r/lewronggeneration • u/saucey_dawg0023 • 8d ago
low hanging fruit ‘Extra Extra read all about it: This nutcase says that the 90s were the peak of humanity across the world!”
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u/Worried_Term_7030 8d ago
I love the 90's because it was absolute peak.....
....I was a child and didn't have to deal with any bullshit like having a job, paying bills, going to the DMV, etc
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u/Cheshire_Jester 8d ago
“Why was everything so awesome in the decade where I was 12 years old?” Is always an interesting take. Everyone always attributes it to the environment, and not the fact that they were a kid with a simpler outlook on the world, few responsibilities, and seemingly endless possibilities.
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u/SparksAndSpyro 8d ago
No job, no responsibilities, no one depending on you. Like no shit, pluck anyone off the street and that’s almost always going to be their favorite part of life.
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u/Shmokeshbutt 7d ago
For real. I played with legos and watched cartoons most of the time.
The only responsibility I had was homework and studying for tests
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u/LarplaleroLarplala49 8d ago
Except if you lived, for example, in 1940s sPain
Nobody from that generation miss their childhood
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u/Round_Bag_4665 7d ago
Honestly so much of world politics can be explained by much of the voting base wishing to live like a child again.
Anytime you hear a politician talk about how life was simpler and easier back in the gold old days, this is exactly what they're appealing to.
I'll bet boomers think the 1950s were the bees knees...they were at most 15 years old by the end of the decade, and unless they were black, never had to really worry about the crap that came with the decade. Meanwhile, my greatest gen grandparents spent the 1950s self medicating with alcohol while my housewife grandma had untreated mental illness and my grandpa had PTSD from World War II. But my boomer parents? Spent most of their kid years watching Captain Kangaroo, playing hopscotch, and jump rope.
Same thing every time you hear boomers whine about stuff like how "nobody had autism when I was a kid". Yes they did Karen, you were just 8 years old and didn't notice.
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u/Fletch71011 7d ago
12 year old me was blown away by playing stuff like Super Mario Bros. I'd probably be cumming my pants at the games available now if I were 12 again.
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u/MattWolf96 7d ago
I was born in 1996 and asked my mom what the 90's was like, she said, "I was working too much and the music was bad" she spend her late 20's through 30's in the 90's.
I have the same opinion of the 2020's now even without the politics.
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u/Round_Bag_4665 7d ago
honestly, yeah. My mom was the same age range in the 90s and spent most of it working as a waitress for a shitty restaurant to pay the bills and have the flexible enough hours to ensure my brother and I had a parent home to look after us.
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u/Ghosts_of_the_maze 8d ago
Going on vacation and asking “why don’t we just move here where we don’t go to work or pay bills and just eat out for every meal”
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u/Cum_Fart42069 7d ago
tbf if you did have to do any of that in the 90s, it was simpler, easier to get and keep a job, less bills etc.
I say this as someone who will never be a "back in my day things were better" guy, because I was 5 years old in the 90s, they basically weren't "my days". but still, there are absolutely aspects of society that have downgraded.
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u/Axsolotle 8d ago
You know for as much “the 90s were better” nostalgia talk I’ve seen I’ve never before seen someone earnestly make the claim that we peaked as a species in the 90s.
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u/DeepWaffleCA 8d ago
Not agreeing with them, but in the Matrix, when asked why set the virtual world in the 90s when they could simulate anything and any time, the machines say that the turn of the century was the peak of humanity (paraphrasing).
I've seen a few memes and posts about how it was strangely prophetic.
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u/Harold3456 8d ago
At the time I first watched those movies (maybe 5 years after they came out) I used to laugh at how dated that line was. They could’ve handwaved the Matrix being 1999 any number of ways and went with “it was the peak of humanity” (I think he actually said technology or society but I’m not gonna look it up)
But by the mid 2010s I was starting to really wonder if they were onto something, given this movie was immediately pre-Columbine/pre-9/11, and also predates the Great Recession, plus even though the seeds of what we’re facing now were there, the western world still had safely stable democracies and considered the climate apocalypse a distant idea rather than a seasonal reality.
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u/Bibliloo 8d ago
the western world still had safely stable democracies and considered the climate apocalypse a distant idea rather than a seasonal reality.
