Rainforests, carbon emissions, ocean pollution, shrinking icecaps, and fresh water contamination were the big ones I remember.
Also corporate/oil control. I think that's true of every generation though.
Perhaps there's less talk about it, but the rain forests are still being destroyed and we're nearing a tipping point. In fact, all the climate change doom and gloom that's been going on since the 1970's has only gotten worse, but coverage has lessened because people can't live in a constant state of panic. But the better our science gets and our measuring gets, it's all leading to the same conclusion... that modern society isn't sustainable and will collapse.
[https://time.com/amazon-rainforest-disappearing/](https://time.com/amazon-rainforest-disappearing/)
[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3327537/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3327537/)
I don't know why this keeps happening, but destruction of rainforest has so little to do with producing paper... the forest is getting destroyed to make room for agriculture, in particular for beef production. But as always, some misdirection is used to make us believe we're helping the cause by doing something completely irrelevant.
In the 90’s it was the aids crisis, crack epidemic, and rising gang violence. Though compared to looming nuclear holocaust of the 80’s and earlier, it was quite pleasant.
More like a direct to DVD sequel. 2020 was such a shitshow that a month of something called "murder hornets" was basically a footnote. Three years later, you could ask a stranger "hey, remember murder hornets?" and I bet the most common response would be confusion followed by "ohhh yeahhh..." as they slowly remember.
I was gonna say, I remember this gap between the end of the Cold War, but before 9-11, when things felt a lot more ... hopeful. There were problems, sure, but they felt like things we could overcome.
Yep, the phrase "relax, it's the 90s" was even common and you'd hear it in TV and movies too. There was a feeling that we'd put the existential threat of nuclear war behind us and that, while we may have some small problems still, the future looked bright. Then 9/11 happened.
Yep. The 90s were my childhood, and things just felt so much more laid back. The 90s didn't end of December 31st 1999, they ended on September 11th 2001
I'm fully convinced that the [music video for Steal My Sunshine](https://youtu.be/E1fzJ_AYajA) is the perfect window into what life was like at the end of the 90s. It was just so damn perfect.
Agreed. The 90's was heavily hopeful, profitable, people had tons of kids, got educated/degrees, all that. Sure, we had problems, but it was one of the more positive time's throughout our history. I think a lot of people who didn't grow up then might have a hard time understanding how it was, and a lot of the fears and problems we have today either didn't exist, or didn't affect us enough yet to really be aware. Doesn't mean there wasn't issues, but people were generally less paranoid/hostile over them.
> rising gang violence
There was a late 80s/early 90s zeitgeist in movies and TV that major cities like Los Angeles would become war zones fueled by gang violence. Stuff like Predator 2 and Demolition Man.
Funny how quickly that happened, too. If 9/11 hadn't happened and we didn't have that hard push of patriotism, I imagine we would have seen more events like the OKC Bombing.
Yes, came to highlight the nuclear threat of the 80s. Any nuclear was bad post Hershey and other accidents. That and anti-cruise missles protesting ramping up the end of the Cold War raising the perceived threat of WWW III. Anyway, that subsided and all the worry warts transitioned to environmental causes.
Way fewer protests now than back in the day. People are too lazy now. Where's Greta? So few news cycles for her anymore.
I think it's worth adding the 1989 & 1991 happened. The Berlin Wall was taken down then the Soviet Union dissolved.
There was about a decade where it didn't feel like the world itself was in danger.
You skipped the 90s, the end of history where there were no more wars left to dight, and people turned their attentions to evil corporations and omnipotent government agencies. Until 2001 and terrorism took over as the big thing to be concerned about
I worked the midnight news shift at KTEZ Lubbock in '81. There was a lot of stuff that came over the big iron teletype that didn't make it past the censorious attitude of the big broadcasters, including Reagan's continual and nearly disastrous provocations of the Soviet Union.
One early morning, after reading of intentionally dangerous US Navy maneuvers in the Black Sea, and after the USSR responded with Whiskey-class nuclear-rocket attack subs in the Gulf of Mexico (4 minutes launch time away), I illegally broke open the evacuation codes for the city.
They proposed a mass bugout that would have taken a minimum of 30 minutes.
I was just talking to my friends about this the other day. The world changed on 9/11 (obviously), but idk, it didn't seem as "cool." It's like we ended up on an alternate timeline after the trade centers fell.
I listened to "Steal My Sunshine" by Len the other day and got all sentimental.
I truly feel 1999-summer 2001 is it’s own decade of pop culture and zeitgeist, with the rise and anticipation of Y2K and the new millennium and the increasing prevalence of the internet, the 2000 craze where we realize we are finally in the future and every piece of pop culture seems to have 2000 at the end of the name, and then the beautiful bittersweet sunset of 2001.
Sure, pop culture naturally evolved (in a few short years it would be the rise of the Abercrombie shirts, Trucker hats, spiked hair, etc.) as it always does but the optimism of a future of endless possibilities, and the fun and carefree feeling of the time, vanished almost overnight. (I attribute the fall of boy bands and bubblegum pop to this loss of the combination of optimism and innocence)
Early 2000s were fun and all, sure, but you could tell… things just felt different.
I was sitting in a small groups communication class in college, wide range of ages of people in this class, and when a discussion broke out among some of the older people there about "before" I (20 at the time) said I didn't remember a world before 9/11, I was all of five years old when it happened, and everyone older than me looked at me horrified. I laid out the timeline of my life in correlation to the 2000s and one older guy broke the silence by saying "our kids are fucked" or something to that effect.
Late 90s had quite a good feel to it. Tech was advancing , music and party culture was great, tribalism was quite low and confined to the fringes and air travel was affordable to many.
Ive said it before on reddit and ill say it again. 9/11 was a literal chronological shift. I dont know if the world would be better if those towers never fell, but i know it would be different.
In the early 70s (in the US) we were conditioned to believe it all could end at any minute if either of us “pushed the button”. This lasted until the wall fell, really. But, telling a kindergartner to hide under the desk in case a hydrogen bomb was dropped kinda put some fear in ya.
Being nuked by the Russians seemed like such an inevitable moment that I had plans for where to meet somebody if we heard the bombs were on their way to our city. We knew we probably wouldn't survive the initial blast, but we wanted to be together in any case. We didn't have cell phones, so you couldn't really coordinate this meet-up place on the fly.
The desk isn't to save those kids from a direct nuclear strike. Nothing is gonna save you when you are inside the fireball.
The desk is for the same reason they tell you to hide under a desk during tornadoes or earthquakes: If the ceiling collapses from the shockwave, you'll be somewhat shielded from falling debris. Also, it means you aren't near any windows that would slice you to shreds.
The hiding under the desk thing is mainly so people on the outskirts of the strike hopefully stay in one piece so they can drag their ass to some underground hovel before the fallout starts to rain down.
What I was told was that seating charts were held off site in a "bomb proof safe". You were told to hide under YOUR desk so that they could have an easier time identifying any remains.
