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>Then came 9/11

The rising pessimism and negativity since 2008/09 is a global phenomenon. I think it's wrong and very US-centric to attribute that to 9/11.

The 2008 financial crisis and the rise of social media has probably more to do with the rise of millennial pessimism and negativity.

We had worse crises before that didn’t change societies so deeply. With 9/11 we started renouncing to the concept of freedom that we gained with illuminism and the French revolution. Then we started putting “safety” before everything else.

> Then we started putting “safety” before everything else.

One caveat.

It's safety first, unless they decide to go to war to ensure continued access to cheap commodities (Iraq) or to play weird sociopath power games (Vietnam).

It's going to be kind of rich when they ask people from podunk towns in "flyover country" to go fight their next war, after years of ridiculing them and decimating their local economies.

We had worse crises before that didn’t change societies so deeply

During the Red Scare, loyalty review boards were instituted and civil servants insufficiently 'American' were sacked in the thousands.

But there isn't a singular date to associate with the Red Scare... that's more a nebulous period of time. It was also a gradual process. The West was already preparing for the oncoming cold-war with the USSR before the end of WW2.

The loyalty boards and Hollywood blacklisting were definitely a change is society, but it was so slow moving that I wouldn't compare it to a shift like 9/11.

The world wasn't really different before and after something like the hearings of the House Un-American Activities Committee, even though that is what would be a likely event you'd associate with the Red Scare.

When I think of 20th century cultural events that had an shift in society, I think more of the Cuban missile crisis, the Challenger disaster, the fall of the Berlin wall, etc... shorter events (not necessarily instantaneous, but well defined times) where you could define shifts in culture to before/after.

Change can still be change without being sudden.

I agree with the poster below me.

While the financial crisis might be more of a root of all problems in Millenial and generations that followed minds it’s not where it all started (I am a Millenial)

Also don’t forget 2008 was the year of the iPhone. The year we started inching towards being an always on society.

I agree, I think the difference is that in 1999 when he wrote that piece, there wasn't a clear audience in front of him that could react immediately. Nowadays, everything that gets written is immediately posted into social networks to be given instant gratification.

I think the 2008 financial crisis showed most millennials that they would never be able to own anything of real worth and value from their work alone, that they would not accrue their own generational wealth but instead inherit from their parents (if they inherit at all), and that unless you're born into the big club, are useful to the big club, or are a massive outlier, that hard work and personal sacrifice will not materially improve your condition in life.

At least that's what I got from it as an "elder millennial" (born in the very early 1980s).

I wouldn’t understate the role of companies like Google that pioneereed “exploiting idealism as a PR strategy.” The IPO listing claimed “Google is not a conventional company and does not intend to become one” and their recruiting tag line was “Do cool things that matter.” They leaned hard into social issues like gay marriage and paid lip service to FOSS and hacker pet topics. But over time they’ve shown willingness to sacrifice any amount of user privacy, willingness to censor and suppress, willingness to illegally collude against labor, and willingness to embrace special rules to protect elites in their club.

People nowadays complain that gay pride parades have gotten too corporate, but especially by companies that are willing to exploit people in other ways. But this is simply the playbook Google pioneered, to take good will around certain social issues and use it as a decoy while you pick people’s pockets and put your boot on their face. I don’t think we can understate the extent to which good causes have been infiltrated by bad corporate actors and how much that had undermined our trust in our communities.

> Then came 9/11

> American

Yes, except the world is large and frankly in most parts of the world 9/11 doesn't factor very large in memory. As such, I doubt it was the single most important factor in changing this feeling of world peace which again, definitely didn't exist outside of the US. All you need to think about to see that is look at why 9/11 happened and think of all the murdered people those folks must have seen to get that angry.

> and think of all the murdered people those folks must have seen to get that angry.

Come now don't be naïve: those same folk get just as rabidly homicidal over a silly little cartoon.

Some societies are just not compatible with legal systems that a) limits the use of force to the government alone, b) place the rules and rights of men above religions.

Never the two shall meet.

9/11 is an inflection point in modern day America, but there have been other equal/greater inflection points. Revolutionary War, Civil War, WW2… lots of war

Absolutely, and wars waged without declaration that were equally traumatic. Within the lifetime of the Internet, I think 9/11 is the major inflection

Or alternatively, then came Internet for the masses. Before that a lid was kept on a huge part of the population, the dream of raw global information sharing turned out to be a nightmare our societies/species is no ready for.