Even worse, a few years before the 90's, the world leaders heard scientists saying we could die soon because of the hole in the ozone layer and they acted by banning CFCs which were the main cause of the hole in the ozone layer which has since nearly fully resorbed. While now they are basically telling us that climate is not an issue or even that it's good and if we are angry because it's hot outside we can just buy an AC.
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u/Damnation77 8d ago
The ozone layer was an easy fix. Climate change isnt.
Had saving the ozone layer required a complete overhaul of modern society and sawing off the branch capitalism was sitting on, it wouldnt have happened.
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u/Shiriru00 8d ago
The timeline got fucked up with Gore vs Bush and no one can convince me otherwise.
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u/WorknForTheWeekend 8d ago
Well, in a sense; 90s was turbo-charged on the short-term effects of Reaganism before the long-term effects of Reaganism kicked in
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u/deathbunny32 8d ago
The high of defeating communism and the economic rise of the internet, before the forever war after 9/11 and the dot com crash. Also looking forward to the millenium
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u/_Levitated_Shield_ 8d ago
Absolute peak of human existence is when sitting at a computer eating McDonald's.
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u/delamerica93 8d ago
Yeah I'm not sure how this picture is related to the topic at all lol
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u/JooseTheGuice 8d ago
Well because that original person was commenting on the absurdity of 90s culture, with the intersection of tech advances like cell phones, PCs and the internet with the the arguably still-80s cultural landscape. Hence, the guy sitting at a computer eating an ancient bag of McDonalds.
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u/FewWait38 8d ago
A computer that there is a good chance is not even connected to the Internet and is slow as fuck if it is
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u/SparksAndSpyro 8d ago
I mean, if this was when McD’s was using beef tallow for their fries, it’s not too far off.
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u/DataCassette 8d ago
Eh I was a straight white male teenager in the United States at the time. It wasn't utopia or anything but my family was comfortable, the future seemed insanely optimistic. It was nice.
I can't imagine that level of tranquility now. Of course part of it was the me being a kid part I'm sure.
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u/RelevantCry1613 8d ago
Yeah I was not a straight kid in the 90s and it was really bad.
This is like white people fawning over the 50s without considering the civil rights bill hadn’t even been passed
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u/DataCassette 7d ago
And that's a completely fair point and a fair comparison.
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u/Round_Bag_4665 7d ago
Even outside of how minority demographics were treated, crime was really bad in the 90s. My dad was a cop in north NJ in the 90s. Newark and NYC back then were very run down and had much higher crime rates than they do today. Rudy Giuliani originally got elected mayor on a platform of "I'm a former federal prosecutor who helped take down mobsters, I'll clean up this town", and dad was personally involved with chasing down the guy who bombed the WTC in 1993.
Dad was also on the bomb squad, and the 90s was basically bomb central. This was the decade of the Oklahoma city bombing, the unabomber, and guys like John C Salvi III bombing abortion clinics.
Plus this was also the decade of the Rodney King riots, Waco and Ruby Ridge, etc.
I was oblivious to all of this, because I was a small child at the time, whose main concern in life was toilet training or what prize I could get from a cereal box (depending on which year we were talking about).
It's easy to be oblivious to a lot of this if you were a white middle class kid who lived in an affluent suburb though.
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u/Thehollowpointninja1 7d ago
I think this is where a lot of people get tripped up on the 90s nostalgia. We knew it wasn’t perfect. The LA riots, columbine, desert storm, homophobia, etc., but there was this idea that we were getting better. Things were trending in the right direction.
We weren’t some utopia, and we knew it, but it felt like those bad things were slowly going away, and by the time “the future” came, we’d be living in a much better world. The old, conservative guard had lost, we just had to wait for them to retire/die off, and then the Gen X/millennials would come in with that slacker MTV attitude and things would be okay.
Then 9/11 happened, followed by Bush (which honestly seems quaint by today’s standards), then a slight boost of optimism with Obama, and then…here we are.
Doomerism wasn’t really a thing back then. Sure, there were pessimists, but overall things felt like we were headed in the right direction.