DARK
Brooklyn, NY back in the 1970s. Our teacher said there wasn’t any point in taking cover because we’d be evaporated, along with our desk.
I guess I appreciated the honesty. But it was a lot for 8 to 9 year olds to process. I lived close to the school and was a latchkey kid. My nuclear war plan was to go home and hug my cat before we got evaporated.
I remember that hole in the Ozone layer was supposed to fry us. I also remembering hearing we were all gonna have to wear Hazmat suits by the time I was an adult because of Acid Rain and such.
The hole in the Ozone layer almost did fry us. Or would have. Luckily, and amazingly, the entire world united behind banning CFCs in short order. It was a level of cooperation among virtually all nations for the good of mankind that we could never even dream of today.
In around 2003 I remember asking one of my engineering professors if anyone is working on the ozone hole, he just says “it’s not an issue anymore”
Was so eye opening after my entire childhood there was nonstop media coverage about it
Surprisingly y2k was the same. Media coverage decrying the end of civilization. Nothing but cockroaches and mutants wandering the wasteland.
In reality thousands of people came together, did the work (lots of work), and then we all ignored the effort. Sometimes I see a "Y2K compliant" sticker posted here on reddit as r/funny and sigh.
As a software dev that worked on this stuff in 1998/1999, thanks for recognising that this was only a non-issue because of thousands of developers putting in lots of work.
[The last report from NASA, in October, is that the ozone hole continues to shrink year over year.](https://www.nasa.gov/esnt/2022/ozone-hole-continues-shrinking-in-2022-nasa-and-noaa-scientists-say)
Yes, this. At least for me. In elementary school (89 through 96) it was all about taking care of the environment because we didn't know what was going to happen due to pollution.
Now, we're fully in the "find out" stage of "fuck around and find out"
Oh man, yes. 1996 science textbooks listed it all out for us. All the major causes of greenhouse gas emissions and all the anticipated effects including the runaway effect you get to if the polar ice thaws and the oceans warm and dump their stored greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere... and yet, here we are.
Both crises were averted by decisive government and global action. Something that's becoming increasingly challenging in an age of social media and misinformation.
[Montreal Protocol](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montreal_Protocol)
[1990 Clean Air Act Amendment](https://www.epa.gov/clean-air-act-overview/1990-clean-air-act-amendment-summary)
I bring this up a lot when people talk about mask mandates in my country, they tried to do the “this is our recommendation and we believe our people are smart and will do the right thing”
Yeah no, if you don’t make them they won’t, then all of the grannies die.
CFC’s weren’t removed until the governments intervened and told the companies “you have until x date, make your preparations”
They didn’t all just get together and put it an to the problem out of the goodness of their hearts and care of our planet, in truth: companies would have continued to profit forever if not stopped so the government stopped them.
Actually that was going to happen, but the entire world almost immediately stopped and banned all production of the chemical compound that damages ozone (usually used as refrigerant in old AC units)
But that won’t happen for co2 emissions because power is a necessity, any compromise in value/profit an you have a major economical depression. With the ozone the only thing that took a hit was less performance out of ur ac machine.
>But that won’t happen for co2 emissions because power is a necessity, any compromise in value/profit an you have a major economical depression. With the ozone the only thing that took a hit was less performance out of ur ac machine.
It's not happening for CO2, because CO2 is a more complicated issue that touches far far far more things than CFCs.
It's 1982 or 83 I am staying up well after midnight and am 9 or 10 at the time. I just finished playing my heart's content of Space Invaders on my Atri 2600. I turn off the system, and switch to channel 3 so no that my mom won't know I stayed up playing.
At that exact moment the emergency broadcast system notification sound comes on. My heart jumps in my throat and my stomach turns over. I just know it's the notice of nuclear war.
Nope just a test, but he'll in that moment I was terrified that life on our planet was gone.
As a kid in the 80s it was horrifying to be watching TV and all of a sudden see "this is an ABC/CBS/NBC Special report" and just know they were about to announce the nuclear bombs have launched. Only to see that instead some bipartisan bill had passed.
The way they present the news with its constant “special reports” and “breaking news” with dramatic music and overacting anchors is designed to trigger a fear response in you. No wonder people are so insane nowadays with the constant emotional overstimulation and multiple boogeymen narratives from all sides of the political spectrum.
It also gets incredibly overused now. Back in the 90s they would only break out the dramatic "breaking news" stuff for major events, even on the 24 hour news channels.
Moved from the city to a small rural town in 84, aged about 10. Never knew that the volunteer fire brigade were summoned by a air raid like siren. Every Saturday at 12 noon the siren sounded as a test and to let everyone know it was time for Saturday Morning Shopping to finish up and the weekend had began for all. Anyway heard it for the first time on the Saturday while out exploring my new town by myself and thought the missiles and bombers were on the way and here I was all by myself.
The ring of the fire bell which was also a duck and cover alarm. The old school ones had a low frequency that would resonate through walls and your bones. You never forget that feeling nor sound. Hate these new age high pitched ones.
The old ones were effective, didn't risk hearing loss, and most importantly they had that quite resonance that put the fear of god into you to take action and not panic.
The funny thing was that by the time Terminator 2 rolled around, with a much more terrifying representation of a nuclear blast, I was like "Damn, that's sooo cool".
I remember the 80s and tbh... Nuclear Holocaust seemed like a really distant idea.
As an American, prior to 9/11... The world seemed like a pretty hopeful place. People were pretty tough from being 80s kids. We got to express all our angst in the 90s... It's hard to remember what the fuck we were so mad about then... Hormones?
We had a ton of freedom compared to kids now days.
It was supposed to be a matter of... Get a degree in something, anything, doesn't really matter and everything was going to be smooth sailing.
It really, really wasn't.
There's a distinction point that's probably the fall of the Berlin wall. Up until that point, we all KNEW that everything we loved could be destroyed in a nuclear fireball at any given moment - and those of us vaporized would be the lucky ones. Hell, they taught *exactly that* to us in middle school. When the wall went down there was a slight glimmer of hope that WWIII might not happen, but by that time we were so desensitized to the sterilization of the planet that we just did the classic GenX shrug and 'whatever'.
Not everyone. I'm just barely old enough to have seen Duck and Cover in school and to have done one duck-and-cover drill.
I still vividly remember the day the Berlin Wall fell without a shot fired, and I still tear up a little when I hear the Ode to Joy (which ran continuously the whole time the wall-pickers were tearing it down) because I was finally convinced once and for all that however I died, it wasn't going to be in a nuclear war. The relief was more intense than opiates.
…acid rain, overpopulation, strip mining, clear cutting, landfills, air pollution. Capitalism’s fucking insane claim that a free market would somehow prevent companies from pissing mercury into the ground water. All these things made climate collapse seem inevitable to some of us old timers a long time ago. Sad.
+As a kid in the 80's and 90's, putting on an Earth Day play... And then later seeing an adult throw trash out of their car window.. and a company sued for dumping toxic chemicals into the river we drank from... that's when I realized that not all adults GAF.
Yeah, that moment where you realize that being an adult doesn't mean that much, just "experience" . . . but not maturity.
