war, etc
This is true but being able to afford a home, close to where you can find work and develop your social status further, is a pretty important part of life so not particularly surprising kids are miffed about that.
We haven't even got to the same point in the last century where the big war happened, and so far it looks like when we do get to that part of the century, we'll be doing the same thing.
Having medicine is good though. I don't think anyone's arguing that. "Things are worse" doesn't mean "everything is worse"
We’re quickly entering a new era of energy abundance, without needing to constantly dig up, process, and cart around enormous amounts of oil. And solar has recently gotten cheap enough that people in poorer countries around the world are deploying huge amounts of it. That’s pretty amazing!
No not at all. The world is way better off today than at any time in the past. This is objectively true and we can all feel it everyday we don't die of dysentery, sepsis, etc.
Exactly. How many of one bad thing reduced compensates for a different bad thing increased? They say it's better now because we have fast access to information. But we don't have house stability. How many seconds of latency to information equals owning a home?
I’ve got several streaming services available to me. When I’m looking for a good show, it’s very often from the 80s or 90s. A lot of newer movies end up started and not finished.
I am sure every single generation has something like this to say about a decade that was meaningful to them. But I feel the 90s are special because it was a period where you got to experience two worlds - the pre Internet one and the post Internet one. You had all the promise of the early Internet without the downsides of what came later with social media, monetization, etc. And people were still generally … normal. They had lives offline that were authentic and I think that made them happier and healthier.
I sympathise with the author's point (the machines in The Matrix were right!), but the analog music part doesn't really hold water. Digitally produced music was of course a huge thing in the 90s. Countless genres of electronic music – techno, trance, house, whatever have you, all of that made on computers. And of course almost all of pop was digital synth based by the 90s.
Of course the sentiment is there as with any of these kind of posts but a bit revisionist. News, media, personal websites sure, but forums? not so much. Of course usenet and mailing lists and chat rooms but not forums so much. Everything was disjointed and revolved around loosely connected website rings etc. Which brings me to another part - the thing about knowing stuff about people. Reduce that to just knowing people in general. It was double-edged sword. You could connect if you were savvy enough over email with like minded, but if that connection went away for whatever reason, there wasn't like a backup default trail like we have now with Facebook and other general profiles we all see to have. People would disappear with no way to connect to them. Not the best when you look back at it from what we have now and kind of wish some of those connections weren't just 'lost'.
I think about this issue a lot too, and while I think everyone calling out that these feelings are cyclical, and choosing a decade of that persons own life means that it's just nostalgia has validity, but I also think that, there is probably truth to the idea that our cultural peak is behind us. Some Cultural historians would probably put it some time in the 17 and 1800's when we were building cathedrals and making classical music.
I've become something of a cultural conservative, thinking that most significant cultural lessons, the ways to live the good life can be learned by looking behind us.
There are probably multiple peaks though, and I think a peak in the late 20th century is one of them. I think the 20th century in and of itself will probably always be considered a peak, or significant and the reason is the invention of the motion picture and the way motion picture technology evolved over those 100 years. Our image of ourself as a society will never have quite the evolution you get from having like low fps black and white imagery early in the 20th century, to basically 4k sci-fi like the Matrix in 1999.
But I think the like Stranger Things running around on bicycles, getting to experience the birth of modern technology, sort of a combination of maximal freedom and maximal aesthetic experience, shared cultural touchstones and while not yet introducing social media and post-9/11 anxiety is a signifcant cultural peak.
I think the Gibson quote is applicable: "The future is already here – it's just not evenly distributed." Some people are going to remember the 2020's as a time that AI was new, and the eventual winners will look back with nostalgia at all the opportunity. I guarantee HN will have a post in the 2050's about how Moltbook was the peak of society (probably written by an AI agent, though...)
Social media broke society. The echo chamber effect from the feed algorithms has led to everyone living in their own little realities and it's so terrifying to watch what happens when people don't have the same truths.
