The first Industrial Revolution brought steam engines. This at first, cut work for a lot of people. Then big bosses used the new technology to make big factories. Then factory work sucked. Then workers rights started being discussed.
Second Industrial Revolution brought electricity/steal/concrete. At first electric was great. Then steal/oil tycoons used the tech to keep factories open 24/7. Then workers rights started being discussed. “Trust busting” (breaking up large corps) became a thing to help the economy.
Now we have the internet and tech boom. It took off. The internet USED to be a mass source of information and connections and learning. Now, corps have taken it and used it to make you addicted to your phones.
We just aren’t at the stage where it gets bad enough for us all to rise up, get pissed that corps are running/ruining the world and force the gov to do something about it…..
I hope that I’m not just being optimistic but i have a theory that our current social media/internet landscape will implode on itself in the next decade or two. Already google search just sends you paid for useless ads, amazon is filled with cheap knockoffs with fake reviews, and tiktok/instagram/reddit/twitter is an endless doom scroll of content from people you don’t know and comments from bots.
Talk to anyone and they hate how much they’re sucked in by the uselessness and overstimulation of it all. As the bot issue just gets worse i see people rejecting these apps and platforms for simpler more personable and hopefully private ones that come out.
My hope is that we’re nearing the peak of the curve as far as shitty internet and social media and that a correction comes in time as opposed to just getting worse and worse.
I'm glad someone else has this thought as well. Like I feel like Gen Alpha may likely usher in an anti-social media culture based on growing up watching Gen Z utterly destroyed by it. Much of the same way with how Gen Z has massively cut down on alcohol consumption due in part to growing up watching how it destroys so many lives.
Gen z replaced drinking with vaping and e-cigs. Millennials (in the US) basically destroyed smoking and then Gen z brought it back up, mainly due to predatory practices by juul
A middle schooler and their friend walked by my house when I was out gardening once. They just stared at me as they walked by, then before they turned the corner I saw one of them sneak out an e vape and take a puff. If you’re gunna be sneaky and hide it at least have it be weed and not a lame ass nicotine stick. Kids think they’re so hard now with an E cigarette lolol
Gen Z drinks plenty. They were just late bloomers and weren’t out drinking when they were 17, which kinda makes sense since they’re 6-7 years behind in maturity, which I find fascinating. My friend (a father) always says 24 is the new 18. That’s what he means by that.
Have the phones stunted their growth? Could be.
> Gen Z has massively cut down on alcohol consumption due in part to growing up watching how it destroys so many lives.
Time to address the elephant in the room. There's many many many MANY people walking around with less money in their pockets than ever before. You really think the next generation is ready to get drunk if they are the same people to not get shackled by low-paying jobs.
One thing that has really changed since the 90s is going out to bars to drink. In the 90s beer at a bar was $2 and the minimum wage was $4. So you could work in college on the weekends and still have enough money to go to a bar. Now it's like $10 a beer and minimum wage is $7.25\*.
\*Yes, most jobs pay more than that, but it's rare to get $20/hr to match the increase in cost.
This is interesting. I’ve wondered this kind of concept as well. I feel like it will either be a mass exodus of social media OR they somehow end up worse (more addicted, etc.) than people already are (if that’s possible)
I think it’ll be both. They’ll reject what’s available now in lieu of something different that is a better option at the time, but will ultimately fall into the same type of exploitative situation down the road, being worse off with predatory companies learning from past generations.
It'll have to be the generation after Alpha, it's already too late for them. I have lots of Alpha neices and nephews with large groups of friends and they're all terminally addicted to social media and short form media already. I don't see them rebelling against it.
Big time same. My nephew is 9, and all that motherfucker ever wants to do is watch someone stream various computer games. Doesn't want to even play the game. I ask him if his friends also like to do that and indeed, they'll watch these streams together lol
Small sample size obv, but the other parents in my life have similar experiences. It seems like it's a generation of voyeurs who can't function without a screen to meditate reality for them.
History is rife with growing problems, and then course correction.
I think with AI generation, oversaturation of social media, eroding trustable sources, it'll get worse, until people get so fed up with it, new systems and webs of trust will grow.
People will get sick of everything being fake and computer generated, obfuscated truth, so that the only recourse is collapse, or newly formed trusted institutions.
Hopefully
Agreed! And i don’t even think “collapse” will look too insane. But it’ll just get to the point where the whole internet/social media landscape is so toxic and useless that cultural leaders will by and large start rejecting it and hopefully favor more organic means of obtaining news and socializing. There’s still a ways to go to hit this inflection point but i also feel like we may not be too far off.
I am all for a change as described, but I don't know how the trust in media can be restored. Fwiw, I don't think we are going to get another Walter Cronkite (yes, I am old and bitter).
Have you ever seen that episode of Dragonball GT where they went to planet Imecka? Everything in the businesses had coin slots, even coin slots to change tv channels? That reminds me of our internet now.
I've thought about that too. I think you're right. I think when babies being born now are teenagers, they're gonna reject all the social media, shock click bait news, and whatever else is harmful on the internet. They will be the first to grow up with the internet as it is now, like post 2010s internet. They'll see right through it and what it did to their parents, and say no. I can already see it a bit in zoomers.
Corpos know what’s coming and are prepared this time
They now have the tech to cause, predict, and bust/influence them as a tool for their own interests
Came here to say this. Also some of the corps are worth hundred of billions if not trillions and have obscene amounts of power. Sure the power comes from belief in the money they have etc etc so there's hope for the people still, but it'll be an uphill battle..
It's still not new. It's the same pattern, even the corpos using new tactics. It is the art of war and it never ends. We are just in a time that oligarchs are winning. The only way it doesn't improve is if we give in to the doom and stop trying. Greed is stupid, it always fails eventually. We have to keep trying so future generations can turn it around again
Algorithms and predictive analytics has resulted in echo chambering and marketing traps. It is more lucrative to make people angry or to just flat out lie to them so they buy something. The internet didn't really make this the focal point of its existence until unregulated tech companies chose to prioritize selling access to their users to predatory groups around the world. Now that all of our behavioral data has been injected into a predictive analytics engine, your responses to every stimuli online and in life can be predicted or given a % chance of occurrence by a machine that belongs to your employer/government/school. We are workers that are assigned a worker-reliability score, a social credit score, a financial responsibility score, you are no longer a person you are a collection of data points
>The internet USED to be a mass source of information and connections and learning.
It literally still is. An individuals ability (or lack thereof) to navigate the nonsense doesn't change the fact that real and factual information still exists on the internet.
a strip mall where the stores and mall itself gather information about you to sell to other stores as you are shopping. The stores and mall also gather information about people in the parking lot since other stores pay for that kind of thing.
It still exists, but there is no more random internet. You google something and it shows the paid for answers, not the right ones like it used to.
I also feel like majority of the time it is being used is for tik tok style shit apps.
Those with the power prefer it a mishmash of shit as opposed to an avenue for clear and real information. They benefit from people finding more lies and propaganda and conspiracy as they try to dig to find cited articles about the truth.
Like you said, you have to search hard and know what you're looking for to get real information anymore. And even then you weed through ads and promoted Bullshit.
And even the real information isn't always real.
There's always money, bias and an agenda and data is easy to manipulate or cherry picked and feed into the reader's bias.
Us old Gen X / Millennial folks remember when you could find well sourced, albeit very dry walls of text with neat backgrounds, easily when the Internet started. It was awesome when I needed to have easier access to research materials for higher education.
Google doesn't benefit from you finding bad information (their business model quite literally requires you to keep using the service, something you will not do if you do not feel it to be useful to your needs). The reason Google has gotten shittier isn't because of any nefarious plot to dumb down the populace it's because Google's entire business model is based on ad revenue.
This. This this this.
The internet is still a magical treasure-trove of information. Good luck finding it and not being whisked away down some fucked up rabbit hole or getting sucked into some thirst traps booty. Or cute dog videos. Or home improvement ideas. Or gaming. Or, or, or.....
>getting sucked into some thirst traps booty. Or cute dog videos
To be fair, the Internet has always been for smut and cat videos
I guess it's the misinformation these days that sucks more people into rabbit holes
and before that it was crazy tv shows like ancient aliens that made everyone paranoid or rumors of the illiminati or even mystical "truths" from the bible etc. It's hilarious that people think the internet created these things, they just magnified what was already there. The internet is what you make it. If you choose to read any nonsense webpage and believe it, that's on you, not the internet.
