The 90s were objectively the best time to be alive
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Kids aren't allowed to do anything anymore. Whatever autonomy kids once had is basically gone. Why? I have been scratching my head regarding this for awhile, but I think the turning point was Columbine followed in short order by 9/11. I think the US has been in a state of paranoia ever since and that is reflected in the current larger societal/political discourse, which shows a lack of trust and empathy for anyone who dares to disagree.
Something always sticks out in my mind: My older siblings were allowed to basically roam the neighborhood after school / on the weekends and by the time I was their age I wasn't. My parents had become more afraid. Everyone could be a pedophile, or Satan worshiper, or someone could have a gun or drugs, or guns and drugs. And once Columbine happened it was all over not only were there dangers out there for me, I could be the danger. They had to know what I was doing at all times, less they are bad parents for not knowing what I was going through and they have to be the parents on the news say how I was "such a good kid" and "they had no idea."
Blame boomers.
The generation that invented participation trophies then started a culture war over them. The generation that espoused capitalism and made ever facet of human living and enjoyment cost money. The generation that destroyed privacy. The generation that destroyed the climate. The generation that believes resort towns in Mexico are more dangerous than large US cities. I could go on.
I grew up riding my bike across town as a teenager and being home by the time the street lights turned on. Kids these days don’t have that, and it’s showing.
Oh come on. Boomers are grand- or even sometimes grand-grand-parents at this point, with one foot in a grave at best.
Zoomers are already building their careers and some even have babies.
Stop kicking grandpa, at this point he can hardly be responsible for anything.
Participation trophies were definitely a Gen X/Y thing - and it's not like any of them are less bloodthirsty capitalists. And somehow I'm pretty sure that Y/Z will fuck up the climate even more with the current "let's do something, whatever, I'm too nervous about this" attitude.
Crime in the 70s was a lot higher in general. Much discussion why, such as the Freankonomics guys arguing abortion, or the more recently discussed lead paint cause.
My personal guess is that there's a "stabilization" of social structures, and it's hard to argue against incremental changes that lower risks to children, which happens whenever some adverse incident happens, and they eventually pile up. Kind of a slippery slope to the bottom, so to speak.
https://www.theonion.com/10-things-that-will-make-you-super-...
But it's not entirely surprising why the '90s are remembered so fondly by many people living in certain parts of the world, under certain material conditions. It was the end of the Cold War, it was heralded as the End of History. It was the coming of an entirely new millennium and the Information Age. The U.S. federal government had a surplus. Americans were worried about silly things like killer asteroids and Y2K apocalypses.
It really was a time of boundless optimism and futurism in America, and both the 2000s and the 2010s completely upended that.
Do people from older generations think the 90s were the best? Do people from younger generations think 90s was great when told about it?
But at the same time, the '90s do seem rather exceptional as a time in between conflicts- the Cold War, which in some ways is an outgrowth of the end of WWII, itself an outgrowth of WWI, was over. The anxieties of living in a post-bipolar world, of dealing with dangerous non-state actors or multipolar rivals to the American order, had not formalized yet. If anything, most of the world seemed to be getting along under the capitalist liberal democratic framework that Fukuyama called the End of History. So from a security standpoint it certainly seemed peaceful.
I personally have a time travel rule that I wouldn't want to live before penicillin, vaccines, and novocaine. That really doesn't leave much of human history. But the 90's in the US and Western Europe were nice.
Only upended because people fell for the whole "terrorism" con.
(also we were ignoring the former Yugoslavia, as well as the entire FSU in general — but IMNSHO "terrorism" was an unforced error.)
If I could choose which year I was going to be born but knew nothing else about my life, when would I chose? That is I wouldn't know which country, gender, mental composition, parents, socio-economic class, etc. etc. Only which year.
For me, it's hard not to pick today or even the future, if that's allowed. I think it would be fun to visit the past and be a fly on the wall, but with the constraints above I wouldn't want to risk a "bad roll."
For people with talent and ambition, now is the best time in terms of pay and finding a huge audience online or recognition in fields such as AI, computer science, or physics. In the 90s if you were a bodybuilder or enjoyed working out, maybe your income options were limited to hustling steroids at the gym or selling workout videos, but guys on YouTube easily make hundreds of thousands of dollars a year or even millions through ads, selling program, supplements, etc. to a worldwide audiences of millions. Same for video games, thanks to Twitch. People are even getting rich making videos of binge eating. Pretty much any niche you can think of can be turned into a lucrative income stream.
so you're saying homes were cheaper, but unfortunately they weren't getting less-cheaper fast enough?
People want to have their cake and eat it too.
Compare that to now, where Covid can destroy your life and you can get it just going to the grocery store...it's much worse.