I remember early, invite-only Facebook before it got heavily monetized and it was such an amazing tool to bring people together, keep you connected with old friends, organize group events, and stuff like that. Then it... changed.
What can we do about it? Genuinely want to know your thoughts.
I'm in agreement with everything he says, but I've struggled to see eye to eye with anyone not in my age group. How can we have a constructive conversation about this, come to a consensus that things are not okay now, and move forward?
I guess try to improve stuff? There are experiments going on with banning social media to kids for example. I'm a member of actionforhappiness.org and figure we should emulate societies that people are happy with.
For me the 00's were the real deal, that decade when Internet at home finally became affordable but before the arrival of smartphones, social networks, and 24/7 connectivity.
But they were also my high school and university years, and as many other comments have pointed out, we tend to remember those years as the best of our lives.
> Things came out slowly. Albums. Games. Software. That slowness gave them weight. You lived with them for a while instead of replacing them next week.
This is very true (and should include films as well). When big movies came out they were a big thing. Waiting in long lines for a ticket to a movie was a normal thing. People talked about them weeks and weeks. They were sort of big cultural events.
Yup that's the thing: it's not only people who lived that era who do wish they could live in it today.
I never wanted to live in the post-WW II late 40s/50s: maybe the sixties though. For honestly the late 40s and 50s looked incredibly dull. Just dull: movies were dull, acting was dumb, music was mostly pathetic save for a few exceptions.
The boomers really lived the absolute dullest, naive, era and nobody fantasizes on it.
There's never been a teenager from the 80s or 90s saying: "Oh wow, I so wish I lived in the 50s". That's not a thing.
And yet I see many young persons asking me, today, about the 80s and 90s. They like some of the music (sure, some were cheesy but it wasn't the uber dull pathetic stuff from the 50s: not to mention the incredible poor recordings unless you were as successful as Elvis Presley) and they definitely enjoy some of the epic movies. And the cars: many twenty-agers do love cars from the 80s and 90s.
They understand it was pretty much today's world, but less soul-sucking.
There was '50s nostalgia in the '80s, though: Happy Days and Back To The Future.
There was some interesting counterculture in the '40s and '50s, but how could there not be when the dominant culture was so conformist and bland. You have to dig at least a little for that stuff today, because those countercultures didn't really become legible until the '60s, when they were already changing into something less interesting.
I'm really fascinated by the 1890s, myself. Would have been horrible to live in for medical reasons, but there was an amazing counterculture and avant-garde that was just amazingly cool and weird.
Yeah I think part of the limitations of these conversations is the constraints on how we look at time. The arbitrary boomers/gen x/millennial categorisation. When what seems to make more sense is big cultural societal changes. Which would fit into thinking of the history arc as 1920s > mid-1960s/1970s > 2000s
Something I've come to accept and try to remember: people will complain about literally anything you give them to opportunity to complain about.
The world is better today in every conceivable way for more people, than it was at any point in history. But it isn't good enough for enough people, and the people who remind you of that are usually doing the least to improve anything, for anybody.
I don't really understand why. It seems fall under this larger victimization umbrella. The best answers I've seen for it are that it is either some cathartic response to just how good things have gotten, or that the complaint itself represents some marginal effort, enough to elicit a dopamine response.
I was born in the 80s and have vivid memories of the 90s. I absolutely loved everything as it was at that point in time. But to look at the world around us today and to think anything before was the peak is just incomprehensible to me.
Perhaps they are related. In the fall of the USSR, capitalism won — globally. In communist countries you received glorious, product–producing capitalism. In capitalist countries you received terrible, all–encompassing, enshittifying capitalism.
As Douglas Adams and xkcd #1227 have pointed out, the older generations have complained about this sort of thing since Plato. However, I do not believe this observation settles the matter, because it does not seriously contend with the null hypothesis: that we really have been steadily enshittifying the human experience since Plato.