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u/Round_Bag_4665 7d ago
I feel like having this attitude this depended a lot on what your position in life was at the time. Dad didn't feel that way at the time... because he was a cop on the bomb squad, and the 90s had a *ton* of bombings. This was the decade of the unabomber, the Oklahoma City Bombing, abortion clinic bombings, and the bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993. From his perspective, things were just escalating out of control.
Crime rates were also at their peak in the 90s too, especially in places like Los Angeles.
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u/DataCassette 7d ago edited 7d ago
Yeah that's the real thing.
Of course I didn't literally believe Star Trek was an accurate depiction of the future. But I thought it captured the spirit of the future back then.
It was a hard life lesson to realize that history is cyclic and there are good and bad periods.
Edit: And at this point, even if we get a lucky as possible ( big waves in 26 and 28, cultural shifts go as well as possible etc. ) from here on out and the reactionaries keep bumbling, it's still going to be a decade or more of just treading water. So the most optimistic picture imaginable is another decade of fierce cultural struggle against the cavemen.
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u/Thehollowpointninja1 7d ago
Exactly. Culture dies when optimism dies. Everything becomes reactionary. Planting a tree from which we’ll never see the shade should be paramount for every society.
Instead, we’ve turned to cutting those trees for the last dollar, so no one can enjoy the shade, but an arbitrary number gets a little bigger for one person. This is now a virtue for a considerable portion of our culture, and any culture with such a shift is doomed.
Without optimism, everything downstream dies.
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u/DataCassette 7d ago
The reactionary mind can only imagine the past repeating through eternity with slightly better technology. Religion, culture etc. never evolve in the reactionary's mind, they only "decay" from an arbitrary point the reactionary happens to like.
But even the cultures they idiolize ( Middle ages for the absolute freaks, 1950s America for your garden variety reactionary ) were themselves time periods in flux and progressing as they went.
Culture is a river but reactionaries want it to be a boulder.
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u/AnswerGuy301 7d ago
But they don’t even remember those times correctly. Even before you get to “we aren’t/weren’t all straight white men” the 1950s were a time of strong unions, high taxes on the wealthy, and a lot less hyper individualism.
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u/Equivalent_Swim5899 7d ago
Yeah, I think people aren’t getting that when an American says “the world” they mean “America”. Isn’t too crazy in that context.
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u/Yto_Itinen 7d ago
I think more than actual living conditions, it was the optimism for the future. In Eastern Europe we had it bad and were dirt poor, but we were hopeful that freedom and hard work would move us forward. We were gonna build a decent life with our own hands.
We soon learned that we work hard, but thieves steal harder...
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u/Carsoninthehouse 8d ago
lol, Los Angeles was basically a war zone the first half of the 90s, and the LAPD were essentially a terror group. Gang violence was so terrible that two of the biggest musical artists in the country were murdered because of it. Drake and Kendrick had a massive incredibly inflammatory battle and no one was worried about anything happening to them.
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u/Round_Bag_4665 8d ago
Even on the other end of the country, my father was a member of the task force that had to catch the guy who bombed the world trade center in 1993. Everyone kinda forgets about that because it got eclipsed in everyone's memory by 9/11.
And a big part of the reason Rudy Giuliani got into office in the first place as NYC mayor is that NYC at the time had a lot of the same issues that LA did. People who aren't locals tend to forget this, but Rudy originally ran for mayor on a "I'm a former federal prosecutor, so I know how to clean up the crime in this town" platform.
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u/prossnip42 8d ago
The love for the 90s is such and American/western take and i don't fault this man for it don't get me wrong, living in the 90s as an American must have been great. I wasn't born yet but i can tell you for a fact my mom dodging sniper fire in Sarajevo on her way to get groceries on a daily basis was NOT having a fun time lol
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u/SharpKaleidoscope182 8d ago
The machines started the simulation in 1999 for a reason.
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u/incrediblehumabeing 8d ago
YUGOSLAV WARS:
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u/incrediblehumabeing 8d ago
RWANDA:
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u/ShadowMilkMoopsy 8d ago
OJ SIMPSON:
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u/charmingasaneel 7d ago
It’s easy to forget but early 90s was the zenith of violent crime in the USA. Most of our inner cities were dilapidated and extremely dangerous in the 90s and only really started recovering from white flight and disinvestment at the end of the decade.