The chance of dying from COVID is 4/100,000 if you're 80 years old and fully vaccinated [1]. HIV, by contrast, was a death sentence regardless of age. Before COVID vaccines were available, sure, you could compare the pandemics; nowadays, the two situations are not comparable.
[1]: https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/science/data-revie...
...for some values of "easily"
Seriously, there have always been barriers to entry and always will be. They constantly shift. Yes, more competition is happening, which is good, but none of this is something the average person can realistically expect to do without a lot of difficulty (almost by definition).
Anything that's working well today is likely not to be a year from now. Most people aren't cut out for constantly chasing the fickle winds of change to optimize their latest hustle.
Really? Mr. Beast and others have been making money for years. Rogan has been at the top of the podcasting game for close to a decade.
Seriously, there have always been barriers to entry and always will be
The barriers to entry were huge in the 90s too, like Hollywood or the music industry. Nowadays at least there are more opportunities to get rich.
There are more opportunities, yes. But the accessibility of those opportunities hasn't increased all that much. It still takes capital, networking, marketing, hard work and some temporary statistical anomalies which work in your favor at a time when you're equipped to make the most of them.
> 1990s music also sucked.
99% of the money goes to 1% or even 0.1% of people doing things like TikTok/onlyfans/substack/twitch/YT/etc, it’s not an actual choice for the vast majority of people.
And if someone still says that World Economics is not a zero-sum game, I'll laugh in the face of that person.
USSR was destroyed and plundered exactly so that the West would enjoy the golden era of 90s while people were dying here and everything was being destroyed and sold to the West by the price of scrap metal.
So, how do you think he's portrayed in the western media? As a freedom fighter and icon. It's unbelievable! But strength of western propaganda is unbeatable, they can make an idol out of anyone.
You think that the measly Russian economic output is what paid for the 90s boom?
And what do all these Russian oligarchs own? The Russians were preyed upon by their own, Putin being the finest example of this.
Putin came to power in 1999. Until then there was hunger, rampant crime and corruption. He managed to stop all that in just 2-3 years. People started to eat right, they had normal jobs again, it had become safe to go outside.
Western media that disguise as "Russian opposition" that work on destroying Russia from within, still have a very hard time explaining this to population. Because everyone who lived through the 90s remember very clearly how Putin managed to fix everything at once so quickly.
But to the western reader there's no need to explain that, you can start outright with the most obnoxious lies about Putin, since nobody there understands what happened here before and after Putin.
> You think that the measly Russian economic output is what paid for the 90s boom?
People on the West are used to count everything in paper (USD) which is printed in absurd amounts and allows them to inflate their GDP as they wish.
USSR economic output was higher than Russian. USSR had lots of resources, including immense supply of strategic materials (precious metals for example).
1. All that was sold to the West for the price of scrap. Also, not only materials, but plane's, ships and rockets blueprints, scientists, teachers, sport coaches. Just about everything that could be sold.
2. Collapse of the USSR and deliberate destruction of all the industry overnight created a huge market for Western corporations. Just overnight.
And yes, that paid for the boom of 90s.
> And what do all these Russian oligarchs own? The Russians were preyed upon by their own
And do you know how that happened? Before 1991 everything was state owned. After 1991 it was the western "advisors" (from CIA and that's not even a conspiracy theory) that created Russian oligarchs. Also made a buck themselves while being at it.
While that's the least our problems, it resonates with me. The fun has been sucked out of life experience in favor of some shitty wikipedia and google reviews version
When I graduated college in NYC, a studio apartment in an unfashionable outer borough could be bought for $50,000. The same place is like $300 or $400k now.
A beginning secretary at the time might make $35k. And there were studio apartments for sale in Inwood for probably $20k. So if you were willing to live very unglamorously, you could buy an apartment for less than one year's salary.
There was a vibrancy and energy to the 90's. And we had the best of the web. We could research and find things out, but there wasn't this omnipresence of phones and social media. Life was still analogue.
Fair point.
>During the tumultuous '60s or the paranoid gritty '70s?
Two eras people are very nostalgic for. There's so much 60's nostalgia there has been a constant stream of kids born past 1970 pining for it.
However, I'd never trade my life in the 2020s US for a life in the 90s US. I don't his perspective is "objective." A couple reasons come to mind:
1. Civil rights and social acceptance for gay people like me were objectively worse. Sodomy was still a crime in places like Texas, and social acceptance was fairly low too. Have a look at some of these polls; at the turn of the century, ~60% opposed marriage: https://news.gallup.com/poll/1651/gay-lesbian-rights.aspx
2. Life expectancy was ~7 years worse, even accounting for the recent COVID dips.
3. I could be dropped from my health insurance for a pre-existing condition in the 90s.
4. Medicine's gotten a lot better, and I think there's reason to be further optimistic about it improving in the future if we can solve the distribution / cost problem.