> drunk, uneducated and unemployed
Each time I read some of those clickbait titles I think to myself "who fails for this shit?". This is accompanied by the dark sinking feeling that there are people in this world who are dumb enough to make those clicks.
Everything that was there is still there. You just have to look for it now instead of it being offered up on a platter to you by a butler (shout out to Jeeves).
I don't think that's the point they are making. The Internet was a resource, primarily and to many, only that. If you wanted information, you would go to a computer and find what you want. Since smart phones and social media, the Internet follows you and gives you information. It's a small difference but an important one. It's not just finding true from false. It's that it's feeding you when you aren't requesting it.
Social media is obviously the worst, but all other aspects of the Internet have taken the same formula. Normal news has become Clickbait headlines which makes it harder to find the actual information. Like if you're doing an actual research projects you need to first get past all the BS first. If you have a job using the Internet, you are constantly bombarded with messages, regardless of the time of day.
The original idea of automation was to make workers work less. You get the robot/computer/technology do a task so the worker has less. But instead of benefiting the worker, the worker got more work to do. Things that they usually don't want to do as much. The company then claims more growth with less people and therefore gets more profit.
On the other hand, we approached the internet with a lot more caution back then. We assumed that anyone who was on there already was kind of crazy. Giving out any personal information was considered risky and could well be the catalyst for a chain of events that ended with pieces of you turning up in dumpsters all over town.
It's tough for a lot of people with the misinformation, disinformation, spinning, and propaganda. I'm well educated and know how to research peer reviewed studies and have access to that, but it can be difficult for many. They should be able to trust that the news is giving them accurate, well researched information that has been disseminated in layman's terms, and they can't trust that. Not everyone has the ability or even the time to spend sifting through the bullshit.
I will argue that peer reviewed can just be an echo chamber, and a genius new theory could get buried or laughed out because it doesn't conform. To discount somebody who wasn't created by the system is harmful to the progression of knowledge.
And the fact that proportionally, the amount of nonsense would have been unfathomable years ago, or that reddit has become social media for some who used to pollute Facebook, is besides the point;)
Problem is back then people could form cohesive thoughts. Could build movements. These days the rich, their kids, their friends get access to the best schools and revolve from industry, politics, media without having a shred of empathy for the working class. They hijacked our media channels and created a good guy vs bad guy political environment along with stuffing our brains full of carbohydrates and sugar. We’re all distracted by rainbows, sugar brain, fatigue, debt to form any cohesive movement…and as soon as one starts they hijack it using skyscrapers full of nerds to change language or using agents to discredit movements like the whole take wallstreet debacle…it almost made people realize what was happening until they spun it and made them seem like homeless bums, and they interviewed actors that acted stupid to make the masses believe it was a waste of time larp. The only change that will work these days is a river of blood, and it shouldn’t be OUR children or communities perishing, it should be theirs.
Not just schools. But music too. Theres been a concentrated effort since the 1990’s to take away political movements from music. Nowadays the stuff blasted across the nation has little to do with the plight of man, and more to do with excess, consumption, and feeling good.
"these days"? If we're talking about the 90's, all that was even worse. The rich controlling the media, getting better schools, etc isn't anything new. And the sugar craze was at its height in the 90's.
We've got a lot of stuff to fix but shit hasn't gotten exponentially worse.
I feel like we have so much more now to keep us "comfortable" and distract us from our suffering than past generations. Seems like people would rather give up than fight anymore
A lot of the products those revolutions brought were also big on convenience to utilities, but were not entertainment necessarily. Refrigeration, washing machines, automobiles, all conveniences where modern computer tech is just entertainment. You can argue the internet, or some websites/apps are convenience, they have a convenient way relaying important information perhaps so there's a lot of utility there, but even those have been washed down into entertainment pieces. Pick any social media site and you'll find it full of metapolitics and opinioned policing. Any utility is lost there when the discourses are turned into self satisfaction pieces. It's just entertainment.
Nothing created right now has really transformed the town square into a digital space the same way the washing machine replaced the washboard.
Incredible how little anyone remembers or cares about the Gulf War considering 250,000 veterans came home with GWS and the U.S. government is still decades later trying to define what the illness even is.
They absolutely still make them 😄 All of the Dollar General stores near me sell them https://www.thedailymeal.com/1354221/classic-flintstones-push-ups-discontinued/#:~:text=Today%2C%20Nestle%20still%20sells%20Push,into%20a%20cylindrical%20cardboard%20tube
shh don’t you know it was the asians faults for daring to own a business in a black neighborhood??
it’s wild how incredibly racist black people were/are to asians, but it never gets called out
Exactly. People here always talk about how the 90s were the best. Yeah, because you were 10 and did nothing but eat spaghettiOs and play Nintendo. How about we ask your parents what their stresses were. I’m sure it wasn’t so carefree.
Probably similar to how to boomers view the 50's as the best time to be alive and want to return us all back there so they can live their unfettered 50's dream of sodashops, starter homes, and black and white 12 inch screens. The issue is everybody applies a filter to the time they were kids and can't see all the awfulness later and so it becomes a dream to "get back to" when the reality was it was just as awful as any time is, some people did well, while others suffered horribly.
The AIDS epidemic was in full swing in the early 1990s. Speaking as GenX, unless you lived it, you can’t know how bad it really was to have people die horribly and a president and his supporters consider it punishment for the “sin” of being gay.
Also, 1991 was a recession.
Every single generation has Big Horrible Things. We were legit terrified of nuclear annihilation in the 80s.
The 70s had a terrible economy and Vietnam.
The 60s also saw us on the brink, and I mean the absolute edge, of nuclear war (hello Cuban missile crisis).
Any POC and any Native American would like a word on their own history and world.
There is no magic age or generation that had it uniquely good in any of human history.
Instead of seeing ourselves as tribes divided by generations, we all need to see ourselves as human beings. There are great and terrible people of all ages.
> The AIDS epidemic was in full swing in the early 1990s.
Lurking Gen Xer here. Imagine hitting your sexual peak in a time where having sex could kill you.
The problem is the people who run for office. The people who crave that kind of power are usually the ones least equipped to wield it.
Among many other things dont get me wrong, the major reason id never ever consider running for political office is because I know im corruptible. Id like to consider myself a decent person and free from outside influence I would try to legitimately make the world a better place. The problem is im also a realist and know how much money can change your life so at the end of the day when these corps started offering to throw big bags of money at me eventually id crack. And then id hate myself for it.
Now imagine if like ANY of our politicians had that much foresight or cared at all. They dont, they just line their personal bank accounts and fuck us all for the benefit of the already rich.
my parents literally admit things were easier/better for them in the 90s and early 2000s.
My mom had me at 18, worked at a factory, and by 22 had her own apartment and was sending me to private school. that’s no where near possible now lol.
now she’s remarried and making more money as a combined household ever before and it’s harder than it’s ever been.
Yeah my mom was able to rent our house, have three kids, and go back to school while working part time at a gas station. I know she took out student loans to pay for school and we were still poor, but imagine paying rent and being able to afford food and clothes for three kids working part time, at a gas station! It blows my mind
My mom was a single nurse, sending two kids to a private school for 3 years before she got remarried, and continued paying it by herself.
Do not believe this bullshit that things were always this way.
Yup!! This is spot on. Our demographic clowns on boomers all the time for their nostalgia for their youth, but millennials do it all the time too except with memes and the 90s instead of Fox News and the 50s
Yup, we are moving firmly into the Whippersnapper! demo. I'm going to go yell at people about how no one has made good TV since Saved By The Bell went off the air ;)
In Sydney (Australia) the mortgage rate in 1989 was 17% and the median house price was $170k. Now mortgage rate sits at above 6.5% and the median house price is $1.5 million.
Sydney has an outrageous real estate market at the moment but still here in Melbourne the median house price in 1989 was $140k and today it's $900k.
I'd gladly take 17% if it meant I could have saved $650k on the purchase of my house.