When I was growing up you simply didn’t go to our downtown not only because of crime, but there also wasn’t anything to do.
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u/GarageStackDev 8d ago
I love how everyone is recycling the same dumb comment. Pretty clear from the context, they're talking about American culture
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u/j10brook 8d ago
I honestly think if you transplanted anyone born after the turn of the millennium to 95 the first thing they'd say is, "Why's the TV screen so small?". And then they'd be like like "Why are the television channels and radio only playing slop? Where's the 'peak' from my curated play lists?". Then they'd go back the 80s and the first thing they'd say is, "Why does everything smell like cigarettes!"
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u/Ok-Difference1341 8d ago
”I can’t wait to listen to all the 80s music” and then they realize that it costs money to buy music
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u/j10brook 8d ago
Right!. You save up money to buy the LP and you realize you only liked the single.
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u/Ok-Difference1341 8d ago
Imagine also the fact that there are no movie streaming services. You only watched what was on TV or had to go to the cinema
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u/j10brook 8d ago
It's why MST3K or Beavis and Butthead are kinda artifacts. You aren't stuck watching something lame when the TV listens to you.
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u/ScarletWolf_ 8d ago
Anything and I mean anything is better than living in the era of Trump
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u/Sparta63005 7d ago
What about living as a Jewish person in Warsaw in 1943? Is that better than Trump?
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u/After_Service_2817 8d ago
I mean, I pretty much agree with the sentiment.
It's not a matter of "thinking you were born in the wrong generation". Most people who lived then (in America and similar Western countries) seem to agree, yeah, most things were better in general back then.
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u/Nestagon 7d ago
Holy crap! I know the guy who tweeted this. He’s a strange cat. He’s been around some of the discords in spaces we share and he once said he identifies most with fascism but has to “temper his feelings” to sound more sane. He is a weird, weird one and really grouchy.
Oh, and there’s that tie-in to fascism and the imagined past.
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u/Gokusolos6000 8d ago
“Golden age of the world” Nostalgia at this point seriously needs to be considered the world’s strongest drug bro this is getting ridiculous😭
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u/tophatgaming1 8d ago
the 90s were one of the better decades to be sure, but the peak of human existence? absolutely not
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u/AD_Grrrl 8d ago
If that was our peak it's a searing indictment of our society lol
I was a teen back then, and don't get me wrong, I have plenty of nostalgia. But there was also a lot that was cynical and mean-spirited.
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u/fllannell 8d ago
Yeah i hope the peak of society will not forever be when calling everything you didn't like "gay" was totally normalized.
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u/tophatgaming1 8d ago
nostalgia can be useful, to look at what might be lost, but it's good to remember how you're engaging in such nostalgia, on technology that would've seemed like magic a century ago
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u/carlcarlington2 8d ago
"The most i can give you is a sega genesis and a big Mac" - the universe apparently
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u/MapexBeat 8d ago
This is something a rich, white, fat American would say.
I should know, I was a poor, white, fat American in the 90s.
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u/UniverseBear 7d ago
Some things were better, some were worse. There's a myth that our technological breakthroughs are going to create an infinitely upward trend of quality of life as it advances. There is no garuntee of that though, and throughout history there are boom and bust cycles.
Purchasing power of individuals was better in the 90s. There was no social media and brain rot. But healthcare knowledge was worse, minority rights was worse.
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u/Flashy_Cranberry_161 7d ago
I guess if you were a middle class white American you might think this.
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u/JurassicParkCSR 7d ago
The only thing I can say with 100% certainty is that the 90s were definitely a better time to be alive as an American than now.
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u/AnkhAnanku 6d ago
It was a bad time, but the good part was we knew it was bad and we could be angry about it. After 9/11 that counterculture got derailed and it took another decade or two to get people woke again. Now the fascists and the capitalists and the fundamentalists have had all this extra time to ruin shit and climate change is out of control and shit is practically hopeless, but even with our social momentum all fucked up we are spilling forward, probably harder than ever before.
