I think it was on a Sam Harris podcast I listened to recently but there was a discussion on how it’s true that every generation thinks it’s part of a uniquely interesting in time history (as many here have mentioned) and yet we are indeed still in one of the most unique times in human history
For almost all of human history, change was basically not really a thing that happened. For the most part your life would be functionally the same as your parents and as your children. The analogy that was used was that if you put all of human history into a book, it would be extremely uninteresting and unchanging until the last page and the start of the industrial revolution. Effectively in the last paragraph of this book we went from mostly just being farmers to having all of human knowledgeable available at any time in a rectangle we store in our pockets.
The issue is that as a species, we are still adapted to life as it was in 3000BC. Our rate of technological growth has far exceeded our ability to adapt to it from a natural selection perspective. As such, we are basically struggling to keep up with the world we are building
The 1990s are arguably an inflection point in terms of this exponential growth. There was radio, mass media, telephones and the primitive internet. But life in the 90s wasn’t that different to life in the 50s. However, I would argue life in the 2020s is very different
Exponential growth inflection point
I guess the overall idea here is that while life is getting easier in a lot of ways due to technological growth, it also causes us distress. We were never evolved to be able to deal with interacting with thousands-millions of people at once the way social media enables. On-demand streaming leads to unhealthy overconsumption. Our attention spans are collectively being eroded. We are on the cusp of whatever AI has in store for us too
I think this is the best argument I have for the 90s being a particularly special time in history. It was (and may be?) the inflection point in western history where the world we built wasnt entirely foreign to how we evolved. I apologize for the doomerism.
It’s all relative, though. Civilization is made up of many, many different groups (ages, races/ethnicities, religions, cultures, etc.). Each group will have a different take on each decade due to their respective biases. Just as each individual will have a different background that informs their perspective and world view.
There are plenty of groups not represented here on e4 that would say that other decades are better than the 1990s.
Not to mention the fact that we are in the end stage of Western civilization. It’s a decently high chance that a 1st edition Charizard PSA 10 will be traded for a case of 5.56 that today costs $300 when your electricity is out for 2 months and you are trying to hold down your food supply from marauders.
I thought you guys were referring to 90 AD. The height of civilisation, the most powerful empire ever. The denarius hadn’t been debased yet, aqueducts abounded and the Pax Romana stood unshakable.
Then it collapsed and barbarity ensured. Oh wait, 1990s? Yeah, they were pretty good.
TLDR:
Well, we always have nostalgia for the past, and old things. They’re rare, speak to “classic” design or bygone eras we can’t find as easily, but for many the past sucked. When I drive my old '79 pickup, it feels so good, even though it needs a new clutch, valve work, and a paint job. So, it depends, but here’s what I loved in the 90s:
Catchy TV jingles and ad campaigns (started much earlier, yes)
Pokemon cards and TCG, of course!
I’m sure I’m forgetting things.
The Long:
I’ve studied this for years, so please pardon the brevity I know it’s not truly adequate.
While I like to be positive, we are likely seeing the beginning of the end of our tiny little mudball society within the vastness of the universal fabric. edit: I’m being cynical. haha. I think it’s a toss-up at the moment. Great things may be on the horizon!
Still, Lots of things began changing in the 1990s. Credit and inflation started catching up to us, the Internet was beginning to bloom, housing markets would soon falter, political parties started to head down roads that would lead them to their current, largely dysfunctional state. All of this certainly played a role in changing mentalities about modern democratic-venture capitalist societies, and the world, and I think to a large degree people have increasingly become emotionally exhausted.
This leads us to have nostalgia for the past, of course, but I wonder if kids born in the early 2000’s will have the same nostalgia we have for earlier decades. I have a lot of love for culture of the 80s and 40s, even though I was not born in them… and the 40s certainly had a lot of suffering…
BUT, Does anyone really miss the early 2000s? Today, I don’t think there is a large enough percentage of younger adults in society to say “the 2000s were so much better than today” to get a good answer to this question. Give it 10 years, perhaps.
Idk. I get what you’re saying but if we accept “its all relative”, pretty soon everything collapses. If music is all relative, than Beethoven isn’t better than the garage band of teenagers down the street. But if enough people from different backgrounds make a similar claim, than such a claim begins to have merit. Does it not?
Also, I was careful to word the thread such that its not saying 1990s the greatest decade, but rather is it the last(Or most recent) great decade in America.
Life in the 1990s wasn’t that different from life in the 190s CE/AD, if you think about our mentalities. One of the stoics, Marcus Aurelius(?), the last of the “good emperors of Rome”, and whom some would call a “philosopher king”, wrote once that he would often ask himself when he woke up, “Do I really have to get out of bed today?”
Raise your hand if that’s not part of modern life?
Sure. We just have to acknowledge that many voices are not represented on e4 or in publications like the one that you shared. For the “average” Western citizen, the 90s were a great time. It just becomes less generalizable when you look at specific races/ethnicities, cultures, age groups, etc. who had a very different experience.
A good example of this was made by @qwachansey. The late 80s and early 90s were absolute hell for the LGBTQ+ community, and specifically gay men. People were dying every single day of HIV/AIDS and related comorbidities. Not to mention the social and legal troubles.
Something I think about quite often is how human communication has suffered from the digital age.
