We (As a Society) Peaked in the 90s

This Douglas Adams quote is still undefeated:

1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.

2. Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.

3. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.

As an old-timer, the biggest difference between now and the 80s and 90s is that in the 80s and 90s entertainment was relatively scarce. An album cost $20, which was a lot in those days. You could get movies, but you had to go to the video store and remember to return them, and the selection was often limited. If you liked some weird band, most record stores didn't have it. In the 80s TV was very limited and you had to get home in time.

So today entertainment is unlimited and everywhere, personalized and you can have more free entertainment than you could ever watch in a million years. This means other forms of entertainment like hanging out with friends, going to the symphony, the opera, or out to the movies, or just hanging out in public are much less valuable than they used to be.

One example: As a teenager, I used to go to a special screening of a Warren Miller film about extreme skiing that they would do once a year. This was a big annual event where we would watch daredevils ski and do tricks with old Warren narrating and pay $12 to get in. They wouldn't have anything like that on regular TV. Now, there is an unlimited amount of that stuff on almost every single video platform on the internet.

Also, one other huge notable difference was pornography was very hard to get a hold of, and now it's available in unlimited amounts for free. This warps society in all kinds of weird ways. For instance, women were mysterious, incredibly alluring, and much more irresistable in those days. Just seeing cleavage was a big deal! Now all that mystery is totally gone for men who don't abstain from pornography, and young men seem hugely demotivated to date.

A thought I often have - older millennials and younger Gen X have a unique obligation to fix certain parts of society because we are the youngest generation old enough to remember how to operate in and enjoy a world that wasn't A/B tested into a gray, lifeless background hum.

If you want to sum up the 90s in the UK for people like me who became adults then, it would be the song, "Things can only get better". A little embarrassing, yes? Naive? and yet there really was an optimism then. If things weren't great (and objectively it was a poorer country), they were getting better, and they could get better, and they would. Happiness is more about cake tomorrow than cake today, and in the 90s you really could believe it. Do we have that belief now? Managed decline, it feels like, is the best the UK can offer.

To make this a bit more pithy: in the 1990s we were excited about the coming 21st century. In 2025, do we think the 2030s are going to be better, really? Or are we looking down the barrels of one maturing catastrophe over another?

I was hoping this would be more fleshed out as an article, but the sentiment is understandable.

Want to throw some of my knowledge of digital music, as you called it out specifically.

In the late 90s most digitally arranged music production was relegated to trackers (think Amiga trackers) and sequencing samples and loops, because the storage simply didn't exist.

Then that would be committed to tape, sometimes on a 4-track, sometimes on studio-quality tape, sometimes on ADAT.

Fully digital music production like we have now was out of reach for most people until roughly the early-to-mid 2000s, when you see an explosion of people, even in local music scenes, quantizing drum parts and using virtual instruments (usually VST) that would normally require tens or even hundreds of thousands in hardware.

The Internet is to blame!

But you could say we peaked before electricity too:

- It broke our natural circadian rhythm

- It enabled the 24-hr grind

- With radios and televisions, people were now staying home for leisure instead of going to parks and public spaces (TV dinners!)

- It led to immense pollution

Technology really is a double edged sword.

Your perception of the best decade is correlated with your age

https://today.yougov.com/society/articles/53769-what-are-the...

The author is in their forties or fifties. They’re forgetting one important thing; they were young and the world was in front of them.

I am sure every single generation has something like this to say about a decade that was meaningful to them. But I feel the 90s are special because it was a period where you got to experience two worlds - the pre Internet one and the post Internet one. You had all the promise of the early Internet without the downsides of what came later with social media, monetization, etc. And people were still generally … normal. They had lives offline that were authentic and I think that made them happier and healthier.

How could he miss movies?

I’ve got several streaming services available to me. When I’m looking for a good show, it’s very often from the 80s or 90s. A lot of newer movies end up started and not finished.

I sympathise with the author's point (the machines in The Matrix were right!), but the analog music part doesn't really hold water. Digitally produced music was of course a huge thing in the 90s. Countless genres of electronic music – techno, trance, house, whatever have you, all of that made on computers. And of course almost all of pop was digital synth based by the 90s.

Of course the sentiment is there as with any of these kind of posts but a bit revisionist. News, media, personal websites sure, but forums? not so much. Of course usenet and mailing lists and chat rooms but not forums so much. Everything was disjointed and revolved around loosely connected website rings etc. Which brings me to another part - the thing about knowing stuff about people. Reduce that to just knowing people in general. It was double-edged sword. You could connect if you were savvy enough over email with like minded, but if that connection went away for whatever reason, there wasn't like a backup default trail like we have now with Facebook and other general profiles we all see to have. People would disappear with no way to connect to them. Not the best when you look back at it from what we have now and kind of wish some of those connections weren't just 'lost'.

I think about this issue a lot too, and while I think everyone calling out that these feelings are cyclical, and choosing a decade of that persons own life means that it's just nostalgia has validity, but I also think that, there is probably truth to the idea that our cultural peak is behind us. Some Cultural historians would probably put it some time in the 17 and 1800's when we were building cathedrals and making classical music.