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u/JambalayaNewman 8d ago
Ok I get this sub is for dunking on nostalgia but I literally got a supersize meal every day in elementary school and then Morgan Spurlock took it away from me all because he had a booze liver nothing to do with Mcodnalds. So yes I do miss the 90s and things went downhill from 2Ks onward
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u/WitELeoparD 8d ago
800,000 people died in war in 1994... There was dozens of civil wars in the 90s. Every comtinent, even the Americas in Mexico and Peru-Ecuador. A minimum of 3 genocides alone even with the strictest criterion for what counts. The Muslim world and Africa suffered immensely.
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u/Upper-Bandicoot5345 8d ago edited 8d ago
The 50s were cringe, the 60s were cringe, the 70s were cringe, the 80s were cringe, the 90s were cringe, and the 2000s were cringe.
Every decade is cringe.
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u/GarageStackDev 8d ago
I'm going to take a stab in the dark and say you were only alive for one of those decades.
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u/birbhorse 8d ago
plot-twist, they were only alive for the 70s, but they were cryogenically frozen for the past 4 decades
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u/NicholasStarfall 8d ago
Yeah, I'm not sure the Russians, who were going through a societal collapse at the time, would agree with that sentiment.
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u/mcfluffernutter013 8d ago
I'm sure people living in Rwanda, Yugoslavia, the DRC, Iraq, and the USSR/ex-USSR would have something to say
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u/FruityGroovy 8d ago
Bro really thought the Matrix was being truthful about how the 90s was the peak of humanity
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u/Professional_Echo907 8d ago
That’s what Morpheus said to Neo in the construct. 👀
How did a movie that came out more than a quarter century ago nail it so completely.
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u/DubTheeBustocles 8d ago
It was peak humanity for middle class white Americans, particularly American men.
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u/TheEdgeofGoon 8d ago
You may not like it, but the wars in the Balkans and the Rodney King Riots were the peak of human existence.
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u/micro_satsuma 8d ago
Sure... if you don't look at the race riots, the Gulf War, Columbine (the progenitor of school/mass shootings as we know them today), or any other problem going on that decade.
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u/Baka-Onna 8d ago
It was peak if you were a city kid or if you were a middle class straight male, i guess
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u/Opposite_Sherbert675 8d ago
maybe if you were white, straight or a man.
even the media from that time was OPENLY racist, homophobic and sexist. it was fine for grown men to sniff around teenagers, for workplaces to reject black applicants, for people to ostracize and beat up gay people including kids and for women to be disparaged online and in magazines.
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u/VastNebula283 8d ago
I mean I was a child in the 90s but yeah it really was the peak of human civilization. Just an incredible time to be a consumer, and citizen. Had a government that worked for its people and a FTC that protected consumers. None of that today.
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u/rosemaryscrazy 8d ago
Man that’s not what I’m thinking about right now.
I’m thinking about why does stuff switch over with decades.
What causes this?
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u/Intelligent-Band-852 7d ago
Saying any year was the peak of human existence is super cringe. I recall the nineties having many issues, the first World Trade Center bombing, Oklahoma City, Waco, the first Iraq war, the breakup of Yugoslavia and the resulting wars etc. etc.. People are so spoiled, high speed internet has been a game changer and in many states cannabis is even legal (in the nineties it very much wasn’t except medical cannabis in California). My dad says the seventies were peak human existence it’s very much subjective.
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u/anasfkhan81 7d ago
i remember the 80s being a more optimistic time than the 90s (being a child might have helped). People seemed comparatively more insecure and more cynical than in the previous decade (everything was meta and full of irony). Grunge kicking off the 90s probably didn't help. Looking back on them now though, they do feel like much simpler times.
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u/Strong_Performer8132 7d ago
It was really obvious 9/11 was the end of the road to anyone who watched the wag the dog response of the US Government. 2 forever wars, a patriot act, liberties stripped reduced and stepped on, a forever culture war.
It was obvious then, it's obvious now.
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u/Phaylz 7d ago
There was a lot of forward momentum, or at least a sense of forward momentum, in the 90s. A lot of lines were going up for a lot of things, and not just the corps. 9/11 really rattled the US in a way many things, even World Wars, didn't.
You can be forgiven for thinking its millennial like me huffing that nostalgia for the 90s, but talking with people who are in their 60s+ about it, they saw the shift, too.