Who has the right of it? Do the new generations simply not know what they are missing. Or is there something in human nature that makes us unavoidably crotchety as we get older and, thus, not to be taken too seriously? In my opinion, it is simply an open mystery.
On the one hand, many tangible, measurable things have improved over the last 2000 years, or, indeed, since the 90's. Steven Pinker has made this point somewhat convincingly by looking at unambiguously positive things like reduced infant mortality.
On the other hand, every single generation can give detailed accounts of how much more real and alive and authentic the world was a few decades ago. The accounts have similarities across the generations, but they are also rooted in specifics. To argue that we're all mis-remembering or failing to appreciate what the new decade has to offer is to insist on a rather fantastic level of self-doubt. If our entire lived experience is this untrustworthy, it kind of makes it impossible to rule on anything - good OR bad. Why should we default to trusting the younger generation?
I think the surrounding technological context of our age has brought this long-simmering matter to a boil. Now that our electronic communication is so sophisticated that we can essentially build "anything", it starts to re-focus our attention from "CAN we build it" to "SHOULD we build it". This question about digital society is complementary to the broader, long-standing civilizational question. Have the trillions of hours the human race has expended shaping our society resulted in _better_ life, or just life with a deeper tech tree?
One novelty of our time is how certain human enterprises play out at 10x speed in cyberspace. This lets us watch the entire lifecycle as they Rise and Fall, over and over. This lends perspective, and allows patterns to emerge. Indeed, this is exactly how Doctorow came to coin the term enshittification. If there's any truth to the life-really-is-getting-worse theory, you'd want to find some causal mechanism - some constant factor that explains why we've been driving things in the wrong direction so consistently. Digital life lets us see enough trials to start building such an account. You can imagine starting to understand the "physics" of why all human affairs eventually lead to an Eternal September. Wherever brief pockets of goodness pop up, they are like arbitrage opportunities: they tautologically attract more and more people trying to harvest the goodness until it's pulverized - a tragedy of the commons. Perhaps some combination of population growth and the inevitable depletion of Earth's natural resources lead to such a framework.
Whatever you think about it, I mostly just wish people would acknowledge that it is an unresolved debate and treat it as such. It is critical to understanding what it is worth spending our time on, and it is the kernel of many comparatively superficial disagreements (e.g. the red-blue culture war in US politics).
> On the other hand, every single generation can give detailed accounts of how much more real and alive and authentic the world was a few decades ago.
I don’t know that this is true, and I doubt it meant the same thing to Plato as it did to us; I read somewhere that in ancient times, nostalgia would have been for the world of the gods, not a specific time and place.
The thirties and fourties’ were probably not more alive and authentic than the
50’s and 60’s. The 1920’s were a cultural peak that retreated until the 1960’s, and prior to the Industrial Revolution, things didn’t change fast enough for like decades to be significant. The original documented example of nostalgia was about soldiers nostalgic for home, not explicitly their youth or another time.
All these feelings, “nostalgia” are going to hit different without shared cultural experiences, and changing technological and aesthetic context,
I think this is just millenials discovering nostalgia. For me all kinds of things sucked (even though I am a millenial).
I really love lots of things about the world today. I love delivery apps, remote working, so much entertainment. I feel much safer in some ways (not in others -- but that's a 2026 development). I hated walkmans and cd players, they skip, wearout,etc... I hated having to rent movies, sometimes all the copies have been rented out, and you had to deal with fees for not rewinding. and the media quality sucked.
Even when there was internet (if you're lucky, and you afforded the very costly computers back then), you had to share time with landline usage. You had to remember landline numbers too.
I hated writing all the time, pens, pencils, sharpening pencils, pens leaking in your pocket. There were no cameras anywhere back then, so people were free to be really bad to each other with little consequence. You didn't go viral for berating a waiter back then. Everything terrible cops are accused of doing today, it was 10x worse in the 90s too.
So many thing were inaccessible unless you were in the right neighborhood and with the right amount of family income.