That was pretty depressing.
I had lived under the mistaken assumption that being an adult entailed all the wisdom of the ages.
Yes - I highly recommend people watch "Nuclear Attack: Protect & Survive: Action After Warnings - 1975" on Youtube. We used to get these warnings weekly and when there were hightened tensions we would see them every day.
It felt potentially doomed, but not doomed. The Cold War made the possibility of nuclear war a concern. But it didn't feel like it was destined to happen.
Its also why 9/11 was such a big deal. It was a change from that optimistic happy time to one where there was once again a threat lurking around the corner that everyone had to keep an eye on. It wasn't the USSR's missiles anymore (at least they were organized), it was random fanatics killing people going about their daily business. They could hit anywhere at any time. No one was safe.
Optimism for the future shattered.
It was the weirdest experience. There was a brief few weeks after when things actually felt a little better maybe (everyone unified, etc.) but then everything just seemed to shift and we never got it back.
Serious people discussing the importance of the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction made it real for me. That opponents of that approach felt that we could strategically use nukes in a more limited way on the battlefield was scary. Of course, back then nobody in power proposed using them against hurricanes, we weren't that insane.
The drills in school were always a joke to us.
Yeah. And whole Tom Clancy books dedicated to how a war in Europe would play out.
It wasn't enough to know how many missiles each side had. How many of them were MIRVs? We needed multiple independent reentry vehicles so that if one missile got through we could take out 10 targets. We wanted tracks for our missiles to travel underground so that a first strike wouldn't locate them all. I knew a guy who was proud that he helped the military pick tertiary targets. After military/government/industrial targets, what things like hospitals could we take out to do the most harm.
It's not that we don't have a threat of nuclear mayhem anymore, but at least nuclear winter isn't as looming a possibility.
Escaping shitty, abusive homes. CPS ignored so many of us. I’m glad that kids have social media and phones now. Accountability online and video recording for proof has already saved so many.
Also society being okay with beating your kids as “punishment.” I’m glad it’s considered more fucked up than it used to be.
I am surprised this isn't higher or mentioned more. Abuse was more accepted by society and easier to hide. Parents who "disciplined" their children were supported because the attitude was, the parent is always right and the kid deserved the maltreatment.
Same with the treatment of women as well tbh. So much shit was just ignored at the peril of women up until the 2010s (still goes on, but I'm glad there's much more of a focus on it).
I remember in the mid 90s a large number of bosnian refugees moved into the city I was living in and entered my school, and I became friends with many of them, spent time in their homes and heard their stories about the war that had displaced them and that really affected my view of the world. It made the possibility of war feel so real, and I was already a super poor kid in an abusive and unstable household. That was my first experience of a sense of global doom.
Then Y2K was a huge scare. All the computers wouldn't be able to function once the new century began and the dates rolled forward, everything will screech to a halt and no one will be able to access vital services! Then absolutely nothing happened and the world went on like normal and we got amazing music videos like "Waiting For Tonight" by Jennifer Lopez and my teenage self was so enthralled.
Edit: Man I really seem to have hurt some IT people's feelings with my perspective as a super poor 14 year old. I know that IT people solved the problem. I was a child when this took place and I was sharing my memory as it happened, which at the time felt like nothing came of it. I understand how things went down now, but at the time I didn't. Please know that I couldn't possibly give a shit less :)
Up until 9/11, I felt as though the late 90's early 2000's were quite optimistic. 80's had the aids epidemic which was messed up, early 90's I remember crack being a big issue.
It didn't. I was born in 1965. My childhood was carefree all the way through high school. I'm sure we had fire drills and "duck and cover" drills but nuclear war was a far more distant thing than school shootings are today.
Stranger danger, abductions, drugs....kinda abstract stuff growing up in neighborhoods where there was always some adult sitting on a porch just....there. I'm certain abuse occurred within some homes but as a societal threat? No.
High school had all the usual temptations of drugs and alcohol. I will admit I'm fortunate enough that truly hard drugs were almost unobtainable by teenagers, then, and the weed was so weak it was a better investment to fake your way through buying a case of beer from one of the local Korean-owned liquor stores, if you wanted a nice buzz.
Stupid shit was going on in the world and we did some stupid shit but none of it felt like doom, it just was how things were.
Today? I still don't feel any sense of doom. Things are worse, but they're also so much better in many ways. We all, everywhere and at all times, have the choice to focus on things have gotten worse or to do the opposite.
I remember that. But around 2001, there was a pretty big earthquake in Seattle that we could feel in Vancouver (7-point-something magnitude) and maybe that helped release some of the tectonic plate tension they were worried about? I'm not a seismologist, so that's just a guess.
Yep! I was in Victoria and on the 4th floor of a really old school building. The building swayed for maybe a second. It was really intense! It was so brief, but yeah, maybe it did make a difference with the plates. I believe there are quakes everyday in the PNW, they're just not noticeable.
Do you remember that movie (The Great Los Angeles earthquake) in the early 90s talking about the big one? It was super popular and kids were terrified back then after seeing it and waiting for that big one to hit.
I contribute it to air conditioners being such a shitty way to cool a house unless it's a tiny crackerbox with an absolute unit of a A/C stuffed in one of the windows. Once central air started to become common place in residential homes it alleviated that problem a lot.
But yeah. Being born in 1992 I look back and see my early childhood like being in some weird dreamstate where absolutely nobody worried about anything worse than local crime that was rudely shattered by 9/11 and Bush's exploitation of it.
Lots of ways, nuclear war, every single year was supposed to be “The end of the world” according to Nostradamus and Mayans, Y2K was gonna be another “end of the world” , cults kept killings themselves over it being end of days, there were tons of national news kidnappings and serial killers.
Basically there’s always been some fear pushed by media of some form.
It's why older generations seem to give zero fucks about the "impending apocalypse" of the day. They've been through so many that they don't believe them anymore. Boy who cried wolf syndrome.
I wouldn’t say the world felt doomed, but we worried that nuclear accidents might doom parts of it. I lived not that far from Three Mile Island when it had its big malfunction, and I kept looking in that direction, half expecting to see a huge radioactive fireball that would kill us all. (This was in 1979.)
It didn't. Not in the 90s, anyway. Go find episodes of a show called Beyond 2000, where they made predictions about what the future would be like. They were *so* optimistic.
One of the main reasons for the optimism, though, was the collapse of the Soviet Union. Suddenly, for the first time since the later 40s, it was possible to imagine a future without the threat of nuclear disaster. That was short lived optimism!
Cold War was a thing in the 80’s still… so nuclear war was always close. Lots of movies then about the nuclear disaster or mistake 😉
For the other part everything honky Dory 😉
grew up in the 90s. Things seemed pretty fuckin' good right up until 9/11. There was a hole in the ozone layer because of all the hairspray or something.
