And then there’s idiocracy …
this post was submitted on 30 Jun 2025
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The 90s had a lot of good in them but I gotta admit I'm a bit tired of this nostalgic mindset people have about the past.
Sure, a lot of things are not going well today, but at the same time we have made amazing advancements in multiple areas where I'm sure most of you would regret going back to the 90s and not have them.
Advancements in medicine and science as well as social advancements in the form of a better understanding and acceptance of mental health issues. Being gay and trans today is also a lot easier than it was in the 90s. We hold sexual predators more and more responsible for their actions today than we did back then. More people today are aware and concerned about fixing the environment than they were in the 90s where you got to hear things about the ozone layer and then that was it.
Smoking is on its way out. Similar with alcohol. At least in my country. It is less nad less socially acceptable and more and more people turn away from those vices, which is amazing.
In my experience, more and more people raise their kids with respect for the child's emotional well being. My generation were barely seen as humans when we were children and I see more and more people around my age raising their children with the respect they didn't receive themselves when they were little. It is bound to create some more robust people in the future who have a healthy sense of self and who believe in themselves.
There are so many good things in the world right now, but if you only look for the bad and start romanticizing a past that wasn't really as perfect as you think it was, then you're, in my opinion, living wrong.
It's okay to appreciate things from the past and miss them, but this "the world was better" bullshit is just very counter productive and in many cases objectively untrue.
100% agree with this. The 90's were awesome for white males in North America and a few places in Europe born after 1950, and not a ton of other people. The same could be said of the 80's or the 60's up to 1973. Just because the Boomers (and then later Millennials) were great at the marketing associated with the entertainment detritus of when they had general periods of feeling awesome about life*, doesn't mean it was the peak of anything.
Case in point, TWO of the most popular TV shows in the US in the late 80's/early 90's were one about living in the 1960's (Wonder Years) and a show that included a lot of time travel to the 1960's (Quantum Leap).
- To clarify this, Boomers dragged Western culture around on their emotions, so periods where a lot of them hit seminal age ranges (15-20 becoming and adult, and 30-45 when you have career and family and haven't yet hit midlife crisis point) line up generally with larger periods of nostalgia setting in and being marketable. This is then extrapolated out to Millennials, who unlike Gen X, gobbled up their Boomer training and penchant for nostalgia hard. So the 80's and 90s were sort of this perfect inflection point of career-oriented Boomers taking the lead and feeling like kinds of the world, then selling us the most brightly-colored plastic crap in the history of humanity, and then Millennials thinking that time, when they were also hitting 15-20, was the peak of human civilization. While the births per year are not quite a bell curve, there's a range of earlier people in the generation that set the tone of that generation, which people a few years younger often go a long with. So it's the first 5-10 years of a generation that are setting the trends and tones, and then another 10 years backing them up. Schools, specially high schools and colleges with 4-year cohorts, facilitate this by having the older classes informing the younger classes pre-internet. Thank you for coming to my TED Talk.
I think it's is a bit disingenuous to pretend like Gen X hasn't also been drowning in member berries. All the 70s and 80s nostalgia that has also been permiating media the past decade is more or less Gen X dreaming of their childhoods. Hell, the birth of the online movie and video game reviews was mostly spear headed by Gen X'ers sitting and screaming in front of their cameras about how this game and that show or movie was either amazing or ruined their childhoods. One even called himself the Nostalgia Critic. I have also heard countless Gen X'ers reminisce about how much better things were when they were young. Especially in more recent years where more and more "back in my day we played outside and didn't stare at phones all day"-videos get posted to social media.
Gen X is not too good to be down here in the mud with the rest of us nostalgic peasants.
Every generation has a bit of nostalgia for thier childhoods and everybody misses parts of times that have passed and that is fine.
I just don't like it when it gets to a point where one starts acting like there is absolutely nothing positive or better going on in the current age we live in and that all the good stuff is in the past. That irks the fuck out of me.