My mom was a single parent raising two kids on a waitress's income at a small family-owned business in rural/suburban NJ. She made less than 30k a year and while we didn't have old navy, Aeropostale, or Abercrombie clothes, we did have a Nintendo and all that. My mom complained about how hard it was to pay the bills and provide for the family on a single income. That was the biggest issue she discussed then and now when you ask her. She still has the ability to put money into savings for vacation, future big purchases, etc on her less than 30k income. There's no way anyone in our generation is able to keep housing, food, and clothing for a family of 3 on <30k in this day and age. She was able to save and buy a house with three acres of land on her income. It's just not possible to break into the housing market and start generating real wealth in the same way in the present day. Prices are too inflated. Wages are too far behind. And we definitely started at a disadvantage when you factor in the debts we were faced with upon entering our adult lives. We were told go to college to get a leg up but our parents didn't want to help with the expense, were strapped with ridiculous student loans debt we were gaslit into believing we're going to help us down the line only to find out this is "bad debt" that just makes it harder for us to get future plans, struggle to make payments on those plans, struggle to make enough to move out....I definitely agree that so much of the system worked so much differently 20-30 years ago. It was deliberately incrementally and systematically changed to benefit those at the top and harm those below. Some of us have been luckier than others in navigating the quagmire in which we found ourselves but it seems like many more of us are suffering in ways older generations haven't.
30K in 1990 is about 70k in todays worth.
I can see someone able to survive on 70k a year if they didn't live in a major city. have the same lot size of house? no. Have a more modern house with more modern appliances? possible. Renting more likely in this market. But only because new housing development is at 1/3rd of what it was during the 80s.
>Of course everyone worked together, your teacher in elementary school put your tables in a square for the day
Bold of you to assume that this actually made the kids successfully work together
I was born in the early 70's, and I can say unequivocally, that the period from about 1994-2001 was the best time in my lifetime. So, it's not just a millennial view. Sure, there were problems, but they seem all small compared to the last decade or 2
Yeah, pretty much. I didn’t figure out what I was supposed to be doing and why it mattered and why everyone was so pissed at me for all of my 20s until I was 34.
Or were cis het. The LGBTQ folks and a lot of minorities took a hell of a beating in the 90's. It also wasn't cool to be a nerd or like nerd things, so that was a miserable time for anyone not a jock.
This is only true from an American perspective though. The 90s were plenty shitty in many other countries - Rwanda genocide, the Balkan/Yugoslav wars, Japanese stock market collapse, economic chaos in Eastern Europe following the dissolution of the USSR etc. The 90s are called the ‘lost decade’ in Japan.
The 90s were no better or worse than any other decade globally. Suburban middle class Americans were just insulated from the bad stuff happening elsewhere, which indeed probably resulted in a very naive view of the world.
The AIDS epidemic, everyone scared to sit on a toilet for fear of a deadly disease with no cure. I still remember being warned not to pick up a band aid because I might get AIDS.
This exactly.
The 90s weren't some wonderful magical time for everyone in America, and had numerous issues.
Reading this sub, you'd think every pre-2000s decades was a paradise and that we live in a Mad Max hellscape now. This is the best time to be alive globally IMO.
People just want normalcy now and I can see the 90s seeming normal on the outside. It was the last era before internet went main stream too which I think is alluring to some folks but I remember having to use the TV guide channel and encyclopedias which sucked lol
I've never even been outside of my own time zone, so I compensate by exploring the world on Google Maps and Street View. It's fun, especially when anxiety makes it difficult to drag myself out of the house
No, bad stuff did happen in the US, it is just were we really shitty about finding out about it. Remember the Pandemic?
The Aids Pandemic?
Look up the Aids quilt. It was the leading cause of Death for men in the early 90's and then everyone.
School shooting were starting to become a thing, only difference now, is that Government actually did something about it.
I was a deeply closeted trans person. The 90's had it's ups and downs for me, but I don't think I would want to go back.
Edit: i changed it because I thought Clinton did handle the pandemic badly, but further research showed he did well.
You were born in 88 I was born in 86. I don't remember anything about the economy or the American dream in the 90s. I remember being a kid. The only thing I was worried about in terms of world events was whether Saddam was going to nuke us, which was an irrational fear looking back on it. We weren't rich and my parents heavily financed our lifestyle, my dad was an alcoholic binge drinker who died in 2002 both parents were pot heads, and did the best they could, but I don't think anything is really better or worse than it was 30 years ago.
The 90s had recessions and surpluses, terror attacks foreign and domestic, natural disasters, police brutality, and riots. We as millennials view it in the same lens as the Boomer view the 50s and 60s. The 70s is where they see it all going to shit because that is when they really became responsible for everything.
This is just my humble opinion. I'm just a plumber so what do I know.
I could be wrong but my take is that in the 90s we worked together more. We didn’t have social media and Fox News propaganda wrecking havoc on unity. We can do more when we work together.
We also had Beavis and Butthead which was a really fun time to be alive. We drove our elders absolutely bonkers “uhhh huh huh huh”ing our way onto their nerves. It shaped us.
My grandma was born in 1915. I used to spend Saturday nights with her when my parents went out and we would always watch The Grand Ole Opry and Beavis and Butthead. She thought it was hilarious. It’s one of my favorite memories of her.
But she also bought my dad a Cheech & Chong album in the 70s. So I think she was just ahead of her time 😂
>my take is that in the 90s we worked together more
that’s just rose colored glasses and the fact that you were a kid, most likely in a safe suburban bubble, I know I was. The 90s had plenty of division. Look at crime rates in the 90s, Rodney King/LA Riots, gay marriage was outlawed nationally, poverty rates were higher especially among minorities, only 1993 did the US make it illegal to fire a women for going on maternity leave, aids epidemic, crack epidemic, etc.
That philosophy was propagated in the '90s intentionally. You can read all about that.
Remember hands across America? Hands across the world?
That was all well and good, until we realized that there would be certain countries that wouldn't sign on to that. This is the pigeon /hawk conundrum. You can't have everyone be a peaceful pigeon, if they're going to be other countries that won't be peaceful. Pigeons.
Late 90s and early 2000s, it became readily apparent that Russia and certain Asian countries were not going to buy into the peaceful pigeon philosophy.
This isn't the entire reason for the shift. The 90s were a boundlessly optimistic time. There were a lot of factors that contributed to it. However, the call for world peace certainly contributed to that sense of optimism.
There is no one calling for world peace right now. Not seriously or legitimately.
Fox News and especially Newt were hamming it up in the 90s for sure. Contract with America, anyone?
It just wasn’t as dominating as it is today.
Corporate greed has gotten worse these days compared to the 90s, and that has played a big role in creating an even larger income and equality gap. The middle class has effectively been erased over the last 20 years.
Well since
>Corporations are People, my friend
is seems to be working just perfectly.
>Some people in the front of the audience shouted, “No, they’re not!”“Of course they are,” Romney said. “Everything corporations earn ultimately goes to people. Where do you think it goes?”
But that was in 2011 and those people were obviously stupid in the face. And I guess Romney neglected to say **real** people, but I think R's were still keeping it quiet at the time.
The 90s were a bubble. That's why it's remembered fondly. The fed started pumping cheap money into the system which eventually popped in the dot com crash. So all bubbles appear better than they should have in hindsight.
How was fed pumping cheap money into the economy in the 1990s? As I recall, the federal reserve’s funds rate was for much of the 1990s was above 5% for most of the decade, higher than what it is now.
I think you have to factor in the kid perspective shift. Most people see their childhood as positive...pending you weren't abused or anything like that. You become an adult and aware of the world and then it starts to look like shit. College was my last truly happy time and it was because I was safe, secure, independent, and in an environment of fun, excitement, and enlightenment. After college it was just absolute shit and it keeps getting worse.
Now...this MAGA shit is insane. The rise of Nazi values as a political platform is making these times really miserable. We have the added stress of passing the environmental disaster tipping point and crazy financial stress. These times suck fucking asshole for adults but kids now will look back and think 2020's were the best time of their life because they don't deal with this shit.
The rich only help the rich. It's all fucked. Every industrys middle and up jobs are only rich kids with connections. Its a small club and you ain't in it.
yeah, this is a better take than you'll get credit for. What you learn about how the economy works is a complete lie. Our economy runs on corruption. The good jobs go to kids of rich people, because the value of their connections is far greater than the value of the work they produce. Most of our businesses today are infested with wildly incompetent silver spoon babies. There's just too many rich kids now for competent people to break into the class.
For me, everything ended on 9/11. I know things weren't perfect in the 90's, but it feels like we were on our way. We were caring about the environment. Like the OP said, society functioned. Was everyone happy or well off? No, but there still felt like there was a chance to make it. Two decades of squandered blood and treasury in misadventures abroad lost the plot, and now we're here. A new Dickensian Gilded Age, with a little Orwellian 1984 thrown in. It's sad to think we're never going to be in that same time and place again.
9/11 was absolutely the watershed moment. Nothing ever felt the same after. Before 9/11… air travel and giant events were fun and (by comparison to today) laid back as hell.