5. I feel like it's so much easier to connect over great distances today than it ever has been. This opens up vast social and work opportunities. I'd likely have to change careers or cities if we regressed to the 90s, neither of which seem particularly appealing.
Still, we can all agree America died on 9/11.
The question is - which is the funnest time? The most interesting?
The 1980s. I've been around from the 1970s to 2023. Easily 1980s were the best. Maybe they were not if you lived out in the middle of Nebraska in a town of 200 people, but in that case, no decade is great. Options are limited. You watch the grass grow, or you watch the paint dry.
I was very young in the 1960s, but I always thought that the women of the late 1960s were the most attractive. More natural, more open. Starting in the 1980s, very, very slowly, women became more and more closed off, building shells around themselves. Now they are hard beetle carapaces. Guys pretty much have stayed the same. I've had many work interactions with people in their late teens to mid 20s, where I have been by far the oldest. We get along great, but that's what I've noticed. But like any era, there are sweet people, too. It's just the proportions have changed.
The 90s was a great time in America because, for us, it was immensely peaceful, prosperous, and hopeful.
I don't generally subscribe to sweeping generalizations about eras being overall good or bad in the absence of data though. I'm not sure any decade of my life has been better or worse in any way that I could point to general societal trends (industry or major sector trends are different).
Sure, you most probably didn't have means for anything extravagant or frequent, but you still could actually travel, and nobody would shoot you like a rabid dog on the border or throw you into uranium mines for a decade or two to just die there.
It was wild time, local mafias, few people dissolved in acid (but generally due to close association with mobsters). People progressively getting richer, not ending up rich but if you start very low any progress is massive. You could see it ie in car ownership - before car parks around were often half empty, but they were gradually filling up (and now they are overflowing).
Of course there were losers, people who worked for decades in a factory in the middle of nowhere and it suddenly went bankrupt. Too stubborn/scared of change to move elsewhere, slide into alcoholism (if not there already) and long term unemployment. Transition from communism was universally messed up and just few ahole got obscenely rich. Smart people had endless possibilities, rest was still one foot in old regime which was just about coarsing, slacking or worse. Pretty awesome to experience, of course hindsight is required.
My grandpa visited Italy, Egypt, Cuba and India. I doubt that NK citizens can do it now unless they are high-ranking party members.
My father, after maybe 2 years of attempts to get approval for travel to Yugoslavia, ended up in dark lit room with just 1 guy from secret service sitting behind the desk. The guy just stared at him for 45 minutes straight, eye to eye, no word uttered. Absolute power and its projection. Of course, denied. That was former Czechoslovakia, Slovakia part. I've heard some people could travel a bit more, but generally there were reasons for that and they were not nice reasons. At least I can say I am proud of my parents for keeping their morals when there were strong motivations to betray them.
But for adults hyperinflation, economic collapse and skyrocketing crime wasn't that fun.
Another good example is extreme poverty. Which dropped from 1.8 billion to 1.6 billion in 90s and to 710 million by 2021. A billion people not having the immediate experience of hunger is a big win.
I had an argument about this with a friend of mine a while back.
"Why would you EVER do anything BUT just download and listen to the best songs on the album? Listening to the whole album, including the crap songs is just the height of stupidity. Why would you pay money for the crap songs??"
Counterpoint: The songs which grab you right away, may not be the ones with staying power. You get over them, and the more you listen to the songs which don't grab you right away, the more you start to appreciate their hidden depths.
90's music example: Megadeth's Rust In Peace album. Hanger 18 is the most obviously best song on the album, but you listen to the albums a few times, and if you're a guitar player you're going to start noticing the playing on Tornado of Souls. You go back and HOLY SHIT THIS SONG IS INSANE. That is a song that I can listen to decades later and still hear something new and interesting that I never noticed before.
Another counterpoint: Concept albums, which tell a story which is greater than the sum of its parts. Listening to the whole album of 2112 by Rush is far superior to just listening to Temples of Syrinx. Or, the whole of Dream Theater's Metropolis Pt. 2 instead of just The Dance of Eternity.
My friend is not a musician and has a fairly casual appreciation of music. So of course, he has a shallow view of how people should consume music.
Sadly, sometimes I suspect they had a point.
it's interesting to look back on the significance of 1999 20+ years later, but obviously they didn't understand what we would think about it at the time.
Yet modern youths look at it today and find it aspirational.
"Wait, so I have a steady income writing code, have a cool apartment, and get to go to awesome underground raves at night? What's the problem exactly?"