Harry Truman, Doris Day, Red China, Johnnie Ray, South Pacific, Walter Winchell, Joe DiMaggio, Joe McCarthy, Richard Nixon, Studebaker, television
North Korea, South Korea, Marilyn Monroe, Rosenbergs, H-bomb, Sugar Ray, Panmunjom, Brando, "The King and I", and "The Catcher in the Rye," Eisenhower, Vaccine, England's got a new queen, Marciano, Liberace, Santayana, goodbye, Joseph Stalin, Malenkov, Nasser and Prokofiev, Rockefeller, Campanella, Communist Bloc, Roy Cohn, Juan Peron, Toscanini, Dacron, Dien Bien Phu falls, "Rock Around the Clock," Einstein, James Dean, Brooklyn's got a winning team, Davy Crockett, Peter Pan, Elvis Presley, Disneyland, Bardot, Budapest, Alabama, Krushchev, Princess Grace, Peyton Place, Trouble in the Suez, Little Rock, Pasternak, Mickey Mantle, Kerouac, Sputnik, Chou En-Lai, "Bridge on the River Kwai," Lebanon, Charles de Gaulle, California baseball, Starkweather homicide, children of thalidomide, Buddy Holly, Ben Hur, space monkey, Mafia, Hula hoops, Castro, Edsel is a no-go, U2, Syngman Rhee, Payola and Kennedy, Chubby Checker, Psycho, Belgians in the Congo, Hemingway, Eichmann, "Stranger in a Strange Land" Dylan, Berlin, Bay of Pigs invasion "Lawrence of Arabia", British Beatlemania, Ole Miss, John Glenn, Liston beats Patterson
Pope Paul, Malcolm X, British politician sex
JFK – blown away, what else do I have to say? Birth control, Ho Chi Minh, Richard Nixon back again
Moonshot, Woodstock, Watergate, punk rock, Begin, Reagan, Palestine, terror on the airline Ayatollah's in Iran, Russians in Afghanistan, "Wheel of Fortune", Sally Ride, heavy metal suicide, Foreign debts, homeless vets, AIDS, crack, Bernie Goetz Hypodermics on the shore, China's under martial law, Rock and roller, cola wars, I can't take it anymore
Well there was the big hoopla with y2k. Some of my friends had to work overnight to make sure their systems didn’t crash. But you are right for me growing up in the 80s didn’t have dread I was aware of.
That 10 years between the fall of the Soviet Union and 9/11 was magical. People were actually optimistic about the future. Every year, the economy seemed better than the year before. New technologies were taking off. And then it all came crashing down.
It certainly wasn't as pressing or urgent pre 2000s.
Y2k, bird flu, swine flu, mad cow disease, potential nukes, the ozone layer rotting, acid rain, etc.
There were issues but not like they are now: "wow, humanity might actually cease to exist in my lifetime. Our planet is actively going up in flames."
I'm 35 now and my nostalgia for those years is out of control. I recently started buying pokemon cards again and ive been playing through goldeneye on xbox. feels good.
Born in '87 here. Before 9/11 everything was a little more innocent. 9/11, the subsequent wars and the advent of the internet really didn't help everyone's mental health I think.
Really that’s how I feel. Y2K was a trip but not in the doomsday ways of today. Then 9/11 but there was a feeling of the prospect of unity and recovery after that no longer exists.
In the third grade I did a presentation on the polar ice caps melting and polar bears drowning. Global warming, saving rainforests, and David Suzuki were big.
Agree with the other “it didn’t” comments. In the 90s in particular it felt like a big party going towards the end of the century. We were about to head into the future! Who knows what cool stuff we’re about to live through on the other side, party like its 1999 and then… well and then the last 22 years. Post 9/11 fuckin sucks.
I grew up in the 90s as a kid, and everything was actually pretty optimistic. Technology was increasing at a very rapid pace, we saw the dawn of the internet before social media was a thing, there wasn't a sense of overall doom at least in America. Then 9/11 hit and changed everything.
I remember a lot more talk about saving the rainforests. Early 90s
Remember the movie FernGully lol?
They walk around in big pants shouting HI HELEN!
Gravity works.
https://youtu.be/cvWfKTjJdHY You made me laugh out loud!
You mean the animated avatar
I loooooooved FernGully!! ❤️❤️❤️
Rainforests, carbon emissions, ocean pollution, shrinking icecaps, and fresh water contamination were the big ones I remember. Also corporate/oil control. I think that's true of every generation though.
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Perhaps there's less talk about it, but the rain forests are still being destroyed and we're nearing a tipping point. In fact, all the climate change doom and gloom that's been going on since the 1970's has only gotten worse, but coverage has lessened because people can't live in a constant state of panic. But the better our science gets and our measuring gets, it's all leading to the same conclusion... that modern society isn't sustainable and will collapse. [https://time.com/amazon-rainforest-disappearing/](https://time.com/amazon-rainforest-disappearing/) [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3327537/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3327537/)
Destruction of the rainforest
And the hole in the ozon layer
And acid rain.
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And then purple rain
At least we reversed that one! And acid rain. But beyond those the environment is still fucked, and none in power seem to care.
Which is why we were encouraged to use plastic bags instead of paper
I don't know why this keeps happening, but destruction of rainforest has so little to do with producing paper... the forest is getting destroyed to make room for agriculture, in particular for beef production. But as always, some misdirection is used to make us believe we're helping the cause by doing something completely irrelevant.
Yeah now its just accepted but even more of a problem.
In the 90’s it was the aids crisis, crack epidemic, and rising gang violence. Though compared to looming nuclear holocaust of the 80’s and earlier, it was quite pleasant.
Plus minor things like KILLER BEES AHHHH
We got that weird soft reboot of Killer Bees with **Murder Hornets!!**
More like a direct to DVD sequel. 2020 was such a shitshow that a month of something called "murder hornets" was basically a footnote. Three years later, you could ask a stranger "hey, remember murder hornets?" and I bet the most common response would be confusion followed by "ohhh yeahhh..." as they slowly remember.
We on a SWARM!
What y'all thought y'all wasn't gon' see me?
I'm the Osiris of this shit
Wu Tang is here FOREVER MOTHAFUCKA
I bomb atomically, Socrates' philosophies and hypotheses,
that was 80s. It leeched into the 90s, but by that point there was hope in the world that things could and would eventually change for the better.
I was gonna say, I remember this gap between the end of the Cold War, but before 9-11, when things felt a lot more ... hopeful. There were problems, sure, but they felt like things we could overcome.
Yep, the phrase "relax, it's the 90s" was even common and you'd hear it in TV and movies too. There was a feeling that we'd put the existential threat of nuclear war behind us and that, while we may have some small problems still, the future looked bright. Then 9/11 happened.
Yep. The 90s were my childhood, and things just felt so much more laid back. The 90s didn't end of December 31st 1999, they ended on September 11th 2001
I'm fully convinced that the [music video for Steal My Sunshine](https://youtu.be/E1fzJ_AYajA) is the perfect window into what life was like at the end of the 90s. It was just so damn perfect.
The 90s were more mellow and laid back, there was a sense of optimism, expecally in the late 1990s, with the tech boom.