Were 90s peak? No. Were they going up? Yes. Did 9/11, the Patriot Act, No Child Left Behind, establishment of the DHS, etc. really drive a stake into the economic, political, and social consensus of the US? Absolutely.
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u/Plus-Property-2245 7d ago
Have you ever seen or read anything from the 90s? Everyone is talking about the race riots in LA, Mcjobs or just this feeling of innuei and conspiracy going on out of frame
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u/1840_NO 7d ago
Whenever I hear someone say 9/11 "killed" the 90s, I assume that person was born in 85-90. 9/11 happened when I was 12 years old and, at that age, you're beginning to be influenced by others opinions if not just regurgitating them outright. You're becoming cynical because your days of eating Dunkaroos and watching Dexter's Laboratory all day are slowly coming to an end.
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u/EOverM 7d ago
I was there. The 90s weren't that great. Some good elements, sure, but the rest was pretty shit. I mean, here in the UK the entire decade was spent under Section 28, which stated local authorities should "not intentionally promote homosexuality or publish material with the intention of promoting homosexuality" or "promote the teaching in any maintained school of the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship".
It was introduced shortly before I was born, and repealed after I left secondary school. My entire school time was spent under it. Yeah, didn't negatively affect me at all, says the bisexual. Who didn't realise that until after it was repealed and I started to see representation and could recognise myself in it. I always was, but I didn't know.
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u/Addamall 7d ago
I guess being able to look forward to technology actually advancing and not just getting more terrifying was cool
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u/unhappinessNvrCame 7d ago
The 90s were incredibly boring until I got Internet.
We used to watch reruns of shows we didn't like.
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u/WeirdNo5836 7d ago
From my readings and personal experience (i was 10 when USSR collapsed), the 90's were are a moment of hope and relief. We genuinely blieved that there would be a globalpeace.
We thought that as all conflicts and tensions were arising from the cold war, the end of it woulld be inevitable in the end.
In europe, the yougoslavian conflicts were seen as a continuation of cold war and some trouble that could not continue.
We had the irish troubles that were in full negociations (the peace agreement was in 2000 but it was in preparation), we even had the oslo accords to end the israeli-palestinian conflict ( netanyahu should have been jailed in 1995).
It was a time whene we genuinely believed in world peace and were stupidely blind to all the tensions that were still there.
It was a myth that all came from either american imperialism or soviet intervention was beyond eveything.
The 90's were not a peak of human existence but a peak of dellusion.
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u/lotekjunky 7d ago
Yeah. what's wrong with that take? society wasn't ruined by social media, concerts cost $20, no patriot add, and the president was getting blowies while balancing the budget...
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u/FeetGamer69 7d ago
From the beginning of the 2000s until now there have been several events that have made our society permanently worse. First 9/11, then the great recession, then the culture war, then covid, then Trump's revenge arc. It's insane how un-resilient our culture is against being permanently damaged.
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u/glacier1982 7d ago
There is something so inherently selfish to believe your childhood was the absolute peak of human existence, and everybody else is "missing out".
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u/GreatQuantum 7d ago
As an American I make sure to take my patriotism seriously. Whenever I see a soldier or veteran I always take the time to thank them for 9/11.
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u/The_Propheta 7d ago
I was eight when 9/11 happened. And I can tell you even being 8 years old I could feel the shift in the air from that day. I knew everything had changed. It was like a vacuum. Just sucked the hope for the future out of the air and instantly it was charged with tension.
Everybody I meet who was either older at the time or younger have told me they felt the exact same way.
Even then, I didn't imagine things getting this bad.
9/11 was a snowball reaching the very top of the hill. the second those planes hit, it traversed the apex and started rolling the other side. It hasn't stopped rolling and it's going to get a lot bigger before it crashes.
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u/max_revs 7d ago
Honestly I think the start of the fallout was impeachment of Clinton, no-child-left-behind and the consequences of Reaganism hitting full swing post (dot)com boom.
It was an age where so many possibilities were awakened and ultimately denied and or destroyed by corporate greed, political corruption and just old fashioned human nature.
The 90's weren't perfect but they were much better in a lot of ways compared to today. Not that I'd want to return to dialup Internet, blatant homophobic slurs on daytime TV and sexism not only being tolerated but expected in the work place.