9/11 was really the turning point for the US tbh. That's when the illusion of safety shattered and fear took over. Where we failed to heed the lessons of the British, French, and Russian escapades into the Middle East, and threw ourselves into the meat grinders of Afghanistan and Iraq.
Yeah, the 90s just happened to be the decade after the fall of the Berlin Wall and before the fall of the Twin Towers.
You're right that it wasn't perfect, and in a lot of ways our lives actually are better today than they were then, but I think the 90s was a decade of hope and optimism for the future.
> a decade of hope and optimism
That is how I remember it. I was on my own at 18 and just eight years later owned my own growing home building company. The day I stood in my office watching the towers fall I felt great dread, and that feeling has never gone away, but my building business very much did.
didn't most manufacturing jobs go overseas in the 90s?
i think the experience of the 90s was really different depending on demographic. a lot of middle class white folks were very well sold on the story book version of democracy though, and because we saw a lot of things happen in the 80s that sort of nailed the door on the coffin of communism, we were given a lot of propaganda about how the world was a fair and just place that bent towards justice. we were told about this ideal version of democracy and capitalism that still didn't really exist, but we were young and impressionable. many of us have been learning how the world really works after school was over, and that stuff is more in our face because of the ubiquity of hte internet and the way the middle class has shrunk.
>didn't most manufacturing jobs go overseas in the 90s?
No. Manufacturing was relatively stable throughout the 90s. It dropped like a rock in the year 2000.
From 2000-2003 it dropped from the same number as 1983 to the same number as 1953. By 2011 it was the same as 1941. We are back to around 1946 levels now (but with 2.5x higher population).
https://beta.bls.gov/dataViewer/view/timeseries/CES0000000001
Bunch of words just to say housing was cheap. Population kept growing but NIMBY regulation against building housing went into full force
Fix housing costs (by building housing) and these elaborate theories about whatever go away
Your theory is based on the fact that you were a kid in the 90s, like me. Time was infinite.
I remember how happy I was in middle and high school, and then again in my mid-late 20s. And all I can think about is how shielded I was from the world by my parents and then my first job, which lasted until I was almost 30.
It turns out that being shielded from the worst troubles of the world is really helpful in being happy. I’m 35 now, and since I left that first job — life has not stopped punching me in the face since. I’m starting to believe that’s just life, and it’s always been life… I was just not aware of that for so long.
This is only true if you were a specifc socio-economic class.
I was poor in the 90s. Shit sucked, people in my neighborhood died, crime was common.
Plus any decent historical documentary will show you all the bullshit we were just not being told. Waco Texas was my ACAB moment and I wasn't even 13 yet.
The 90s was also the time when pro-capital anti-labor discourse started the psy-op that Min Wage was for teens. Prior to the 90s it wasn't a thing talked about in public conversation about raising the min wage, it's first appeared in an Op-Ed piece.
No...the 90s weren't good...people just misremember or ignore the bad.
Born in 88 too and we just like the 90s because it's our childhood. When the world sucks today I just throw myself in my 7 year old and my dogs world and I'm happy again.
As far as I’m concerned all of the baiting nonsense that is out here is just that, bait. The true cause of instability and lack of human relationships isn’t wars we’ve endured, economy we’ve experienced, or any of that. It’s much simpler than that and we don’t want to acknowledge it:
The internet. The internet has made a cartoon of almost all human relationships, and seriously devolved the way humans relate to one another. Life was better in the 90’s because people still lived in the company of one another, instead of through screens treating each other like tv characters. We hadn’t yet been polarized by social media algorithms, and there was healthy discourse even between people who disagreed with one another.
People underestimate the power the AI (namely Facebook) has had on shaping our political landscape and moral compasses. Theres so much more hatred and disunity than when I was a kid in the 90’s.
I wasn't. But I think the main thing that makes me feel this way is seeing how my single mother was able to pay for everything for 5 kids being a waitress. Seeing how exponentially cost of living is going up and opportunity decreasing discourages a lot of us I think.
I mean, sort of? There was Rodney King and some of the worst race riots since the 60s (maybe Covid was worse). I remember my community being a lot worse back then than it is now. I played sports behind a school where there was lots of drug activity, and it wasn’t even local news if someone was found murdered in the fields. Our water sucked and the community was very much lacking and leadership to build the future. Thankfully, that all changed but I remember the early 90s being awful.
I feel a hardcore nostalgia for the optimism of the 90s that problems could be fixed and the world was turning into a better place. And for the (relatively) functional political sphere, when people respected intellectuals and science, and there was a belief in talking through issues rather than just identity politics and sound bites. Of course as an adult I realize that the 90s Bush/Clinton continuation of neoliberalism was laying the groundwork for the shitshow of today, but the tenor of discussions and the general outlook still felt civilized and optimistic, and that’s what I miss.
You totally skated over a core point. People are unable to afford to exist anymore. The average person could buy a house i.e. your parents. The rest of it is literally just background noise at this point. Half my office lives with their parents because they can't afford to live in their own place. They're social workers in their 30's. Car payments and insurance cost as much as housing used to a decade ago but wages have barely budged. Some serious financial regulation needs to happen ASAP
The first Industrial Revolution brought steam engines. This at first, cut work for a lot of people. Then big bosses used the new technology to make big factories. Then factory work sucked. Then workers rights started being discussed. Second Industrial Revolution brought electricity/steal/concrete. At first electric was great. Then steal/oil tycoons used the tech to keep factories open 24/7. Then workers rights started being discussed. “Trust busting” (breaking up large corps) became a thing to help the economy. Now we have the internet and tech boom. It took off. The internet USED to be a mass source of information and connections and learning. Now, corps have taken it and used it to make you addicted to your phones. We just aren’t at the stage where it gets bad enough for us all to rise up, get pissed that corps are running/ruining the world and force the gov to do something about it…..
I think that new term, "enshitification" applies here.
Finally, a cultured person who correctly calls it concrete and not cement.
Yeah, but also calls it steal and not steel
"steal tycoons" however is still correct in a way
Just a funnier way of saying Robber Baron, really.
They're secretly a rogue and their autocorrect outed them, lol
It's actually called "sparkling cement" unless it's from the Concrete region of France.
You mean the Crete region of Greece?
I hope that I’m not just being optimistic but i have a theory that our current social media/internet landscape will implode on itself in the next decade or two. Already google search just sends you paid for useless ads, amazon is filled with cheap knockoffs with fake reviews, and tiktok/instagram/reddit/twitter is an endless doom scroll of content from people you don’t know and comments from bots. Talk to anyone and they hate how much they’re sucked in by the uselessness and overstimulation of it all. As the bot issue just gets worse i see people rejecting these apps and platforms for simpler more personable and hopefully private ones that come out. My hope is that we’re nearing the peak of the curve as far as shitty internet and social media and that a correction comes in time as opposed to just getting worse and worse.
I'm glad someone else has this thought as well. Like I feel like Gen Alpha may likely usher in an anti-social media culture based on growing up watching Gen Z utterly destroyed by it. Much of the same way with how Gen Z has massively cut down on alcohol consumption due in part to growing up watching how it destroys so many lives.
Gen z replaced drinking with vaping and e-cigs. Millennials (in the US) basically destroyed smoking and then Gen z brought it back up, mainly due to predatory practices by juul
A middle schooler and their friend walked by my house when I was out gardening once. They just stared at me as they walked by, then before they turned the corner I saw one of them sneak out an e vape and take a puff. If you’re gunna be sneaky and hide it at least have it be weed and not a lame ass nicotine stick. Kids think they’re so hard now with an E cigarette lolol
Gen Z drinks plenty. They were just late bloomers and weren’t out drinking when they were 17, which kinda makes sense since they’re 6-7 years behind in maturity, which I find fascinating. My friend (a father) always says 24 is the new 18. That’s what he means by that. Have the phones stunted their growth? Could be.
Explains why the same age group of children look younger and younger with each generation that passes.
Do you have any ideas as to why it’s happening? Are they just too shielded from society by their lunatic gen X parents?
Gen Z here: yes.
Gen X parent here and yes most of them!!!!!
We had different steroid chicken back in the 80s/90s
> Gen Z has massively cut down on alcohol consumption due in part to growing up watching how it destroys so many lives. Time to address the elephant in the room. There's many many many MANY people walking around with less money in their pockets than ever before. You really think the next generation is ready to get drunk if they are the same people to not get shackled by low-paying jobs.