My favorite thing from The Matrix was the concept of "Residual Self Image." It is the perfect starting point to understanding dysphoria. If I was plugged into The Matrix, I would not at all look the way I actually do. I would look to you the way I see myself in my own mind.
I believe it was Switch that originally supposed to be Trans in the movie. They would be a man in the "Real World" and in the Matrix they would be a woman. But it was 1999 and Warner Bros nixed it.
I believe the creators are also trans
Yes. And I understand that one of the character's expressed gender is opposite inside and outside the Matrix.
So relevant now lol
I think it turned out worse than that.
I am ok with “question everything”, the problem is that people don’t believe in reputable sources that don’t confirm their beliefs, they look (possibly unreliable) sources that confirm them
I think it is due to the echo chamber of social networks. People have constant confirmation of superficial “sources” and they continue to want that.
Incidentally it’s the reason I use lemmy where the algorithm is not optimised to the point of echo chambers (also looking for “all” helps)
I do agree to a point. Lemmy itself is still a giant echo chamber. Even with filters set to all you will barely find anything that isn't left or far left. In Lemmy it's not the algorithm that makes it an echo chamber it's the users themselves. I'm fairly progressive and left winged myself, but in lemmy I'm slowly gaining the reputation of being a fashist because of how far left the rest of the userbase is.
Here's the version I have that I think is more accurate
Living in the 90s would be so chill compared to today.
Wealth inequality is fucking over everything.
I just want to be rewarded for working to support humanity with a life that doesn't feel like a prison. :c
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Probably not the place for it but I shall point out that the 00s were going swimmingly until the cunts at Goldman Sachs and others of a similar bent made a shedload of cash out of turning the housing market into a massive casino and then stuck taxpayers the world over with the bill in the '08 crash and the global economy has been pretty much fucked ever since.
It's Goldman Sachs. Those board members should be in prison.
Sure. Prison would be fine. Hell, I'll gladly argue for the reduced sentence after they're brought to justice. I bet I'll be feeling generous.
I dunno. I kinda consider 9/11 to be the shifting point. That’s when racism came roaring back and also the introduction of the Patriot Act. The 2008 crash was just the solidification of the shit show to come.
The 2008 crash was also the result of Greenspan and Bush’s 0% interest rate bullshit that prevented savings and ruined the housing market while starting wars to avoid smaller correctional recessions. 9/11 was the excuse, so I kinda caused all this, in a way.
YOU did?!? You son of a...
So it was an inside job!
The LA race riots and Clintons going on about "super-predators" would like a word with you about racism going away in the 90's
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Guys, guys. We all know the true inflection point. Harambe.
I'm starting to think having my dick out this whole time hasn't been working.
Just imagine how much worse things would have been if we hadn’t
Its working for me....
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It was that gods damned Hadron collider, I’m telling you. It let the 5G into our reality and now we’re all being controlled by fucking lizard people from the Nth dimension who are after all of our blood.
It was in all the papers.
It's actually red Lectroids from the 8th dimension.
But I understand how you'd get confused.
How much are the lizard people paying you to spread their propaganda?
I've never been approached by the lizard people (that I'm aware of).
But the Lectroids? Also never spoken to them.
If we really were to be in the Matrix that's fine, but could I maybe ask for some better living conditions? Maybe be able to actually afford things without constant worry and anxiety over whether I can pay the rent.
They tried a perfect society but humanity rejected it as fake.
But that's the thing it doesn't gotta be perfect, just a little better. We can still handle some suffering, but goddamn could we atleast afford a house to suffer in?
That's part of the control.
Mid-2000s were also kinda nice. We got relatively capable pocket computing devices. Proper 3D games. Avatar: The Last Airbender. Music was not yet so... algorithmic.
Kinda downhill from there, though, ngl.
Someone hasn't heard of late nineties, early two thousands boy bands if they think music wasn't formulaic...
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As a trans person, I'm very glad I live today and not the 1990s
Same. The 90s tried to kill me, the more time put between me and it the better.
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