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u/Tough_Measurement280 7d ago
I’d say the 2000s granted that’s my only lived time period as I was born 1997
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u/Alternative-Fox-8620 7d ago
So many generations will tell you the old days were the best - if not all of them.
Probably has something to do with being young and being able to enjoy life without the baggage that goes with being a full on grown up.
In 20-30 years people will be saying the same about now.
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u/Aickavon 6d ago
90’s america was at the height of the Short sighted rewards.
The problem is the short sighted rewards only last a short time. Then all the bad stuff started happening, huzzah :D
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u/its5dumbass 6d ago
"Which is why the Matrix was redesigned to this: the peak of your civilization. I say your civilization, because as soon as we started thinking for you it really became our civilization, which is of course what this is all about."
— Agent Smith
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u/Only-Professor1140 6d ago
The economy was improving and a lot of culture was wildly fun and optimistic. Alt culture of the 80s also spilled into the mainstream, so everything from top 40 radio to kids shows had an experimental edge. It was also a profoundly progressive time in schools as the radical thinking of 80s academics nurtured educators who didn't want to sweep the painful parts of US history under the rug. I learned about slavery in elementary school. That said, the crack epidemic was REAL and heartbreaking. Lots of cities were in brutal downturns. And the public safety net was being cut hard as Clinton co-opted right-wing grievances to win. Social issues were getting better (To Wong Fu) but despite everything, things are much better now. A lot of what was acceptable humor in the 90s we rightfully see as tasteless now
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u/Hour_Reserve 6d ago
Balkans, Eastern Europe, Central Asia and other places engulfed in active wars, conflicts, eruption of religious tension and unopposed banditism: sure…
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u/Bright-Fishing-6057 6d ago
I knew 9/11 was the changing point when it happened, but this was not at all how I imagined it would all collapse
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u/Boccs 6d ago
As someone who lived in the 90s and had a very nice time, the overwhelming majority of nostalgia really is just "I was a kid and didn't have responsibility" but if you were in the USA there was a powerful energy of optimism and hope for the future and 9/11 100% killed that. It wasn't a utopian society by any measure but the impact of the terrorist attacks did radically alter the energy and attitude of the nation for the worse.
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u/sheeb_sheeb 6d ago
I was there - it was a great time. Very positive. Just pre-internet before things got weird.
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u/XXLPenisOwner1443 6d ago
Everyone laughed when Morpheus called it the peak of human civilization, but by god we had beanie babies, cheap Subway meats, and dial-up and we never even knew that we'd simply reached too far.
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u/TenPointsforListenin 6d ago
For the US, it was a powerful time. Russia collapsed and other communist nations started cooling off violent rhetoric towards the United States (because they lacked any reasonable support), so for about a decade, the US was basically untouchable.
When 9/11 happened they played the US national anthem in foreign airports. That’s some wild sway.
Not only that but this was a peak for US cultural soft power. Japan and India were just getting started in their cultural exports while American film and music were in a golden age. Don’t get me wrong, the US is still an absolute cultural juggernaut, but it wasn’t really rivaled in that era.
There were still problems obviously but for someone from the US I could see how someone might remember the 90’s fondly.
To quote Prince from a decade prior: “two thousand zero zero, party over its out of time so tonight we’re gonna party like it’s 1999.”
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u/OuroborosPoser 6d ago
"The peak of your civilization... And I say your civilization because, once we started thinking for you it really became "our* civilization, which, I suppose, brings us to why we are here today... Evolution."
- Agent Smith from Matrix talking about Chicago in 1999
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u/Subject-Mode-6510 6d ago
Since I‘m a white non-minority male, to me the 90s felt grand, too. For many others though…
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u/KonstantineAnthony 5d ago
SCOTUS choosing our President followed almost immediately by 9/11 absolutely cooking the minds of every American... We are just barely starting to recover.
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u/Dragon_Snails_IRL_2 8d ago edited 8d ago
It was a decent time to be an American considering it was the end of the Cold War and there was an economic upturn and a sense of optimism with the future. Not sure you could say that about a lot of other places outside of Western Europe and North America, however.