Burnt out dopamine receptors rule the land, no serotonin to process, bonding without oxytocin, public spaces overrun by low IQ and fluctuating blood sugars. Snark and sarcasm at every opportunity, deliberate misunderstandings facilitating elaborate insults, absolute negligence of giving offence yet always ready to be offended. Other people are dehumanized; playthings to analyse and injure, not flesh and blood to understand. No-one asks for forgiveness, a new enemy is made every second.
And most “safe” spaces function either through iron-fisted moderation or the complete avoidance of any substance, lest we talk about things we actually care about and immediately start hacking each other to bits. “I like object A, not a fan of object B” “Cool, I agree, we’re friends now until you share an opinion I don’t like.”
In short, the human craving for other humans is malnourished and distorted.
A good fight can be a good thing. And I’m not saying that all of this isn’t happening in “real life” as well, this eternal Darwinian backdrop is not at all unique to the internet. I for one have certainly been in classrooms that functioned similarly to the typical subreddit. But it seems enhanced, optimized; weaponized. As if someone hollowed it out, and we know precious little about the potential consequences this will have down the line.
One of the most intriguing things about this is how a lot of the science being done is rodent-based, which is a fine science and in many circumstances the only option. But we are talking about the human brain, the organ in our bodies that is the least similar to these animals, or any animal for that matter. I can’t help but feel that we are falling ever more behind.
I’m a computer programmer by trade and even I wish we could go back to the days where our lives weren’t dominated by portable screens. Everything around us is soulless and hyper-optimized by technology.
I think this forum is in a uniquely poor position to answer this question. People here almost invariably have some level of nostalgic attachment to the 90s.
I also think that the scope of the question is unreasonably broad. One could say that the 90s was better in terms of x or y, and I could respond by saying that the 00s was better in terms of z or w. Basically, the scope of the question has to be narrowed significantly.
Depends what you mean by “great”. For the purposes of this post, I’m going to look at “great” as just being a mindset thing.
I believe morale among people is at an all time low, at least since the 1970s. Due to things like 9/11 and its butterfly effect of sociopolitical shifts, people seem more divided than ever despite the rapid rise of internet communication and the effected acceleration in globalization. I would say both are actually related and the latter contributes to the former. The world is changing far more quickly than so many people are comfortable with.
All that said, I believe we as humans over all are still on the up and up. That probably sounds naive, but I would always prefer to be optimistic. For example, on a world level, poverty levels continue to go down, child mortality rates continue to accelerate downward, we succeeded in removing the ozone layer threat, and are making progress in fixing the climate change situation. There’s a lot of bad in the world, but there is also a lot of good. I believe a lot of the good tends to be drowned out by peoples’ strange addiction to anger. I doubt I need to explain that, the current state of social media says it all.
But all that overly “serious” context out of the way, I believe the 90s were the most positive feeling decade in a while, but I think it’s overly pessimistic to say it will have been the last great decade. I agree with the “most recent” great thing you said in the OP. We don’t know what’s going to happen in the future, and I’d rather work my hardest to make things better and believe we’re getting there than stew in the negative yearning for the past.
Also Pokemon cards is literally at its peak right now. That’s pretty great.
I think like most decades, it has pros and cons. I really feel the 90s/early 2000s were better than today in how we (people) interacted with each other, and there seemed to be a good amount of optimism towards the future even when I was a child. It was a great mix of technological advancement while still retaining a lot of the human interaction we had in prior decades. Anxiety/fear definitely was a lot lower. I have good memories of people leaving their doors unlocked, leaving car keys inside of vehicles, and there seemed to be a higher level of trust among most people in general.
Economically speaking, things were looking up in many ways. Even a minimum wage or average job went much further than today on average. The web and things were starting to go mainstream and there was massive growth happening in technology and other areas. It was really an exciting decade, and although looking back there were many political and cultural issues, I feel it was no where near as bad as it is now.
Today, I feel a lot of the issues we face stems from the web/internet and rise of social media we’ve had since later 2000s onward. This has given many a platform to really say things that I feel they wouldn’t say in-person, and it’s put people in a bit of a cage at times. I think we’ve lacked good charity and honest discussion for a while now, and I feel it’s made a lot of people hopeless at times. I never heard of all the depression, anxiety and other mental issues for the first 2/3rd of my life until this past decade or so.
Anyway, I really feel we’ve been in like time warp for a while now. Call it nostalgia or whatever you want, but the world was much different back then in many ways. 9/11 sort of kicked a lot of fear off in people, but I do believe smartphones/social media has really screwed things up the most in our daily lives the past while. It’s done a lot of amazing things for our lives, but I think it’s also taken away a vital experience of how we used to interact more regularly as humans.
I’m not even an American, but videos like this just fill me with a feeling of what things used to be like:
I shared this pic in another thread, but it’s so appropriate now:
humans are destroying humans by technology; I would like a time where technology is enough but not too advanced. and the early 2010 seems like a good time.
Well, the 2020s have had such a bad start, the trope may be dead for good.
But seriously, I do think that unless there is a fundamental restructure of society soon, things will keep getting worse.
More and more kids are growing up with climate anxiety - I have that myself now, but when I was a kid it was blissful ignorance. These kids don’t get that privilege.
The way society is currently structured makes it impossible to deal with climate change. You could argue that for older people, say 60+, life has kept improving when people hit that age. But when I’m 60, who knows what the temperature and climate will be like?
There are already areas in the world that hit wet bulb temperature for weeks/months. When places become uninhabitable, what do you think will happen then?