I've become something of a cultural conservative, thinking that most significant cultural lessons, the ways to live the good life can be learned by looking behind us.

There are probably multiple peaks though, and I think a peak in the late 20th century is one of them. I think the 20th century in and of itself will probably always be considered a peak, or significant and the reason is the invention of the motion picture and the way motion picture technology evolved over those 100 years. Our image of ourself as a society will never have quite the evolution you get from having like low fps black and white imagery early in the 20th century, to basically 4k sci-fi like the Matrix in 1999.

But I think the like Stranger Things running around on bicycles, getting to experience the birth of modern technology, sort of a combination of maximal freedom and maximal aesthetic experience, shared cultural touchstones and while not yet introducing social media and post-9/11 anxiety is a signifcant cultural peak.

I think the Gibson quote is applicable: "The future is already here – it's just not evenly distributed." Some people are going to remember the 2020's as a time that AI was new, and the eventual winners will look back with nostalgia at all the opportunity. I guarantee HN will have a post in the 2050's about how Moltbook was the peak of society (probably written by an AI agent, though...)

Social media broke society. The echo chamber effect from the feed algorithms has led to everyone living in their own little realities and it's so terrifying to watch what happens when people don't have the same truths.

I remember early, invite-only Facebook before it got heavily monetized and it was such an amazing tool to bring people together, keep you connected with old friends, organize group events, and stuff like that. Then it... changed.

For me the 00's were the real deal, that decade when Internet at home finally became affordable but before the arrival of smartphones, social networks, and 24/7 connectivity.

But they were also my high school and university years, and as many other comments have pointed out, we tend to remember those years as the best of our lives.

What can we do about it? Genuinely want to know your thoughts.

I'm in agreement with everything he says, but I've struggled to see eye to eye with anyone not in my age group. How can we have a constructive conversation about this, come to a consensus that things are not okay now, and move forward?

> Things came out slowly. Albums. Games. Software. That slowness gave them weight. You lived with them for a while instead of replacing them next week.

This is very true (and should include films as well). When big movies came out they were a big thing. Waiting in long lines for a ticket to a movie was a normal thing. People talked about them weeks and weeks. They were sort of big cultural events.

I was there in the 1990s.

Absolutely the peak decade of human civilization.

I would argue we peaked in 70's after that only crises and fallback

> We used tech without letting it own us.

This was, and is, a personal choice.

You can call me a judas goat if you want for spending my whole life building the things I would not use, but that is the nature of the game.

This is true, and I think a good indicator of its truth is that basically all generations agree about it. Even Gen Z, who weren’t alive at the time.

Something I've come to accept and try to remember: people will complain about literally anything you give them to opportunity to complain about.

The world is better today in every conceivable way for more people, than it was at any point in history. But it isn't good enough for enough people, and the people who remind you of that are usually doing the least to improve anything, for anybody.

I don't really understand why. It seems fall under this larger victimization umbrella. The best answers I've seen for it are that it is either some cathartic response to just how good things have gotten, or that the complaint itself represents some marginal effort, enough to elicit a dopamine response.

I was born in the 80s and have vivid memories of the 90s. I absolutely loved everything as it was at that point in time. But to look at the world around us today and to think anything before was the peak is just incomprehensible to me.

MTV!

To anyone old enough to have seen the first few years, it was awesome beyond description. Just totally great.

‘Take on Me’, ‘Walk like an Egyptian’, ‘Come On, Eileen’…. That was peak entertainment, the likes of which we have not seen again.

The 90s were shit.

As Douglas Adams and xkcd #1227 have pointed out, the older generations have complained about this sort of thing since Plato. However, I do not believe this observation settles the matter, because it does not seriously contend with the null hypothesis: that we really have been steadily enshittifying the human experience since Plato.

Who has the right of it? Do the new generations simply not know what they are missing. Or is there something in human nature that makes us unavoidably crotchety as we get older and, thus, not to be taken too seriously? In my opinion, it is simply an open mystery.

On the one hand, many tangible, measurable things have improved over the last 2000 years, or, indeed, since the 90's. Steven Pinker has made this point somewhat convincingly by looking at unambiguously positive things like reduced infant mortality.

On the other hand, every single generation can give detailed accounts of how much more real and alive and authentic the world was a few decades ago. The accounts have similarities across the generations, but they are also rooted in specifics. To argue that we're all mis-remembering or failing to appreciate what the new decade has to offer is to insist on a rather fantastic level of self-doubt. If our entire lived experience is this untrustworthy, it kind of makes it impossible to rule on anything - good OR bad. Why should we default to trusting the younger generation?

I think the surrounding technological context of our age has brought this long-simmering matter to a boil. Now that our electronic communication is so sophisticated that we can essentially build "anything", it starts to re-focus our attention from "CAN we build it" to "SHOULD we build it". This question about digital society is complementary to the broader, long-standing civilizational question. Have the trillions of hours the human race has expended shaping our society resulted in _better_ life, or just life with a deeper tech tree?