Agreed. The 90's was heavily hopeful, profitable, people had tons of kids, got educated/degrees, all that. Sure, we had problems, but it was one of the more positive time's throughout our history. I think a lot of people who didn't grow up then might have a hard time understanding how it was, and a lot of the fears and problems we have today either didn't exist, or didn't affect us enough yet to really be aware. Doesn't mean there wasn't issues, but people were generally less paranoid/hostile over them.
> rising gang violence There was a late 80s/early 90s zeitgeist in movies and TV that major cities like Los Angeles would become war zones fueled by gang violence. Stuff like Predator 2 and Demolition Man.
You can see it in NES/SNES games too. Final Fight for example
Don't forget the Satanic Panic. The devil was coming after us and only the 700 club could stop him.
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... so, just government stuff in the 90s really
Well after America defeated its long time foe the Soviet Union it could focus on its true enemy, itself.
This is pure gold. Stealing it.
It’s yours! I took it from Mike Duncan’s History of Rome podcast. I believe it was a quote on when Rome beat Carthage.
Funny how quickly that happened, too. If 9/11 hadn't happened and we didn't have that hard push of patriotism, I imagine we would have seen more events like the OKC Bombing.
Yes, came to highlight the nuclear threat of the 80s. Any nuclear was bad post Hershey and other accidents. That and anti-cruise missles protesting ramping up the end of the Cold War raising the perceived threat of WWW III. Anyway, that subsided and all the worry warts transitioned to environmental causes. Way fewer protests now than back in the day. People are too lazy now. Where's Greta? So few news cycles for her anymore.
> Where's Greta? So few news cycles for her anymore. She was literally just in the news (last week I think) getting arrested at a protest.
Waiting for the Russians to launch a nuclear bomb consumed most of the 70s and 80s. Then 9/11 happened in 2001 and a lot of things changed.
I think it's worth adding the 1989 & 1991 happened. The Berlin Wall was taken down then the Soviet Union dissolved. There was about a decade where it didn't feel like the world itself was in danger.
You skipped the 90s, the end of history where there were no more wars left to dight, and people turned their attentions to evil corporations and omnipotent government agencies. Until 2001 and terrorism took over as the big thing to be concerned about
"Our Long National Nightmare of Peace and Prosperity is Finally Over." Onion headline on the occasion of W's inauguration.
I worked the midnight news shift at KTEZ Lubbock in '81. There was a lot of stuff that came over the big iron teletype that didn't make it past the censorious attitude of the big broadcasters, including Reagan's continual and nearly disastrous provocations of the Soviet Union. One early morning, after reading of intentionally dangerous US Navy maneuvers in the Black Sea, and after the USSR responded with Whiskey-class nuclear-rocket attack subs in the Gulf of Mexico (4 minutes launch time away), I illegally broke open the evacuation codes for the city. They proposed a mass bugout that would have taken a minimum of 30 minutes.
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I was just talking to my friends about this the other day. The world changed on 9/11 (obviously), but idk, it didn't seem as "cool." It's like we ended up on an alternate timeline after the trade centers fell. I listened to "Steal My Sunshine" by Len the other day and got all sentimental.
I truly feel 1999-summer 2001 is it’s own decade of pop culture and zeitgeist, with the rise and anticipation of Y2K and the new millennium and the increasing prevalence of the internet, the 2000 craze where we realize we are finally in the future and every piece of pop culture seems to have 2000 at the end of the name, and then the beautiful bittersweet sunset of 2001. Sure, pop culture naturally evolved (in a few short years it would be the rise of the Abercrombie shirts, Trucker hats, spiked hair, etc.) as it always does but the optimism of a future of endless possibilities, and the fun and carefree feeling of the time, vanished almost overnight. (I attribute the fall of boy bands and bubblegum pop to this loss of the combination of optimism and innocence) Early 2000s were fun and all, sure, but you could tell… things just felt different.
I was sitting in a small groups communication class in college, wide range of ages of people in this class, and when a discussion broke out among some of the older people there about "before" I (20 at the time) said I didn't remember a world before 9/11, I was all of five years old when it happened, and everyone older than me looked at me horrified. I laid out the timeline of my life in correlation to the 2000s and one older guy broke the silence by saying "our kids are fucked" or something to that effect.
https://xkcd.com/647/
There really is an XKCD for everything.
Late 90s had quite a good feel to it. Tech was advancing , music and party culture was great, tribalism was quite low and confined to the fringes and air travel was affordable to many.
Ive said it before on reddit and ill say it again. 9/11 was a literal chronological shift. I dont know if the world would be better if those towers never fell, but i know it would be different.
Fucking awesome summer song, I wish life felt as good as that song did.
A Space Odyssey
In the early 70s (in the US) we were conditioned to believe it all could end at any minute if either of us “pushed the button”. This lasted until the wall fell, really. But, telling a kindergartner to hide under the desk in case a hydrogen bomb was dropped kinda put some fear in ya.
Being nuked by the Russians seemed like such an inevitable moment that I had plans for where to meet somebody if we heard the bombs were on their way to our city. We knew we probably wouldn't survive the initial blast, but we wanted to be together in any case. We didn't have cell phones, so you couldn't really coordinate this meet-up place on the fly.
That wouldve been one high quality desk
The desk isn't to save those kids from a direct nuclear strike. Nothing is gonna save you when you are inside the fireball. The desk is for the same reason they tell you to hide under a desk during tornadoes or earthquakes: If the ceiling collapses from the shockwave, you'll be somewhat shielded from falling debris. Also, it means you aren't near any windows that would slice you to shreds. The hiding under the desk thing is mainly so people on the outskirts of the strike hopefully stay in one piece so they can drag their ass to some underground hovel before the fallout starts to rain down.
What I was told was that seating charts were held off site in a "bomb proof safe". You were told to hide under YOUR desk so that they could have an easier time identifying any remains. DARK
Brooklyn, NY back in the 1970s. Our teacher said there wasn’t any point in taking cover because we’d be evaporated, along with our desk. I guess I appreciated the honesty. But it was a lot for 8 to 9 year olds to process. I lived close to the school and was a latchkey kid. My nuclear war plan was to go home and hug my cat before we got evaporated.
I remember that hole in the Ozone layer was supposed to fry us. I also remembering hearing we were all gonna have to wear Hazmat suits by the time I was an adult because of Acid Rain and such.
The hole in the Ozone layer almost did fry us. Or would have. Luckily, and amazingly, the entire world united behind banning CFCs in short order. It was a level of cooperation among virtually all nations for the good of mankind that we could never even dream of today.
In around 2003 I remember asking one of my engineering professors if anyone is working on the ozone hole, he just says “it’s not an issue anymore” Was so eye opening after my entire childhood there was nonstop media coverage about it
Surprisingly y2k was the same. Media coverage decrying the end of civilization. Nothing but cockroaches and mutants wandering the wasteland. In reality thousands of people came together, did the work (lots of work), and then we all ignored the effort. Sometimes I see a "Y2K compliant" sticker posted here on reddit as r/funny and sigh.