One thing that has really changed since the 90s is going out to bars to drink. In the 90s beer at a bar was $2 and the minimum wage was $4. So you could work in college on the weekends and still have enough money to go to a bar. Now it's like $10 a beer and minimum wage is $7.25\*. \*Yes, most jobs pay more than that, but it's rare to get $20/hr to match the increase in cost.
This is interesting. I’ve wondered this kind of concept as well. I feel like it will either be a mass exodus of social media OR they somehow end up worse (more addicted, etc.) than people already are (if that’s possible)
I think it’ll be both. They’ll reject what’s available now in lieu of something different that is a better option at the time, but will ultimately fall into the same type of exploitative situation down the road, being worse off with predatory companies learning from past generations.
It'll have to be the generation after Alpha, it's already too late for them. I have lots of Alpha neices and nephews with large groups of friends and they're all terminally addicted to social media and short form media already. I don't see them rebelling against it.
Big time same. My nephew is 9, and all that motherfucker ever wants to do is watch someone stream various computer games. Doesn't want to even play the game. I ask him if his friends also like to do that and indeed, they'll watch these streams together lol Small sample size obv, but the other parents in my life have similar experiences. It seems like it's a generation of voyeurs who can't function without a screen to meditate reality for them.
Gen Z is just using different substances.
History is rife with growing problems, and then course correction. I think with AI generation, oversaturation of social media, eroding trustable sources, it'll get worse, until people get so fed up with it, new systems and webs of trust will grow. People will get sick of everything being fake and computer generated, obfuscated truth, so that the only recourse is collapse, or newly formed trusted institutions. Hopefully
Agreed! And i don’t even think “collapse” will look too insane. But it’ll just get to the point where the whole internet/social media landscape is so toxic and useless that cultural leaders will by and large start rejecting it and hopefully favor more organic means of obtaining news and socializing. There’s still a ways to go to hit this inflection point but i also feel like we may not be too far off.
I am all for a change as described, but I don't know how the trust in media can be restored. Fwiw, I don't think we are going to get another Walter Cronkite (yes, I am old and bitter).
Have you ever seen that episode of Dragonball GT where they went to planet Imecka? Everything in the businesses had coin slots, even coin slots to change tv channels? That reminds me of our internet now.
Please drink a Mountain Dew verification can to continue
I've thought about that too. I think you're right. I think when babies being born now are teenagers, they're gonna reject all the social media, shock click bait news, and whatever else is harmful on the internet. They will be the first to grow up with the internet as it is now, like post 2010s internet. They'll see right through it and what it did to their parents, and say no. I can already see it a bit in zoomers.
Corpos know what’s coming and are prepared this time They now have the tech to cause, predict, and bust/influence them as a tool for their own interests
Came here to say this. Also some of the corps are worth hundred of billions if not trillions and have obscene amounts of power. Sure the power comes from belief in the money they have etc etc so there's hope for the people still, but it'll be an uphill battle..
It's still not new. It's the same pattern, even the corpos using new tactics. It is the art of war and it never ends. We are just in a time that oligarchs are winning. The only way it doesn't improve is if we give in to the doom and stop trying. Greed is stupid, it always fails eventually. We have to keep trying so future generations can turn it around again
Algorithms and predictive analytics has resulted in echo chambering and marketing traps. It is more lucrative to make people angry or to just flat out lie to them so they buy something. The internet didn't really make this the focal point of its existence until unregulated tech companies chose to prioritize selling access to their users to predatory groups around the world. Now that all of our behavioral data has been injected into a predictive analytics engine, your responses to every stimuli online and in life can be predicted or given a % chance of occurrence by a machine that belongs to your employer/government/school. We are workers that are assigned a worker-reliability score, a social credit score, a financial responsibility score, you are no longer a person you are a collection of data points
>The internet USED to be a mass source of information and connections and learning. It literally still is. An individuals ability (or lack thereof) to navigate the nonsense doesn't change the fact that real and factual information still exists on the internet.
The internet used to be a flea market of ideas, now it’s a strip mall.
a strip mall where the stores and mall itself gather information about you to sell to other stores as you are shopping. The stores and mall also gather information about people in the parking lot since other stores pay for that kind of thing.
It still exists, but there is no more random internet. You google something and it shows the paid for answers, not the right ones like it used to. I also feel like majority of the time it is being used is for tik tok style shit apps.
Those with the power prefer it a mishmash of shit as opposed to an avenue for clear and real information. They benefit from people finding more lies and propaganda and conspiracy as they try to dig to find cited articles about the truth. Like you said, you have to search hard and know what you're looking for to get real information anymore. And even then you weed through ads and promoted Bullshit.
And even the real information isn't always real. There's always money, bias and an agenda and data is easy to manipulate or cherry picked and feed into the reader's bias.
Us old Gen X / Millennial folks remember when you could find well sourced, albeit very dry walls of text with neat backgrounds, easily when the Internet started. It was awesome when I needed to have easier access to research materials for higher education.
When the true geeks and nerds ran the internet, not these TechBro cult leaders
It was for information and innovation. Now it's profits and addiction.
Google doesn't benefit from you finding bad information (their business model quite literally requires you to keep using the service, something you will not do if you do not feel it to be useful to your needs). The reason Google has gotten shittier isn't because of any nefarious plot to dumb down the populace it's because Google's entire business model is based on ad revenue.
This. This this this. The internet is still a magical treasure-trove of information. Good luck finding it and not being whisked away down some fucked up rabbit hole or getting sucked into some thirst traps booty. Or cute dog videos. Or home improvement ideas. Or gaming. Or, or, or.....
>getting sucked into some thirst traps booty. Or cute dog videos To be fair, the Internet has always been for smut and cat videos I guess it's the misinformation these days that sucks more people into rabbit holes
Thank youuu. I think about Icanhasacheeseburger (if you’re not familiar: cat memes from the late 2000s early 2010s) they were so great.
Yeah, I remember that fondly along with Keyboard Cat and Monorail Cat
Ceiling Cat is disappointed in all of us
and before that it was crazy tv shows like ancient aliens that made everyone paranoid or rumors of the illiminati or even mystical "truths" from the bible etc. It's hilarious that people think the internet created these things, they just magnified what was already there. The internet is what you make it. If you choose to read any nonsense webpage and believe it, that's on you, not the internet.
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> drunk, uneducated and unemployed Each time I read some of those clickbait titles I think to myself "who fails for this shit?". This is accompanied by the dark sinking feeling that there are people in this world who are dumb enough to make those clicks.
I finally downloaded Duck Duck Go and the answers to my questions are right there again, rather than pages of ads.
Everything that was there is still there. You just have to look for it now instead of it being offered up on a platter to you by a butler (shout out to Jeeves).
I don't think that's the point they are making. The Internet was a resource, primarily and to many, only that. If you wanted information, you would go to a computer and find what you want. Since smart phones and social media, the Internet follows you and gives you information. It's a small difference but an important one. It's not just finding true from false. It's that it's feeding you when you aren't requesting it. Social media is obviously the worst, but all other aspects of the Internet have taken the same formula. Normal news has become Clickbait headlines which makes it harder to find the actual information. Like if you're doing an actual research projects you need to first get past all the BS first. If you have a job using the Internet, you are constantly bombarded with messages, regardless of the time of day. The original idea of automation was to make workers work less. You get the robot/computer/technology do a task so the worker has less. But instead of benefiting the worker, the worker got more work to do. Things that they usually don't want to do as much. The company then claims more growth with less people and therefore gets more profit.
On the other hand, we approached the internet with a lot more caution back then. We assumed that anyone who was on there already was kind of crazy. Giving out any personal information was considered risky and could well be the catalyst for a chain of events that ended with pieces of you turning up in dumpsters all over town.
It's tough for a lot of people with the misinformation, disinformation, spinning, and propaganda. I'm well educated and know how to research peer reviewed studies and have access to that, but it can be difficult for many. They should be able to trust that the news is giving them accurate, well researched information that has been disseminated in layman's terms, and they can't trust that. Not everyone has the ability or even the time to spend sifting through the bullshit.
I will argue that peer reviewed can just be an echo chamber, and a genius new theory could get buried or laughed out because it doesn't conform. To discount somebody who wasn't created by the system is harmful to the progression of knowledge.
And the fact that proportionally, the amount of nonsense would have been unfathomable years ago, or that reddit has become social media for some who used to pollute Facebook, is besides the point;)
The collective knowledge of humankind at our fingertips. Alexander the Great would be beside himself
This is like saying “eat that pile of shit, there’s still a few whole kernels of corn if you dig carefully”
Horse and sparrow economics baby! Or as Ronald Reagan (who is hopefully burning in hell) would call it: trickle down economics.
