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?
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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Yes
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.
Yes, but now you get all the bad news streamed straight to you 24/7.
Previously you would have to pick up a newspaper or turn on the TV at the right time to hear about it.
40 here. Your sentiments are my sentiments.
Fuck this place. But also we gotta fix it.
A tad older. My response was the same as yours. I dream of fixing it but how?
Then I remember so many people voted or walked towards this. A handful of greedy have been pushing this and other humans were happy to enable it, and millions more accept it.
Which leads me to think maybe I am the minority.
but how
I know this sounds cliche as, but I just try to fix it one smile at a time.
Mum used to tell me this story and it has stuck with me for more than forty years.
Two kids were walking at the beach when they saw thousands of beached fish, gasping for their lives. So one kid picked up a fish and threw it back in the water. The friend said, “there’s thousands of them, you’re not making a difference!”. “Well, I did for that one”.
Most news is bad news and you certainly are exposed to more (bad) news these days than decades earlier. That certainly must be one factor why you can get increasingly bitter about the world.
But that doesn’t mean that the situation hasn’t gotten worse. It definitely has.
The three main factors are (although #2 and #3 are related): increasingly problematic climate change and exhausting the planetary resources too quickly while at the same time polluting it more and more, increasingly ruthless neo-liberalist capitalism (leading to increasingly poor regular people and increasingly rich rich people), and the rise of right-wing extremism / fascism (related to the previous factor because whenever the population is worse off, they tend to vote more for right-wing populists lying to make everything better and knowing the true causes, while in reality they deflect from real problems and will make things even worse for the general population, and faster). And since we have the internet, local fascism doesn’t stay local. It spreads globally.
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.
Coming from the 70’s (US) as well the thing is things were generally getting better. The trend was upward although I would say economically that sorta ended in 2000 while technologically it was more around 20teens (excepting open source). The thing about politically, especially with freedom and rights, its been sorta back and forth but again felt more two steps forward one back pre 2k and one forward two back afterwards. Its starting to feel all back and no forward this year.
I’ve been watching BBC Archive footage from the 80s recently:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6yfE9Ihr8F0
Everyone has the exact same fears as they do now: Russian interference, outcompeted by China, being a US lapdog, the price of housing, education standards, rich/poor divide.
All the exact same talking points we have today. We havent changed that much in 50 years just different gadgets.
(Though the absolute rich/ absolute poor divide is a lot bigger
Better gadgets and more inclusion for minorities and LGBTQ+ people. But plenty of incredibly vocal people that act like those rights are fascism, oh and numerous other rights are at risk.
Its a lot of better, and we’ve come a long way. But we’ve also come nowhere.
Nerds were no longer beaten for knowing how tech works.
Looking at the nerds fucking things up right now, I’d say they could stand a few extra beatings.
This was immensely interesting and helpful, thank you. I’m a millennial and reading your perspective is huge to me. I wish more things like this were shared openly, honestly, with an analytical perspective, from more people.
Thank you. This made my day.
You probably noticed that I ran out of time after 00’s
I mean, 10s and 20s were short, but I figured that was because they are most recent and don’t need to be talked about as much. Is that not why?
True, but how the world actually changed due to arrival of the world wide web and it’s commercialisation became apparent in those years.
And I do have to admit that I have slight skew of perspective.
It’s in the age of 25-30, when your career takes off and your children are born, your world kinda freezes. Mentally you see yourself as 30 years old till you’re well over 50. Your memories kinda clump together and time runs faster and faster. Song that’s playing on the throwback show feels like it was released last year.
Not sure if your brain clocks your memories in relation to life lived.
Realities of old age and appearance of new generation finally makes you wake up. You have arrived to your midlife crisis. This is what people older than me tell me. I’m still not 50, although first grandchildren are probably not far off.
The thing is that your world view also freezes. I notice that I’m still dragging along somewhere in the early 2010s
I’m 35, probably won’t have children because I’m queer, and I’m already meeting younger generations and being violently shaken awake by my appearance and that my country is full of people who don’t seem to exhibit signs of self awareness.
I thought stupid people were relatively rare, but it’s like there’s a neverending supply of ignorance, hatred, vitriol, and the same bad logic/rhetoric that I’ve been trying to undo for the past 25 years. It’s like every year, there’s a new crop of some dumb myth that I haven’t heard since 2010, each time I hear it, it’s being parroted more and more confidently and belligerently.
My life stretches out in sisyphean walls of rhetoric at every front. Gaming, art, exercise, sexuality, politics, philosophy, or all number of micro topics like how to not use wet oven mitts or that if you own a car you have to actually maintain it. It’s like I’m witnessing the speed of evolution and have too high of expectations.
Maybe this expectations came from early internet and my world view is also stuck in the early 2010s. But if that were the case, then how does me as an American at my age, you who is Nordic at your age, and a friend of mine who is ten years younger and an immigrant all have overlap? That makes no sense and leads me to believe a lot of these things are NOT inherent to our age, but maybe to the state of the world itself.
Believe it or not, the world has indeed been made worse, it’s just the era of American Domination due to the collapse of the USSR has waned due to previous socio-cultural issues ramping up and COVID-19 as well as the general beginning of change across the world due to the old generation dying out
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
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.
This is exactly it. For Westerners just feeling the weight of the military-industrial complex, this feels unbelievable. The reality is, we were ignorant. Maybe we knew that Bush invaded Iraq, and had seen the pictures of Obama’s drone strikes in Yemen, but seeing those events could never match the daily toll of knowing you’re being targeted every single day. The few times that these crises bled onto US soil (Kent State, killings of George Floyd and Brianna Taylor, police brutality at BLM protests, Jan 6th insurrection) it felt like an unbelievable atrocity, but this was what the anti-war movement was trying to highlight.
I thought I understood what was being said because I knew the facts. Trump’s reelection showed me how wrong I was.
“We were just minding our own business invading other countries for oil.”
Honestly maybe the 90ies were a short break between two crisis or a “golden age”, but on the other hands, my parents were both struggling, we never had money, there was terrorism and police violence already
Remember when computer were magic though?
remember when going online was a thing you used to do and not a 24/7 state of being
yeah now not looking at a screen is something i actively do
Why not both?
Twenty-five years ago many slurs now rightly shunned were still part of common speech.
Twenty-five years ago marriage equality was not even on the table.
A lot of things are worse now, but a lot of things are better, too. I’d say right now things are worse than ten years ago but you can’t go much farther back without it getting murky.
There are a lot of things going on. Internationally, China and Russia and others at war or preparing for war with thw west. So big geopolitical stuff. At home an aligment of those forces to create political instbility with existing forces internal to the US. A media and social media enviornment that thrives on outrage not truth. Disastisfaction that has resulted in a major political party being taken over by faciat, authoritarian. and corrupt influences. A populus that thinks this is juat fine for one reason or another. A wealthy corporate power elite behind the scenes that likes this.
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.
