> It's okay to acknowledge things are worse than they used to be.
It's impossible due to the moderation fallacy and the "Law of Averages."
Imagine if you bought up every single movie studio in the country, locked everyone else out of the market, and exclusively made terrible movies - and I mean exclusively, like you review them all before release and if you see any glow of inspiration you have it cut, the people involved fired, and you put their friends on a list. Lets say you didn't do this all at once, but gradually - not that gradually, but over let's say 15 years.
Movie reviewers would continue to say that about half of movies were good and about half of them were bad. Reviewers who said that all movies were bad, and explained patiently why they were bad so well that you used their thoughts to come up with even worse movies would be pilloried as hopeless cynics and snobs.
"Oh, it's so easy to look down your nose at everything." "This is all just poisonous snark."
A lot of people just pride themselves on being in the middle. They like to hate everyone who is too happy or who is too angry, and they define those things by who surrounds them at any given time. Reality to them is the mean of all known claims. It's the sum of all personality conflicts, and also somehow necessarily zero. And that's where they're comfortable, claiming to be zero.
If you see a bunch of things in the world are going well and you're happy about it, and they're absorbed in a media environment that at that time is determined to have them believe the opposite (maybe they want to fight a war), those are the same people that will tell you you have your head in the sand and you don't understand that the world is burning. If you reply that you don't believe that the world is burning, they'll say "you're such a cynic, you think everyone is lying to you."
It's just sort of a mindless gradient following to death. Never defend looking at the world accurately, and never get involved in conversations with people who argue "oh, please!" or "come on!" and try to turn a conversation about reality into a conversation about your optimism or cynicism. They're not trying to figure out the world through reason, they're trying to figure out what is considered "reasonable" within any particular social and cultural environment.
So how was it in the 90s? Well some things were better, but other things were worse. Rich people may do bad things but they do good things. You're upset about the bad things they do, but you don't appreciate the good things enough. And you say the 90s were great, and of course they were, but I wouldn't trade what I have now for the 90s because you're forgetting how bad it was. It's the universe as a Buttigieg speech. No references to actual events or conditions necessary. Just the mean, give or take, more or less.