In news and politics, petty things were made to be a big deal, like Clinton's affair for example. People today fall for the deception of nostalgia and think it's because things were by relation not so bad back then, but it's just that they were kids and their parents sheltered them. All the stuff in epstein's list, all the #metoo revelations, all the gang warfare and war on drugs chaos in cities, that happened in the 90s too. matter of fact, a lot of the terrible things happening today are only coming into the light now that we have smartphones, internet and things are getting exposed.
In my opinion, the US peaked in 2022-23 in many ways.But post-covid trauma and the current administration nullified much of that.
What was great in the 90s was that the US had a healthy amount of national pride and love of country. Russia/Putin has been trying to undermine that, split the us apart from within since the fall of the USSR. Which by the way, all the 90's nostalgia is fueled by the whole "we won the cold war" euphoria in part, and mostly younger people being fooled by the whole "that means we're the good guys" nonsense. Until Iraq of course.
But anyways, social divisions and strife has widened dramatically, but the people who call themselves "MAGA" were "tea party" prior to that and all sorts of other names historically. All the chaos with the current admin is caused by "the heritage foundation" which has been sowing sees of divisions and chaos since before the 90s (thank them for project 2025). My point is the divisions and chaos are not new. but a lot of people that were doing badly in the 90's are doing much better now (oh..and did I mention how terrifying aids was then? even covid in 2020 was nowhere near as scary).
We're terrible at appreciating what we have right now in the present,today. We're losing so much of our rights and privileges because of this nonsense, so I hope you all don't propagate it. The 90's were nice in some ways, but they were mostly horrible, and the more disadvantaged you were the worse they were. There was more injustice, more misery, more suffering, more discomforts. We have the best technology, the best health care, the most powerful military, an economy which by all means should be crashing but is somehow surviving, a government which is being attacked by cartoon-level villains at all sides and somehow it too hasn't collapsed yet. Even our allies which are turning to other countries, even they haven't forsaken the US completely yet.
This mindset of "we used to have it great but it's over now" is defeatist. it is actually the same mindset MAGA is using for their lunacy.
The problem I think is our generation and gen-z are finally grown ups now, but instead of fighting to keep what we have and improving it, we're in this defeatist mindset looking back into the past and thinking it used to be better. Not appreciating the progress achieved by the sacrifices and struggles of so many. What you don't fight to keep is taken away from you.
Oh and by the way, remember the ozone crisis, it was more scary than climate change now, and we fixed it more or less now (although objectively, climate change in the future will be worse if it isn't fixed).
I really really hated school so much!! now for all the problems I had, there has been so much research into them. educators are more aware and more willing to provide individualized plans to students. I wish I had wikipedia back then, heck I wish I had chatgpt back then, I was the student that asked 1000 questions and annoyed everyone, I could annoy chatgpt instead if i were a student today.
Taxis, how horrible and scammy they were! it was such a hopeless, boring and miserable time. I could go on all day.
The key thing everyone should keep in mind is that nostalgia is by its nature deceptive. This is why eyewitness testimony is also unreliable. We selectively recall things from the past, not only that, our minds alter how we felt back then in the recall process.
Infant mortality was also 1.5x higher in the US than it is today. (Depending on who we mean by "we", this difference can be much larger.) Cystic fibrosis was a death sentence. "Late 90's" barely includes the development of effective AIDS treatment, though certainly not the rollout. (Maybe part of what you were getting at above, besides gay marriage.) Etc etc.
There was also rampant bullying of millions who weren't white, rich, straight, a celebrity, and/or neurotypical in 80's-90's America. That was also the era when Epstein, Trump, and pals allegedly raped "models" (12-17-yo's) with impunity. Similarly, society enabled Bill Cosby, Harvey Weinstein, Jimmy Savile, and ...
as someone who used BBS/Fidonet in 90s I am certainly not missing them over websites/forums/Reddit, same goes for CDs vs MP3/streaming (which is just another source for MP3)
I think we would be fine even know if we just straight up stopped using all social media
1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
2. Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
3. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.
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