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?
It can be both. This is also very specific to the western world and america in general, as other parts of the world have very different experiences, both good and bad
So the conclusion would be:
This world is awful! Let’s fix it, so it can be as awful as it used to be.
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.
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.
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.
Are you American? I’d really like to know.
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.
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”.
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.
Grew up watching news of Palestinians and Israelis killing each other. Good thing that was 40 years ago.
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.
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.
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.
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
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
Yes
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.
In terms of politics, yes. But we are better in almost every other aspect.
Everything is political.
Yes. The contradictions of capitalism are only getting worse. Workers, care givers, nature, social institutions, racialized people and countries, all can only be exploited and expropriated so much. But capitalism demands more and more. So it will continue getting worse until successful revolutions. But you don’t have to feel detached about it. You can try to understand it, tell others about it, look around for awesome people struggling against it, maybe even find ways to help them. I started reading Nancy Fraser’s new book “Cannibal Capitalism” it’s short, tries to be accessible and it explains how all those areas of struggle I mentioned above are connected.