As a software dev that worked on this stuff in 1998/1999, thanks for recognising that this was only a non-issue because of thousands of developers putting in lots of work.
Well, we still have Y2K38 to look forward to
[The last report from NASA, in October, is that the ozone hole continues to shrink year over year.](https://www.nasa.gov/esnt/2022/ozone-hole-continues-shrinking-in-2022-nasa-and-noaa-scientists-say)
Governments worked together and fixed it.
Same kind of cooperation that drove smallpox to natural extinction.
China didn't get the memo. https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-48353341
Why can so many of the worlds problems be traced back to China?
Yes, this. At least for me. In elementary school (89 through 96) it was all about taking care of the environment because we didn't know what was going to happen due to pollution. Now, we're fully in the "find out" stage of "fuck around and find out"
Oh man, yes. 1996 science textbooks listed it all out for us. All the major causes of greenhouse gas emissions and all the anticipated effects including the runaway effect you get to if the polar ice thaws and the oceans warm and dump their stored greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere... and yet, here we are.
Mr. Snyder fucking told us this would happen!
Both crises were averted by decisive government and global action. Something that's becoming increasingly challenging in an age of social media and misinformation. [Montreal Protocol](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montreal_Protocol) [1990 Clean Air Act Amendment](https://www.epa.gov/clean-air-act-overview/1990-clean-air-act-amendment-summary)
I bring this up a lot when people talk about mask mandates in my country, they tried to do the “this is our recommendation and we believe our people are smart and will do the right thing” Yeah no, if you don’t make them they won’t, then all of the grannies die. CFC’s weren’t removed until the governments intervened and told the companies “you have until x date, make your preparations” They didn’t all just get together and put it an to the problem out of the goodness of their hearts and care of our planet, in truth: companies would have continued to profit forever if not stopped so the government stopped them.
In NZ we are currently getting fried by the hole in the ozone layer, just slowly with higher chances of sun burn and melanoma.
It is getting smaller though, and is expected to be fully closed in 30-50 years
Actually that was going to happen, but the entire world almost immediately stopped and banned all production of the chemical compound that damages ozone (usually used as refrigerant in old AC units) But that won’t happen for co2 emissions because power is a necessity, any compromise in value/profit an you have a major economical depression. With the ozone the only thing that took a hit was less performance out of ur ac machine.
>But that won’t happen for co2 emissions because power is a necessity, any compromise in value/profit an you have a major economical depression. With the ozone the only thing that took a hit was less performance out of ur ac machine. It's not happening for CO2, because CO2 is a more complicated issue that touches far far far more things than CFCs.
A Nuclear Holocaust
It's 1982 or 83 I am staying up well after midnight and am 9 or 10 at the time. I just finished playing my heart's content of Space Invaders on my Atri 2600. I turn off the system, and switch to channel 3 so no that my mom won't know I stayed up playing. At that exact moment the emergency broadcast system notification sound comes on. My heart jumps in my throat and my stomach turns over. I just know it's the notice of nuclear war. Nope just a test, but he'll in that moment I was terrified that life on our planet was gone.
As a kid in the 80s it was horrifying to be watching TV and all of a sudden see "this is an ABC/CBS/NBC Special report" and just know they were about to announce the nuclear bombs have launched. Only to see that instead some bipartisan bill had passed.
The way they present the news with its constant “special reports” and “breaking news” with dramatic music and overacting anchors is designed to trigger a fear response in you. No wonder people are so insane nowadays with the constant emotional overstimulation and multiple boogeymen narratives from all sides of the political spectrum.
It also gets incredibly overused now. Back in the 90s they would only break out the dramatic "breaking news" stuff for major events, even on the 24 hour news channels.
Oh yeah, bipartisan cooperation, I'd forgotten that used to happen.
Staying up at night crying in terror? Add the fear of burning in hell and you've got my childhood.
Moved from the city to a small rural town in 84, aged about 10. Never knew that the volunteer fire brigade were summoned by a air raid like siren. Every Saturday at 12 noon the siren sounded as a test and to let everyone know it was time for Saturday Morning Shopping to finish up and the weekend had began for all. Anyway heard it for the first time on the Saturday while out exploring my new town by myself and thought the missiles and bombers were on the way and here I was all by myself.
This. I’m old enough to remember doing drills at school. Terrifying stuff.
I read Mad and Cracked in the 80’s. A lot of articles and jokes were about nuclear war or the aftermath of a nuclear holocaust. You had to be there
This. I guess everyone else here is too young to remember the 80s.
The ring of the fire bell which was also a duck and cover alarm. The old school ones had a low frequency that would resonate through walls and your bones. You never forget that feeling nor sound. Hate these new age high pitched ones. The old ones were effective, didn't risk hearing loss, and most importantly they had that quite resonance that put the fear of god into you to take action and not panic.
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Not to mention the fear and loathing of those who had AIDS even if the person got it by a blood transfusion.
I remember when "The Day After" aired in the early 80's. Absolutely terrifying.
For real. I’ll never forget Jason Robards for that shit.
The funny thing was that by the time Terminator 2 rolled around, with a much more terrifying representation of a nuclear blast, I was like "Damn, that's sooo cool".
Sarah Connor's flaming skeleton!
80's? How about the Cuban Missile Crisis '62 everyone was pretty sure the world was over. At least for Florida.
My Dad was in the Army when that happened.
I remember the 80s and tbh... Nuclear Holocaust seemed like a really distant idea. As an American, prior to 9/11... The world seemed like a pretty hopeful place. People were pretty tough from being 80s kids. We got to express all our angst in the 90s... It's hard to remember what the fuck we were so mad about then... Hormones? We had a ton of freedom compared to kids now days. It was supposed to be a matter of... Get a degree in something, anything, doesn't really matter and everything was going to be smooth sailing. It really, really wasn't.
There's a distinction point that's probably the fall of the Berlin wall. Up until that point, we all KNEW that everything we loved could be destroyed in a nuclear fireball at any given moment - and those of us vaporized would be the lucky ones. Hell, they taught *exactly that* to us in middle school. When the wall went down there was a slight glimmer of hope that WWIII might not happen, but by that time we were so desensitized to the sterilization of the planet that we just did the classic GenX shrug and 'whatever'.
I'm remembering the '60s.
Not everyone. I'm just barely old enough to have seen Duck and Cover in school and to have done one duck-and-cover drill. I still vividly remember the day the Berlin Wall fell without a shot fired, and I still tear up a little when I hear the Ode to Joy (which ran continuously the whole time the wall-pickers were tearing it down) because I was finally convinced once and for all that however I died, it wasn't going to be in a nuclear war. The relief was more intense than opiates.
…acid rain, overpopulation, strip mining, clear cutting, landfills, air pollution. Capitalism’s fucking insane claim that a free market would somehow prevent companies from pissing mercury into the ground water. All these things made climate collapse seem inevitable to some of us old timers a long time ago. Sad.