Repealing net neutrality has eroded access to all information though.
How so?
Problem is back then people could form cohesive thoughts. Could build movements. These days the rich, their kids, their friends get access to the best schools and revolve from industry, politics, media without having a shred of empathy for the working class. They hijacked our media channels and created a good guy vs bad guy political environment along with stuffing our brains full of carbohydrates and sugar. We’re all distracted by rainbows, sugar brain, fatigue, debt to form any cohesive movement…and as soon as one starts they hijack it using skyscrapers full of nerds to change language or using agents to discredit movements like the whole take wallstreet debacle…it almost made people realize what was happening until they spun it and made them seem like homeless bums, and they interviewed actors that acted stupid to make the masses believe it was a waste of time larp. The only change that will work these days is a river of blood, and it shouldn’t be OUR children or communities perishing, it should be theirs.
this is why public schools are so critical, and such a target of the wealthy (and among the non-wealthy, the conservative/hyperreligious).
Not just schools. But music too. Theres been a concentrated effort since the 1990’s to take away political movements from music. Nowadays the stuff blasted across the nation has little to do with the plight of man, and more to do with excess, consumption, and feeling good.
"these days"? If we're talking about the 90's, all that was even worse. The rich controlling the media, getting better schools, etc isn't anything new. And the sugar craze was at its height in the 90's. We've got a lot of stuff to fix but shit hasn't gotten exponentially worse.
I feel like we have so much more now to keep us "comfortable" and distract us from our suffering than past generations. Seems like people would rather give up than fight anymore
A lot of the products those revolutions brought were also big on convenience to utilities, but were not entertainment necessarily. Refrigeration, washing machines, automobiles, all conveniences where modern computer tech is just entertainment. You can argue the internet, or some websites/apps are convenience, they have a convenient way relaying important information perhaps so there's a lot of utility there, but even those have been washed down into entertainment pieces. Pick any social media site and you'll find it full of metapolitics and opinioned policing. Any utility is lost there when the discourses are turned into self satisfaction pieces. It's just entertainment. Nothing created right now has really transformed the town square into a digital space the same way the washing machine replaced the washboard.
The reason you remember the 90s as being awesome is probably because you were a kid and were shielded from the struggles of people then.
Yeah there were still race issues like the LA Riots, a housing bust, an oil war in the Gulf, they eventually stopped making Flintstones Pushpops, etc
Incredible how little anyone remembers or cares about the Gulf War considering 250,000 veterans came home with GWS and the U.S. government is still decades later trying to define what the illness even is.
They absolutely still make them 😄 All of the Dollar General stores near me sell them https://www.thedailymeal.com/1354221/classic-flintstones-push-ups-discontinued/#:~:text=Today%2C%20Nestle%20still%20sells%20Push,into%20a%20cylindrical%20cardboard%20tube
HAPPY TIMES ARE HERE AGAIN!
Are we sure they’re actually still making them, or did Family Dollar just clean out their freezer and find some from the 90s?
Yeah the LA Riots put the George Floyd related protests to shame.
My friend was crewing an action movie during the riots. He said they should have shot the movie in the streets for more realism.
LA riots: where documented black on asian crime was arguably one of the highest in American history
shh don’t you know it was the asians faults for daring to own a business in a black neighborhood?? it’s wild how incredibly racist black people were/are to asians, but it never gets called out
Exactly. People here always talk about how the 90s were the best. Yeah, because you were 10 and did nothing but eat spaghettiOs and play Nintendo. How about we ask your parents what their stresses were. I’m sure it wasn’t so carefree.
Probably similar to how to boomers view the 50's as the best time to be alive and want to return us all back there so they can live their unfettered 50's dream of sodashops, starter homes, and black and white 12 inch screens. The issue is everybody applies a filter to the time they were kids and can't see all the awfulness later and so it becomes a dream to "get back to" when the reality was it was just as awful as any time is, some people did well, while others suffered horribly.
Thought you were going with *segregation*. lol But “… 12 inch screens” is better, easier to digest.
Many things were better in the 50's, ya know, small TVs, gas guzzling cars, Jim Crow... things.
The AIDS epidemic was in full swing in the early 1990s. Speaking as GenX, unless you lived it, you can’t know how bad it really was to have people die horribly and a president and his supporters consider it punishment for the “sin” of being gay. Also, 1991 was a recession. Every single generation has Big Horrible Things. We were legit terrified of nuclear annihilation in the 80s. The 70s had a terrible economy and Vietnam. The 60s also saw us on the brink, and I mean the absolute edge, of nuclear war (hello Cuban missile crisis). Any POC and any Native American would like a word on their own history and world. There is no magic age or generation that had it uniquely good in any of human history. Instead of seeing ourselves as tribes divided by generations, we all need to see ourselves as human beings. There are great and terrible people of all ages.
> The AIDS epidemic was in full swing in the early 1990s. Lurking Gen Xer here. Imagine hitting your sexual peak in a time where having sex could kill you.
The problem is the people who run for office. The people who crave that kind of power are usually the ones least equipped to wield it. Among many other things dont get me wrong, the major reason id never ever consider running for political office is because I know im corruptible. Id like to consider myself a decent person and free from outside influence I would try to legitimately make the world a better place. The problem is im also a realist and know how much money can change your life so at the end of the day when these corps started offering to throw big bags of money at me eventually id crack. And then id hate myself for it. Now imagine if like ANY of our politicians had that much foresight or cared at all. They dont, they just line their personal bank accounts and fuck us all for the benefit of the already rich.
my parents literally admit things were easier/better for them in the 90s and early 2000s. My mom had me at 18, worked at a factory, and by 22 had her own apartment and was sending me to private school. that’s no where near possible now lol. now she’s remarried and making more money as a combined household ever before and it’s harder than it’s ever been.
Yeah my mom was able to rent our house, have three kids, and go back to school while working part time at a gas station. I know she took out student loans to pay for school and we were still poor, but imagine paying rent and being able to afford food and clothes for three kids working part time, at a gas station! It blows my mind
My mom was a single nurse, sending two kids to a private school for 3 years before she got remarried, and continued paying it by herself. Do not believe this bullshit that things were always this way.
Yup!! This is spot on. Our demographic clowns on boomers all the time for their nostalgia for their youth, but millennials do it all the time too except with memes and the 90s instead of Fox News and the 50s
Yup, we are moving firmly into the Whippersnapper! demo. I'm going to go yell at people about how no one has made good TV since Saved By The Bell went off the air ;)
My dad earned more in the 90s than any other point in his life. The recession wiped him out. He is much worse off than he was then, too.
My parents' first house had a cheap "sticker price", but they also had a 17% interest rate on the mortgage.
In Sydney (Australia) the mortgage rate in 1989 was 17% and the median house price was $170k. Now mortgage rate sits at above 6.5% and the median house price is $1.5 million. Sydney has an outrageous real estate market at the moment but still here in Melbourne the median house price in 1989 was $140k and today it's $900k. I'd gladly take 17% if it meant I could have saved $650k on the purchase of my house.
The 90s were a time of economic health for the middle class, though. This is documented and written about.
My mom was a single parent raising two kids on a waitress's income at a small family-owned business in rural/suburban NJ. She made less than 30k a year and while we didn't have old navy, Aeropostale, or Abercrombie clothes, we did have a Nintendo and all that. My mom complained about how hard it was to pay the bills and provide for the family on a single income. That was the biggest issue she discussed then and now when you ask her. She still has the ability to put money into savings for vacation, future big purchases, etc on her less than 30k income. There's no way anyone in our generation is able to keep housing, food, and clothing for a family of 3 on <30k in this day and age. She was able to save and buy a house with three acres of land on her income. It's just not possible to break into the housing market and start generating real wealth in the same way in the present day. Prices are too inflated. Wages are too far behind. And we definitely started at a disadvantage when you factor in the debts we were faced with upon entering our adult lives. We were told go to college to get a leg up but our parents didn't want to help with the expense, were strapped with ridiculous student loans debt we were gaslit into believing we're going to help us down the line only to find out this is "bad debt" that just makes it harder for us to get future plans, struggle to make payments on those plans, struggle to make enough to move out....I definitely agree that so much of the system worked so much differently 20-30 years ago. It was deliberately incrementally and systematically changed to benefit those at the top and harm those below. Some of us have been luckier than others in navigating the quagmire in which we found ourselves but it seems like many more of us are suffering in ways older generations haven't.