One novelty of our time is how certain human enterprises play out at 10x speed in cyberspace. This lets us watch the entire lifecycle as they Rise and Fall, over and over. This lends perspective, and allows patterns to emerge. Indeed, this is exactly how Doctorow came to coin the term enshittification. If there's any truth to the life-really-is-getting-worse theory, you'd want to find some causal mechanism - some constant factor that explains why we've been driving things in the wrong direction so consistently. Digital life lets us see enough trials to start building such an account. You can imagine starting to understand the "physics" of why all human affairs eventually lead to an Eternal September. Wherever brief pockets of goodness pop up, they are like arbitrage opportunities: they tautologically attract more and more people trying to harvest the goodness until it's pulverized - a tragedy of the commons. Perhaps some combination of population growth and the inevitable depletion of Earth's natural resources lead to such a framework.

Whatever you think about it, I mostly just wish people would acknowledge that it is an unresolved debate and treat it as such. It is critical to understanding what it is worth spending our time on, and it is the kernel of many comparatively superficial disagreements (e.g. the red-blue culture war in US politics).

I think this is just millenials discovering nostalgia. For me all kinds of things sucked (even though I am a millenial).

I really love lots of things about the world today. I love delivery apps, remote working, so much entertainment. I feel much safer in some ways (not in others -- but that's a 2026 development). I hated walkmans and cd players, they skip, wearout,etc... I hated having to rent movies, sometimes all the copies have been rented out, and you had to deal with fees for not rewinding. and the media quality sucked.

Even when there was internet (if you're lucky, and you afforded the very costly computers back then), you had to share time with landline usage. You had to remember landline numbers too.

I hated writing all the time, pens, pencils, sharpening pencils, pens leaking in your pocket. There were no cameras anywhere back then, so people were free to be really bad to each other with little consequence. You didn't go viral for berating a waiter back then. Everything terrible cops are accused of doing today, it was 10x worse in the 90s too.

So many thing were inaccessible unless you were in the right neighborhood and with the right amount of family income.

In news and politics, petty things were made to be a big deal, like Clinton's affair for example. People today fall for the deception of nostalgia and think it's because things were by relation not so bad back then, but it's just that they were kids and their parents sheltered them. All the stuff in epstein's list, all the #metoo revelations, all the gang warfare and war on drugs chaos in cities, that happened in the 90s too. matter of fact, a lot of the terrible things happening today are only coming into the light now that we have smartphones, internet and things are getting exposed.

In my opinion, the US peaked in 2022-23 in many ways.But post-covid trauma and the current administration nullified much of that.

What was great in the 90s was that the US had a healthy amount of national pride and love of country. Russia/Putin has been trying to undermine that, split the us apart from within since the fall of the USSR. Which by the way, all the 90's nostalgia is fueled by the whole "we won the cold war" euphoria in part, and mostly younger people being fooled by the whole "that means we're the good guys" nonsense. Until Iraq of course.

But anyways, social divisions and strife has widened dramatically, but the people who call themselves "MAGA" were "tea party" prior to that and all sorts of other names historically. All the chaos with the current admin is caused by "the heritage foundation" which has been sowing sees of divisions and chaos since before the 90s (thank them for project 2025). My point is the divisions and chaos are not new. but a lot of people that were doing badly in the 90's are doing much better now (oh..and did I mention how terrifying aids was then? even covid in 2020 was nowhere near as scary).

We're terrible at appreciating what we have right now in the present,today. We're losing so much of our rights and privileges because of this nonsense, so I hope you all don't propagate it. The 90's were nice in some ways, but they were mostly horrible, and the more disadvantaged you were the worse they were. There was more injustice, more misery, more suffering, more discomforts. We have the best technology, the best health care, the most powerful military, an economy which by all means should be crashing but is somehow surviving, a government which is being attacked by cartoon-level villains at all sides and somehow it too hasn't collapsed yet. Even our allies which are turning to other countries, even they haven't forsaken the US completely yet.

This mindset of "we used to have it great but it's over now" is defeatist. it is actually the same mindset MAGA is using for their lunacy.

The problem I think is our generation and gen-z are finally grown ups now, but instead of fighting to keep what we have and improving it, we're in this defeatist mindset looking back into the past and thinking it used to be better. Not appreciating the progress achieved by the sacrifices and struggles of so many. What you don't fight to keep is taken away from you.

Oh and by the way, remember the ozone crisis, it was more scary than climate change now, and we fixed it more or less now (although objectively, climate change in the future will be worse if it isn't fixed).

I really really hated school so much!! now for all the problems I had, there has been so much research into them. educators are more aware and more willing to provide individualized plans to students. I wish I had wikipedia back then, heck I wish I had chatgpt back then, I was the student that asked 1000 questions and annoyed everyone, I could annoy chatgpt instead if i were a student today.

Taxis, how horrible and scammy they were! it was such a hopeless, boring and miserable time. I could go on all day.

The key thing everyone should keep in mind is that nostalgia is by its nature deceptive. This is why eyewitness testimony is also unreliable. We selectively recall things from the past, not only that, our minds alter how we felt back then in the recall process.

90s are the new 60s

Yeah it was great if you weren't gay.

Agree, Internet/bbs, CDs, 3d polygon based games. Programming, excitement for the future.