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Comment by hiddencache | Hacker News Reader

Regardless of what Tyler Durden said:

> "We’re the middle children of history. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War’s a spiritual war, our Great Depression is our lives."

The 90s were a pretty fortunate decade. The threat of nuclear war had passed with the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the economy was chugging along fine, and terrorism hadn't yet taken centre stage. Certainly that's the way I remember it - maybe through rose-tinted glasses (?)

But nevertheless, maybe a quiet life without crises isn't such a bad thing?

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Wearing my rose tinted glasses too

the direction of the 90s was pointing at was, cosmopolitanism, techno-utopianism, radical secularism. I can't help to think that the decades that followed were a big regression from that with human tribes forming around the most ancient, base anxieties of the species. Unfortunately this decline was not captured in the the arts which became significantly less significant

Definitely rose tinted glasses. I don't know where you live but it depends on that. For example they were the years of slaughters in former Yugoslavia, terrorist attacks in Israel, various wars in Africa

Or the Rwandan genocide https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rwandan_genocide

things in africa and israel are not better today. The yugoslav wars were kind of to-be-expected since yugoslavia split at that time and they largely ended in the 90s. There 's more war today than in the 90s https://ourworldindata.org/war-and-peace

The >500k bump from the Rwandan genocide is not in their battle related graph. If you scroll further down, you see it in “Other forms of large-scale violence”. Taking the up to date death toll of Syria you could say that the situation is as bad as in the ‘90.

I remember only two international crises -- the Gulf War and Serbia. when protecting the Earth against asteroid impacts started receiving what felt like more than its fair share of news coverage, even as a teenager I knew that the world must be in a great place. With the Internet taking off, I thought it would be the dawn of a golden age. Of course, that came to an abrupt halt on 2001/9/11.

american culture had done that decades ago. the political culture of outrage did spill over, a little, but it didn't really catch on anywhere else

We also connected the entire world together, thanks to Big Tech. Silicon Valley culture is imposed on the world whether you like it or not: https://www.economist.com/international/2021/06/12/social-me...

The internet was also very useful and functional. though I’ll admit it got better in the 2000’s with Google Maps etc. Still I managed to navigate unknown cities with MapQuest printouts haha

But we aren't the middle children of history. I'd argue that we are amongst the first few generations where humans have become too powerful for their own good. That era started with the nuclear bomb when we first had the ability to destroy ourselves. Thankfully very small groups of people have ever had to take responsibility for that and they've mostly managed to do okay so far. However now with mass industrialization and the spectre of climate change we've reached a point where every single human is responsible for our collective future. We have to fight our evolutionary and historical instincts to preserve the planet for ourselves and all other life. So there is a crisis upon us, it may be different in nature to the ones before but its certainly no less challenging. For a far better argued view on this I would recommend "The precipice" by Toby Or

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