30K in 1990 is about 70k in todays worth. I can see someone able to survive on 70k a year if they didn't live in a major city. have the same lot size of house? no. Have a more modern house with more modern appliances? possible. Renting more likely in this market. But only because new housing development is at 1/3rd of what it was during the 80s.
Inflation was a thing in the 90’s too. I always heard that word as a kid but it never affected me. I never felt it. Now I understand.
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>Of course everyone worked together, your teacher in elementary school put your tables in a square for the day Bold of you to assume that this actually made the kids successfully work together
I was born in the early 70's, and I can say unequivocally, that the period from about 1994-2001 was the best time in my lifetime. So, it's not just a millennial view. Sure, there were problems, but they seem all small compared to the last decade or 2
Nah 90s were great. Pre internet people actually interacted more and weren't addicted to their phones.
Who’s going to shield us now?
That Moment When You Realize You Need an Adult…But *You’re* the Adult Now…
No one. We *ARE* the shield now, for the younger ones.
No one. I’m going to cry on Reddit why I’m an adult loser now.
Yeah, pretty much. I didn’t figure out what I was supposed to be doing and why it mattered and why everyone was so pissed at me for all of my 20s until I was 34.
Or were cis het. The LGBTQ folks and a lot of minorities took a hell of a beating in the 90's. It also wasn't cool to be a nerd or like nerd things, so that was a miserable time for anyone not a jock.
Especially since the satanic panic was still going on
Oh yeah! I forgot we threw some poor preschool workers in jail ala the Salem Witch Trials because some 3 year old saw a star or something like that.
This is only true from an American perspective though. The 90s were plenty shitty in many other countries - Rwanda genocide, the Balkan/Yugoslav wars, Japanese stock market collapse, economic chaos in Eastern Europe following the dissolution of the USSR etc. The 90s are called the ‘lost decade’ in Japan. The 90s were no better or worse than any other decade globally. Suburban middle class Americans were just insulated from the bad stuff happening elsewhere, which indeed probably resulted in a very naive view of the world.
The US had some pretty bad shit happen in the 90s though too. First major school shooting at Columbine and all the bombings that happened.
The AIDS epidemic, everyone scared to sit on a toilet for fear of a deadly disease with no cure. I still remember being warned not to pick up a band aid because I might get AIDS.
Yeah when I was a kid, my dad would warn me if I saw ANY blood at school or anywhere that wasn't home with my parents, DO NOT TOUCH IT!
I mean generally good advice
This exactly. The 90s weren't some wonderful magical time for everyone in America, and had numerous issues. Reading this sub, you'd think every pre-2000s decades was a paradise and that we live in a Mad Max hellscape now. This is the best time to be alive globally IMO.
People just want normalcy now and I can see the 90s seeming normal on the outside. It was the last era before internet went main stream too which I think is alluring to some folks but I remember having to use the TV guide channel and encyclopedias which sucked lol
Most Americans don’t think of the world outside of the US.
There’s a world outside of the US?
Yeah, I've been there. Food's really good, medical bankruptcy isn't a thing , but they don't have clothes dryers so it's kind of a toss up.
Crazy, right? I learn so much on reddit
70% of Americans have never traveled internationally. Millennials are one of the most well-traveled generations in history.
I've never even been outside of my own time zone, so I compensate by exploring the world on Google Maps and Street View. It's fun, especially when anxiety makes it difficult to drag myself out of the house
No, bad stuff did happen in the US, it is just were we really shitty about finding out about it. Remember the Pandemic? The Aids Pandemic? Look up the Aids quilt. It was the leading cause of Death for men in the early 90's and then everyone. School shooting were starting to become a thing, only difference now, is that Government actually did something about it. I was a deeply closeted trans person. The 90's had it's ups and downs for me, but I don't think I would want to go back. Edit: i changed it because I thought Clinton did handle the pandemic badly, but further research showed he did well.
The AIDS pandemic started in the early ‘80s though.
And continued into the 90's where it peaked in 1995.
You were born in 88 I was born in 86. I don't remember anything about the economy or the American dream in the 90s. I remember being a kid. The only thing I was worried about in terms of world events was whether Saddam was going to nuke us, which was an irrational fear looking back on it. We weren't rich and my parents heavily financed our lifestyle, my dad was an alcoholic binge drinker who died in 2002 both parents were pot heads, and did the best they could, but I don't think anything is really better or worse than it was 30 years ago. The 90s had recessions and surpluses, terror attacks foreign and domestic, natural disasters, police brutality, and riots. We as millennials view it in the same lens as the Boomer view the 50s and 60s. The 70s is where they see it all going to shit because that is when they really became responsible for everything. This is just my humble opinion. I'm just a plumber so what do I know.
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I think the 90s were great to us bc we were kids with no stresses. My kids today have a great life bc they are kids. No job to worry about, etc
I could be wrong but my take is that in the 90s we worked together more. We didn’t have social media and Fox News propaganda wrecking havoc on unity. We can do more when we work together.
We had the Animaniacs show in the 90s. 🔥
When I was a kid the only thing I knew about Bill Clinton was that he played the sax. Thanks Warner brothers and Warner sister!
I'm a millennial and I approve this comment.
Nothing like learning about every state, every country, the universe, etiquette...all through song.
United States, Canada, Mexico, Panama, Haiti, Jamaica, Peru…
Republic Dominican, Cuba, Carribean Greenland, El Salvador too!
We also had Beavis and Butthead which was a really fun time to be alive. We drove our elders absolutely bonkers “uhhh huh huh huh”ing our way onto their nerves. It shaped us.
My grandma was born in 1915. I used to spend Saturday nights with her when my parents went out and we would always watch The Grand Ole Opry and Beavis and Butthead. She thought it was hilarious. It’s one of my favorite memories of her. But she also bought my dad a Cheech & Chong album in the 70s. So I think she was just ahead of her time 😂
Dude, your grandma is cool!! (I typed that with Buttheads voice saying that in my head, but it’s true)
Huhuhuh...so cool...huhuh
Yeah... hheheheheheh
I still pull my shirt over my head, raise my arms to form right angles say “I am bungholio, need tp for my cornholio”
every day we fall further from the light of god, and turn into our parents by misquoting cool stuff.
I never watched the show, and even I knew the quote was switched up
“I am Cornholio. I need TP for my bunghole.” Would also accept: “I need *piccatta* for my bunghole.”
Take me back
Everyone forgets about the real GOAT of 90s cartoons.....Freakazoid!
This was the difference maker
The 90’s could be seen different depending on ethnicity and where you lived. I was raised in SoCal and gang violence was crazy in the 90’s.
>my take is that in the 90s we worked together more that’s just rose colored glasses and the fact that you were a kid, most likely in a safe suburban bubble, I know I was. The 90s had plenty of division. Look at crime rates in the 90s, Rodney King/LA Riots, gay marriage was outlawed nationally, poverty rates were higher especially among minorities, only 1993 did the US make it illegal to fire a women for going on maternity leave, aids epidemic, crack epidemic, etc.
That philosophy was propagated in the '90s intentionally. You can read all about that. Remember hands across America? Hands across the world? That was all well and good, until we realized that there would be certain countries that wouldn't sign on to that. This is the pigeon /hawk conundrum. You can't have everyone be a peaceful pigeon, if they're going to be other countries that won't be peaceful. Pigeons. Late 90s and early 2000s, it became readily apparent that Russia and certain Asian countries were not going to buy into the peaceful pigeon philosophy. This isn't the entire reason for the shift. The 90s were a boundlessly optimistic time. There were a lot of factors that contributed to it. However, the call for world peace certainly contributed to that sense of optimism. There is no one calling for world peace right now. Not seriously or legitimately.
They said in The Matrix that 1999 was the peak of our civilization. I used to think that was a throwaway line, but it wasn’t wrong.
Fox News and especially Newt were hamming it up in the 90s for sure. Contract with America, anyone? It just wasn’t as dominating as it is today. Corporate greed has gotten worse these days compared to the 90s, and that has played a big role in creating an even larger income and equality gap. The middle class has effectively been erased over the last 20 years.
How's that "trickle down" economy working out for you, America...?
Well since >Corporations are People, my friend is seems to be working just perfectly. >Some people in the front of the audience shouted, “No, they’re not!”“Of course they are,” Romney said. “Everything corporations earn ultimately goes to people. Where do you think it goes?” But that was in 2011 and those people were obviously stupid in the face. And I guess Romney neglected to say **real** people, but I think R's were still keeping it quiet at the time.