It's the "Eternal September" or "September that Never Ended" for the internet in general. With mass use came mass marketing and a switch from authentic information dissemination Internet to pure and absolute profiteering of everything you see on the internet.

Do a random search in Google (DDG, or Bing) of ANY term at all, and you will see that the full first page links to pages that wrote whatever content for a profit (either by selling ads, or by a paywall, etc).

Long lost are sites like Xoom, Geocities or similar where people wrote about their knowledge just for the sake of it. Long gone are the "web rings" that took you into cliques of people wanting to share knowledge of some specific subject.

Nowadays the closest you can get to that sort of information is in forums like this or reddit (and this last is questionable). That's why adding "site:reddit.com" when searching for some opinion is becoming more useful compared to pure serach engine results.

Wikipedia and community wikis also centralized (drained?) a lot of knowledge that might have otherwise existed on separately hosted sites linked through webrings.

> Doesn’t matter what you think about the event and it’s authenticity as described

Interesting small mention. Is it common in America to disbelieve in the mainstream history of 9/11? I’m just getting glimpses from the new world via the internet and have no ear to the ground there

The answer to that is a personal one and I suggest for anybody on either side of any argument to recall Nietzsche’s saying - Convictions are more dangerous foes of truth than lies.

I'm not sure what the original commenter was talking about, but no, it's not. There is vast agreement in the US about what happened.

Not as vast as you think [1]. Also as of late it appears the victims don’t want their president there in their 20th reunion for similar reasons.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polls_about_9/11_con...

> America as a country has been locked in this sort of country wide PTSD since and have changed completely.

Population wise, that was the case for a number of years after 9/11. In terms of government policy, it's still the case. But in terms of the former, it's fading away as more time passes. People who were born in 2001 are or will turn 20 this year. Just like events like the attack on pearl harbor and the Cuban missle crises, 9/11 will also become an event that's just known by reading history rather than a first hand experience.

They won't remember the transition or really realize it happened, but the cultural echoes last a hell of a lot longer than direct memory of the event. Hell, the reverberations of the civil war still echo today.

> It was indeed peace, we almost had it, world peace - feeling utopian and all loving in the 90s.

Think you might need to qualify that. The mid-90s saw the Bosnian and Rwandan genocides.

It won’t be the first time in history, Americans and with them the “western” world turned a blind eye to who’s backs their hedonistic party was carried over.

If you look at what was life like. What people cared about. What songs sang about. What households looked like. War was as far a concept from the average American.

Sure we had the gulf war early 90s. We had Bosnia during Clinton years. But most Americans were more concerned with becoming stock traders from home, saving willy and the earth and how Clinton’s cigars were used.

Americans bombers dropping bombs by the ton to the backdrop of western advancement has almost become an expectation in our campaign of spreading our brand of democracy and its freedoms or else.

> We had Bosnia during Clinton years.

Oppose them or support them, it was literally American bombing campaigns that stopped the Bosnian genocide and the ethnic cleansing of Kosovo.

Admittedly the Yugoslav wars are not my strong suit in history, but if protecting genocide is all that is American, it makes you wonder where have we been the past decade when it came to Yemen. Same with the Uyghurs in China. Same with the civil war in Syria. I can list a few more...

Feels like there was something more that led America to Bosnia, and it wasn't just our benevolence and saving the world from itself.

> Feels like there was something more that led America to Bosnia, and it wasn't just our benevolence and saving the world from itself.

There was a lot of pressure to "do something" in the Balkans, and the military wasn't averse to showing off its goods, so something was done. Imagine the media pressure with Yemen x1000. That was Bosnia and Kosovo (probably mostly because it was in Europe).

Also, US military has intervened militarily in Syria, many times, and even with troops on the ground. Did you miss it?

The Uyghurs are a poor analogy, because despite the intense oppression they're under, they're not being mass-murdered. And a humanitarian intervention in China due to Uyghur situation is just not in the cards, because realism.

So sure, Bosnia+Kosovo interventions weren't just "benevolence". It was a convergance of factors (power dynamics, US President open to idea, media+public pressure, limiting intervention to air campaign, etc). But it wasn't an oil pipeline or some ridiculous conspiracy, either, like I sometimes hear.