That was the end of the 90's in a nutshell. It was the best time in history to be alive, but noone thought it at the time.
People were BORED that the Cold War ended, the world was at peace, and economic conditions worldwide were improving without any slowdown.
> Did you know that the first Matrix was designed to be a perfect human world? Where none suffered, where everyone would be happy. It was a disaster. No one would accept the program. Entire crops were lost. Some believed we lacked the programming language to describe your perfect world. But I believe that, as a species, human beings define their reality through suffering and misery. The perfect world was a dream that your primitive cerebrum kept trying to wake up from.
People just didn't realize the end of the '90s was relatively perfect compared to so much of the 20th century.
Gen-X cynicism was a running theme in the 1990s — Office Space, the Dilbert comic strip and TV series, etc.
The 1970s were the third best time to be alive, the 1960s were the second best time, and the first best was the 1980s.
The first 2 or 3 years of the 1990s were ok, but after that, everything turned to shit. I don't hate the 1993 to 2023, it is just that they are sooooo boring and derivative. Nothing new, nothing exciting. The internet and iphones, yawn. I was on the internet (ARPAnet) back in the 1980s. iphones are just a delivery system. the underlying stuff was around way before then and I was using it.
Rap music? Rappers Delight in 1979, and Rapture by Blondie in 1980.
I'd LOVE something to be new and innovative. Sure, there is *some* innovation. SaaS is great. But really not too much new.
Yes, you can:
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT211330
https://www.amazon.com/MP3-Music-Download/b?node=163856011
https://www.cnet.com/tech/home-entertainment/best-sites-to-b...
The file method also means you are locked into a format that may go the way of the dodo in 5 years.
There is no way to buy a license and stream forever and media in the digital form is getting less and less sticky. Things are more likely to disappear forever or be modified from the original format. At the same time, physical copies of media are rapidly no longer being made.
- Try digitally purchasing a Weinstein movie - Episodes that are banned and gone forever from TV shows
The utopia of easily accessible digital archives of all media are becoming less and less of a reality. Having to maintain your own server and backup infrastructure to manage your digital media is kind of a step backwards from physical media and while it may be a hobby it's not a wide ranging solution.
On the other hand I'm a little confused what you mean by the format going away in 5 years. The format is sufficiently open that anyone can write a player for it (in theory). Unless I lose all copies of the files, there shouldn't be any reason it won't continue to exist as long as I like listening to it.
The promise of digital media was permanent access to a library that grew and updated with the technology. If I'm streaming a show I don't need to have 720, 4k, ultrawide versions, that's taken care of. New formats are added as they are developed.
>Best Stores for Buying Music and MP3s You Own Forever
That had to be intentional. And rather artful.
* Media: music and, in particular, movies were absolutely booming and innovating
* Technology: every year you could do something completely new with your PC. AOL one year. Then ICQ over the Internet the next.
* Consumerism: flat screen TVs?! Amazing new products every year.
Stuff that sucked about the 90s:
* In Oregon, we had a small but noticable neo-Nazi movement. A local kid got stabbed for dressing wrong (pardon the phrase, but it exemplifies the time, "wigger").
* Race relations were terrible in many places, but the general population was blissfully ignorant. Take the Rodney King backlash, for example.
* AIDs, as mentioned by many here. The reality is that it wouldn't really affect reasonably responsible heterosexuals, but it was drilled into us in school to the point that it traumatized a generation around sex. It may even be contributing to some of the anti-abortion sentiment we're currently seeing.
* Life for many out-groups. A local lesbian couple had a firebomb thrown through their window. If you watch old political speeches, everyone was stoking fears of illegal immigration ("they took our jobs" as opposed to the Trump era "rapists and vermin" rhetoric).
So, the objectively good part, I would say, is media and peace. Everything else boils down to blissful ignorance and largely depends on race, class, and geography.
Although I was in the Balkans in the 90s so that kind of cramped my experience.
- Long ass rant about how he felt it was all better in his teens.
I was hoping someone crunched the numbers and showed that we were happier, healthier, ate better, had better sex, whatever-er back then...
That's the key question.
Not in Eastern Europe's Romania where I grew up.
At the same time, yeah, hedonism was awesome. Raves, electronic music, computers and action movies coming into full bloom. At least the western countries could party for a moment. But the bill was already pretty high.
It was just that no one had written the check yet. That undeniably happened in the last 10 years. Which sucks. Definitely. And at the same time, it was about time.
And I see my kids today and they have their things, culture, music, mannerisms, widgets and references and it’s fun. Yes the world sucks more urgent and I really did like to eat snow and there is none now. But life goes on and those kids from today will build their own stories and we millennials are the old guys in those story. Until the circle of life beats their ass when it’s their turn to turn 40.