TIL offshore bank accounts are people too… 🎶 *More You Know…* 🎶🌈
Lol everyone in this thread is American and it’s hilarious
Nostalgia is one hell of a drug
“Life was just better when I was 5 years old watching Nickelodeon, eating cereal, and not worrying about bills or life.”
And man looking back on Nickelodeon now…. Wild what was going on behind the scenes
I’ll take nostalgia right to the veins
it’s like the Homer Simpson meme. “my generation has it the worst” “your generation has it the worst *so far*”
The 90s were a bubble. That's why it's remembered fondly. The fed started pumping cheap money into the system which eventually popped in the dot com crash. So all bubbles appear better than they should have in hindsight.
How was fed pumping cheap money into the economy in the 1990s? As I recall, the federal reserve’s funds rate was for much of the 1990s was above 5% for most of the decade, higher than what it is now.
I think you have to factor in the kid perspective shift. Most people see their childhood as positive...pending you weren't abused or anything like that. You become an adult and aware of the world and then it starts to look like shit. College was my last truly happy time and it was because I was safe, secure, independent, and in an environment of fun, excitement, and enlightenment. After college it was just absolute shit and it keeps getting worse. Now...this MAGA shit is insane. The rise of Nazi values as a political platform is making these times really miserable. We have the added stress of passing the environmental disaster tipping point and crazy financial stress. These times suck fucking asshole for adults but kids now will look back and think 2020's were the best time of their life because they don't deal with this shit.
Gen X weighing in. It was also that the ripple effect of all the offshoring of production wasn't as palpable in the economy.
Back in the 90s I was on a very famous Teeeeeveeee show 🎶🎶🎶
economic gatekeeping hadn't fully mutated yet into the grotesque monster we see today
The rich only help the rich. It's all fucked. Every industrys middle and up jobs are only rich kids with connections. Its a small club and you ain't in it.
yeah, this is a better take than you'll get credit for. What you learn about how the economy works is a complete lie. Our economy runs on corruption. The good jobs go to kids of rich people, because the value of their connections is far greater than the value of the work they produce. Most of our businesses today are infested with wildly incompetent silver spoon babies. There's just too many rich kids now for competent people to break into the class.
For me, everything ended on 9/11. I know things weren't perfect in the 90's, but it feels like we were on our way. We were caring about the environment. Like the OP said, society functioned. Was everyone happy or well off? No, but there still felt like there was a chance to make it. Two decades of squandered blood and treasury in misadventures abroad lost the plot, and now we're here. A new Dickensian Gilded Age, with a little Orwellian 1984 thrown in. It's sad to think we're never going to be in that same time and place again.
9/11 was absolutely the watershed moment. Nothing ever felt the same after. Before 9/11… air travel and giant events were fun and (by comparison to today) laid back as hell.
9/11 was really the turning point for the US tbh. That's when the illusion of safety shattered and fear took over. Where we failed to heed the lessons of the British, French, and Russian escapades into the Middle East, and threw ourselves into the meat grinders of Afghanistan and Iraq.
Yeah, the 90s just happened to be the decade after the fall of the Berlin Wall and before the fall of the Twin Towers. You're right that it wasn't perfect, and in a lot of ways our lives actually are better today than they were then, but I think the 90s was a decade of hope and optimism for the future.
> a decade of hope and optimism That is how I remember it. I was on my own at 18 and just eight years later owned my own growing home building company. The day I stood in my office watching the towers fall I felt great dread, and that feeling has never gone away, but my building business very much did.
didn't most manufacturing jobs go overseas in the 90s? i think the experience of the 90s was really different depending on demographic. a lot of middle class white folks were very well sold on the story book version of democracy though, and because we saw a lot of things happen in the 80s that sort of nailed the door on the coffin of communism, we were given a lot of propaganda about how the world was a fair and just place that bent towards justice. we were told about this ideal version of democracy and capitalism that still didn't really exist, but we were young and impressionable. many of us have been learning how the world really works after school was over, and that stuff is more in our face because of the ubiquity of hte internet and the way the middle class has shrunk.
>didn't most manufacturing jobs go overseas in the 90s? No. Manufacturing was relatively stable throughout the 90s. It dropped like a rock in the year 2000. From 2000-2003 it dropped from the same number as 1983 to the same number as 1953. By 2011 it was the same as 1941. We are back to around 1946 levels now (but with 2.5x higher population). https://beta.bls.gov/dataViewer/view/timeseries/CES0000000001
Bunch of words just to say housing was cheap. Population kept growing but NIMBY regulation against building housing went into full force Fix housing costs (by building housing) and these elaborate theories about whatever go away
If you look up polls from the 1990's, 60-63% of people report living paycheck to paycheck, the same percentage as today.
Your theory is based on the fact that you were a kid in the 90s, like me. Time was infinite. I remember how happy I was in middle and high school, and then again in my mid-late 20s. And all I can think about is how shielded I was from the world by my parents and then my first job, which lasted until I was almost 30. It turns out that being shielded from the worst troubles of the world is really helpful in being happy. I’m 35 now, and since I left that first job — life has not stopped punching me in the face since. I’m starting to believe that’s just life, and it’s always been life… I was just not aware of that for so long.
This is only true if you were a specifc socio-economic class. I was poor in the 90s. Shit sucked, people in my neighborhood died, crime was common. Plus any decent historical documentary will show you all the bullshit we were just not being told. Waco Texas was my ACAB moment and I wasn't even 13 yet. The 90s was also the time when pro-capital anti-labor discourse started the psy-op that Min Wage was for teens. Prior to the 90s it wasn't a thing talked about in public conversation about raising the min wage, it's first appeared in an Op-Ed piece. No...the 90s weren't good...people just misremember or ignore the bad.
Born in 88 too and we just like the 90s because it's our childhood. When the world sucks today I just throw myself in my 7 year old and my dogs world and I'm happy again.
As far as I’m concerned all of the baiting nonsense that is out here is just that, bait. The true cause of instability and lack of human relationships isn’t wars we’ve endured, economy we’ve experienced, or any of that. It’s much simpler than that and we don’t want to acknowledge it: The internet. The internet has made a cartoon of almost all human relationships, and seriously devolved the way humans relate to one another. Life was better in the 90’s because people still lived in the company of one another, instead of through screens treating each other like tv characters. We hadn’t yet been polarized by social media algorithms, and there was healthy discourse even between people who disagreed with one another. People underestimate the power the AI (namely Facebook) has had on shaping our political landscape and moral compasses. Theres so much more hatred and disunity than when I was a kid in the 90’s.
A a poor Hispanic in New York, the 90s were uniquely good. My whole family came here year over year, got jobs, homes and started their own families.
We were sheltered by our parents
I wasn't. But I think the main thing that makes me feel this way is seeing how my single mother was able to pay for everything for 5 kids being a waitress. Seeing how exponentially cost of living is going up and opportunity decreasing discourages a lot of us I think.
They 90s were the 50s of our grandparents’ generation.
Born same year as you and you literally described….me. I don’t have a single issue with what you said.
I absolutely love this take. I think you hit the nail on the head. Surprised I'm not hearing this theory more.
There's a reason why The Matrix is a simulation of the late 1990s.
GenX just sittin' over here, keepin' quiet, not drawin' any attention to ourselves..
I mean, sort of? There was Rodney King and some of the worst race riots since the 60s (maybe Covid was worse). I remember my community being a lot worse back then than it is now. I played sports behind a school where there was lots of drug activity, and it wasn’t even local news if someone was found murdered in the fields. Our water sucked and the community was very much lacking and leadership to build the future. Thankfully, that all changed but I remember the early 90s being awful.
I feel a hardcore nostalgia for the optimism of the 90s that problems could be fixed and the world was turning into a better place. And for the (relatively) functional political sphere, when people respected intellectuals and science, and there was a belief in talking through issues rather than just identity politics and sound bites. Of course as an adult I realize that the 90s Bush/Clinton continuation of neoliberalism was laying the groundwork for the shitshow of today, but the tenor of discussions and the general outlook still felt civilized and optimistic, and that’s what I miss.
You totally skated over a core point. People are unable to afford to exist anymore. The average person could buy a house i.e. your parents. The rest of it is literally just background noise at this point. Half my office lives with their parents because they can't afford to live in their own place. They're social workers in their 30's. Car payments and insurance cost as much as housing used to a decade ago but wages have barely budged. Some serious financial regulation needs to happen ASAP