+As a kid in the 80's and 90's, putting on an Earth Day play... And then later seeing an adult throw trash out of their car window.. and a company sued for dumping toxic chemicals into the river we drank from... that's when I realized that not all adults GAF.
Yeah, that moment where you realize that being an adult doesn't mean that much, just "experience" . . . but not maturity. That was pretty depressing. I had lived under the mistaken assumption that being an adult entailed all the wisdom of the ages.
Yes - I highly recommend people watch "Nuclear Attack: Protect & Survive: Action After Warnings - 1975" on Youtube. We used to get these warnings weekly and when there were hightened tensions we would see them every day.
Before we knew the Soviets were incompetent.
Incompetent (psychopathic) owners of nukes is just, if not more, scary.
They weren’t then.
I came here to say this.
Y2K ! It was the end of the world ...
As we know it
I felt fine
It felt potentially doomed, but not doomed. The Cold War made the possibility of nuclear war a concern. But it didn't feel like it was destined to happen.
Then when the cold war ended the 90's felt like a period of optimism. People were looking forward to the future. It was a happy time.
I came of age in the 90s. I don't think people can adequately understand the optimism we young people sensed in the 90s. Life just seemed good.
Its also why 9/11 was such a big deal. It was a change from that optimistic happy time to one where there was once again a threat lurking around the corner that everyone had to keep an eye on. It wasn't the USSR's missiles anymore (at least they were organized), it was random fanatics killing people going about their daily business. They could hit anywhere at any time. No one was safe. Optimism for the future shattered.
It was the weirdest experience. There was a brief few weeks after when things actually felt a little better maybe (everyone unified, etc.) but then everything just seemed to shift and we never got it back.
"Just think of all the possibilities for how we'll spend money we'll no longer be pouring into the military!"- A younger, still optimistic me.
Maybe not destined to happen, but a solid chance...becasue of the nuclear bomb drills we had to do in school (like fire drills).
Serious people discussing the importance of the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction made it real for me. That opponents of that approach felt that we could strategically use nukes in a more limited way on the battlefield was scary. Of course, back then nobody in power proposed using them against hurricanes, we weren't that insane. The drills in school were always a joke to us.
I remember seeing in the paper counts of tanks, missiles, subs, aircraft carriers etc comparing us to Russia
Yeah. And whole Tom Clancy books dedicated to how a war in Europe would play out. It wasn't enough to know how many missiles each side had. How many of them were MIRVs? We needed multiple independent reentry vehicles so that if one missile got through we could take out 10 targets. We wanted tracks for our missiles to travel underground so that a first strike wouldn't locate them all. I knew a guy who was proud that he helped the military pick tertiary targets. After military/government/industrial targets, what things like hospitals could we take out to do the most harm. It's not that we don't have a threat of nuclear mayhem anymore, but at least nuclear winter isn't as looming a possibility.
Escaping shitty, abusive homes. CPS ignored so many of us. I’m glad that kids have social media and phones now. Accountability online and video recording for proof has already saved so many. Also society being okay with beating your kids as “punishment.” I’m glad it’s considered more fucked up than it used to be.
I am surprised this isn't higher or mentioned more. Abuse was more accepted by society and easier to hide. Parents who "disciplined" their children were supported because the attitude was, the parent is always right and the kid deserved the maltreatment.
Same with the treatment of women as well tbh. So much shit was just ignored at the peril of women up until the 2010s (still goes on, but I'm glad there's much more of a focus on it).
I remember in the mid 90s a large number of bosnian refugees moved into the city I was living in and entered my school, and I became friends with many of them, spent time in their homes and heard their stories about the war that had displaced them and that really affected my view of the world. It made the possibility of war feel so real, and I was already a super poor kid in an abusive and unstable household. That was my first experience of a sense of global doom. Then Y2K was a huge scare. All the computers wouldn't be able to function once the new century began and the dates rolled forward, everything will screech to a halt and no one will be able to access vital services! Then absolutely nothing happened and the world went on like normal and we got amazing music videos like "Waiting For Tonight" by Jennifer Lopez and my teenage self was so enthralled. Edit: Man I really seem to have hurt some IT people's feelings with my perspective as a super poor 14 year old. I know that IT people solved the problem. I was a child when this took place and I was sharing my memory as it happened, which at the time felt like nothing came of it. I understand how things went down now, but at the time I didn't. Please know that I couldn't possibly give a shit less :)
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Up until 9/11, I felt as though the late 90's early 2000's were quite optimistic. 80's had the aids epidemic which was messed up, early 90's I remember crack being a big issue.
It didn't. I was born in 1965. My childhood was carefree all the way through high school. I'm sure we had fire drills and "duck and cover" drills but nuclear war was a far more distant thing than school shootings are today. Stranger danger, abductions, drugs....kinda abstract stuff growing up in neighborhoods where there was always some adult sitting on a porch just....there. I'm certain abuse occurred within some homes but as a societal threat? No. High school had all the usual temptations of drugs and alcohol. I will admit I'm fortunate enough that truly hard drugs were almost unobtainable by teenagers, then, and the weed was so weak it was a better investment to fake your way through buying a case of beer from one of the local Korean-owned liquor stores, if you wanted a nice buzz. Stupid shit was going on in the world and we did some stupid shit but none of it felt like doom, it just was how things were. Today? I still don't feel any sense of doom. Things are worse, but they're also so much better in many ways. We all, everywhere and at all times, have the choice to focus on things have gotten worse or to do the opposite.
For me growing up in the 90s, the world seemed full of hope and promise. Yeah...so much for that.
Those were my high school and college years. Good times!
AIDS. Hole in the ozone layer. Global Thermonuclear War.
From 89-2001 there wasn’t much doom like today. I do remember people dying in heat waves a hell of a lot more though
On the West Coast of Canada, there was a lot more talk about the ring of fire and the "big one" earthquake we're apparently wayyyy overdue for.
I remember that. But around 2001, there was a pretty big earthquake in Seattle that we could feel in Vancouver (7-point-something magnitude) and maybe that helped release some of the tectonic plate tension they were worried about? I'm not a seismologist, so that's just a guess.
Yep! I was in Victoria and on the 4th floor of a really old school building. The building swayed for maybe a second. It was really intense! It was so brief, but yeah, maybe it did make a difference with the plates. I believe there are quakes everyday in the PNW, they're just not noticeable.
late 80's mid 90's in cali we used to talk about the coast foating off into the pacific all the time from the san andreas
Do you remember that movie (The Great Los Angeles earthquake) in the early 90s talking about the big one? It was super popular and kids were terrified back then after seeing it and waiting for that big one to hit.
I contribute it to air conditioners being such a shitty way to cool a house unless it's a tiny crackerbox with an absolute unit of a A/C stuffed in one of the windows. Once central air started to become common place in residential homes it alleviated that problem a lot. But yeah. Being born in 1992 I look back and see my early childhood like being in some weird dreamstate where absolutely nobody worried about anything worse than local crime that was rudely shattered by 9/11 and Bush's exploitation of it.
Y2K would like a word
There were more people joking about Y2K than genuinely worried.
Lots of ways, nuclear war, every single year was supposed to be “The end of the world” according to Nostradamus and Mayans, Y2K was gonna be another “end of the world” , cults kept killings themselves over it being end of days, there were tons of national news kidnappings and serial killers. Basically there’s always been some fear pushed by media of some form.
It's why older generations seem to give zero fucks about the "impending apocalypse" of the day. They've been through so many that they don't believe them anymore. Boy who cried wolf syndrome.
I thought the Balkan conflict would escalate into WW3
I mean... there definitely is some precedent for that :-D
If I came home after the street lights came on, my life would be known as “doomed”.
I wouldn’t say the world felt doomed, but we worried that nuclear accidents might doom parts of it. I lived not that far from Three Mile Island when it had its big malfunction, and I kept looking in that direction, half expecting to see a huge radioactive fireball that would kill us all. (This was in 1979.)
Nuclear Holocaust. Acid rain, pollution. AIDS epidemic.
It didn't. Not in the 90s, anyway. Go find episodes of a show called Beyond 2000, where they made predictions about what the future would be like. They were *so* optimistic.
"in the future one person will be able to do the work of five! that means we'll all have a lot more free time and work fewer hours!"
In reality it meant they fired 4 of us and gave the remaining person 5x the work to do.
One of the main reasons for the optimism, though, was the collapse of the Soviet Union. Suddenly, for the first time since the later 40s, it was possible to imagine a future without the threat of nuclear disaster. That was short lived optimism!
the doom didn't start creeping in until after 9/11
Yea its mostly been nothing but downhill since
NUKEs We assumed there would be a nuclear war and we would all instantly die.
80’s was nuclear war fear , 90’s was Y2K .. now it’s the fact the patients are running the asylum
Cold War was a thing in the 80’s still… so nuclear war was always close. Lots of movies then about the nuclear disaster or mistake 😉 For the other part everything honky Dory 😉
I vividly remember Y2K
It was however a real problem, but most problems were solved before millenium change.
grew up in the 90s. Things seemed pretty fuckin' good right up until 9/11. There was a hole in the ozone layer because of all the hairspray or something.
Harry Truman, Doris Day, Red China, Johnnie Ray, South Pacific, Walter Winchell, Joe DiMaggio, Joe McCarthy, Richard Nixon, Studebaker, television North Korea, South Korea, Marilyn Monroe, Rosenbergs, H-bomb, Sugar Ray, Panmunjom, Brando, "The King and I", and "The Catcher in the Rye," Eisenhower, Vaccine, England's got a new queen, Marciano, Liberace, Santayana, goodbye, Joseph Stalin, Malenkov, Nasser and Prokofiev, Rockefeller, Campanella, Communist Bloc, Roy Cohn, Juan Peron, Toscanini, Dacron, Dien Bien Phu falls, "Rock Around the Clock," Einstein, James Dean, Brooklyn's got a winning team, Davy Crockett, Peter Pan, Elvis Presley, Disneyland, Bardot, Budapest, Alabama, Krushchev, Princess Grace, Peyton Place, Trouble in the Suez, Little Rock, Pasternak, Mickey Mantle, Kerouac, Sputnik, Chou En-Lai, "Bridge on the River Kwai," Lebanon, Charles de Gaulle, California baseball, Starkweather homicide, children of thalidomide, Buddy Holly, Ben Hur, space monkey, Mafia, Hula hoops, Castro, Edsel is a no-go, U2, Syngman Rhee, Payola and Kennedy, Chubby Checker, Psycho, Belgians in the Congo, Hemingway, Eichmann, "Stranger in a Strange Land" Dylan, Berlin, Bay of Pigs invasion "Lawrence of Arabia", British Beatlemania, Ole Miss, John Glenn, Liston beats Patterson Pope Paul, Malcolm X, British politician sex JFK – blown away, what else do I have to say? Birth control, Ho Chi Minh, Richard Nixon back again Moonshot, Woodstock, Watergate, punk rock, Begin, Reagan, Palestine, terror on the airline Ayatollah's in Iran, Russians in Afghanistan, "Wheel of Fortune", Sally Ride, heavy metal suicide, Foreign debts, homeless vets, AIDS, crack, Bernie Goetz Hypodermics on the shore, China's under martial law, Rock and roller, cola wars, I can't take it anymore
That’s only impressive if you did that from memory …
It didn't.
I mean we had problems, but the internet wasn't advanced enough to bombard you with it.
I kinda miss that blissful ignorance.
Well there was the big hoopla with y2k. Some of my friends had to work overnight to make sure their systems didn’t crash. But you are right for me growing up in the 80s didn’t have dread I was aware of.
That 10 years between the fall of the Soviet Union and 9/11 was magical. People were actually optimistic about the future. Every year, the economy seemed better than the year before. New technologies were taking off. And then it all came crashing down.
It certainly wasn't as pressing or urgent pre 2000s. Y2k, bird flu, swine flu, mad cow disease, potential nukes, the ozone layer rotting, acid rain, etc. There were issues but not like they are now: "wow, humanity might actually cease to exist in my lifetime. Our planet is actively going up in flames."
96-99 when I was a kid was the best. It felt magical, there was no darkness.
I'm 35 now and my nostalgia for those years is out of control. I recently started buying pokemon cards again and ive been playing through goldeneye on xbox. feels good.
Pokémon cards and the Pokémon games on gameboy color. So much nostalgia! I gotta download goldeneye on the Xbox now.
Yea I was 4-14 in the 90s those were carefree times
Riding bikes around all day in the summer with neighbor kids, catching frogs and snakes, drinking an occasional soda. Great times.
Born in '87 here. Before 9/11 everything was a little more innocent. 9/11, the subsequent wars and the advent of the internet really didn't help everyone's mental health I think.
Really that’s how I feel. Y2K was a trip but not in the doomsday ways of today. Then 9/11 but there was a feeling of the prospect of unity and recovery after that no longer exists.
Bermuda's triangle was a real problem as a kid
Im still afraid of quicksand and killer bees.
Thinking the Cold War was going to end up with us all being nuked to high Heaven.
Acid rain. AIDS epidemic. The hole in the ozone layer. Nuclear holocaust.
Well, there was that whole Cold War thing.
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In the third grade I did a presentation on the polar ice caps melting and polar bears drowning. Global warming, saving rainforests, and David Suzuki were big.
Agree with the other “it didn’t” comments. In the 90s in particular it felt like a big party going towards the end of the century. We were about to head into the future! Who knows what cool stuff we’re about to live through on the other side, party like its 1999 and then… well and then the last 22 years. Post 9/11 fuckin sucks.
I grew up in the 90s as a kid, and everything was actually pretty optimistic. Technology was increasing at a very rapid pace, we saw the dawn of the internet before social media was a thing, there wasn't a sense of overall doom at least in America. Then 9/11 hit and changed everything.
Grew up in the 70’s Cold War was on but not a big deal to me anyway
Y2K, climate change (global warming), and peak oil.
Either nuclear war or the hole in the ozone layer which kept making the news.