Does anyone truly think times are better now than 30 years ago? (US)
I really never have believed times improved, and i am almost positive things will only get worse.
30 years ago we had a future to look to, the unshittified internet, great music, affordable land/housing, affordable durable cars, people actually interacted in real life, no social media trash. Now, we have billionaires and LLMs. I don't see how anyone can possibly think times are better or going to improve.
Yes, everyone will say "civil rights improved" and yes thats maybe the only thing that has changed, however it's getting taken away every day again so I don't think you can even use that point anymore.
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Medical technology has greatly improved. More people survive cancer, aids, surgery is far less invasive, and better medications.
Technology in general is getting better.
We have a faster internet. I love having access to so much information. Sure, there are far more gullible fools who believe in all manner of silly stuff but I feel the internet has done more good than bad.
Life expectancy has gone up about 2 years since 1995 (from 76 to 78). Not a massive difference TBH.
Look at that dip right before 2020! Wonder why America dipped so much lower. Surely, face-masks as a way to prevent the spread of infectious disease wasn't suddenly a controversial issue!
What about people's overall health? Two years isn't much but if a person's last ten years is lived with less pain and more mobility that is something.
Wow, that really puts the impact of covid in perspective.
The one grape I have with the medical technology thing is the fact that if I used any of it I would be in debt for the rest of my life which would be longer because of the technology
Half the technology only prevents death, but doesn’t necessarily give you quality of life, so they can keep it. It’s the pharmaceutical advancements that have had the biggest QoL impact on me, and thankfully generics have been reasonably affordable.
Do you have any other fruits with medical tech?
I've goyes. A pineapple t a pineapple with an
That is only an America problem though
True
Maybe you'll get lucky and get a recall or a class action lawsuit
The internet allowed to stupid to find each other far too easily and spread far too much bullshit.
People believed in all manner of things without supporting evidence long before the internet arrived.
Yeah but it was harder for so many stupid people to link up and feed off of each other.
But now they have the means to organize
If you can afford it. Health insurance in the US was certainly better 30 years ago.
Since it hasn't been mentioned, one thing that I am truly thankful for that we have improved since the 1990s is public smoking. Not having to be prepared for the reek of cigarettes in virtually every public space is such a big win.
Hell, in 1990, which is 35 years ago, you could still smoke on airplanes in the US. Airplanes! Can you imagine flying back then? Your neighbor could light up and there was nothing you could do but sit there and stew in the smoke stream. I'm glad I never had to experience flying with smoke but I had my fair share of being forced to sit in smoking sections of restaurants until my teenage years.
Thats true, it stank!! And non smoking was never a truth ha
The (true) joke at the time was that it was like a swimming pool with a little corner marked "no peeing zone".
It wasn't just flying. I grew up in the 90s, and you could smoke in so many places, it was awful. I was so happy listening to my mother bitch and complain when they banned smoking in establishments entirely. I could finally breathe, and she had to go outside to keep killing herself (unless we were at home or in the car, in which case there was still nothing I could do but stew in the smoke).
Depends who you ask. Things are better for the LGBTQ+ community. Still not as they should be, but I see a generation of kids now who are accepting, whereas 30 years ago, it was the worst thing anyone could accuse you of.
You say that civil rights may go away, but we do have them right now, and as our kids get older, they might not be so willing to take them away.
Yeah, that's a big one in the US. Being a queer person in the 90s was almost exile from my social circle. There were some gay guys and lesbians were accepted on the perifery, but homophobia reigned.
The sheer amount of street level crimes, bar fights, car break-ins that existed in those days would blow your mind. Things have changed so much and yet everyone seems to have forgotten. I can't speek for the 'worst' neighbourhoods in the US nowadays but back in the 70s - 80s whole sections of US cities were shitholes. Media make's everything look way worse than reality.
I'm so sorry to be the one to tell you this but 30 years ago was the mid 90s, not the 70s-80s
Oh God...
Unpossible!
I know, the trend continued. And the 90s were half as bad. Sorry you can't extrapolate.
Crime in 1995 was...let's just say... fucking worse in virtually every category...by a lot. Waco and ruby ridge had just happened. As for poverty, there are the same number of people on poverty in 2023 a there were in 1995. Let's talk violence against women. It's tragic today at shockingly high rates. It was much worse in 1995.
Don't be a woman, or a non white man, or poor, or non cis and you are probably just fine back in 1995.
...cept for abortion. Fuck Trump.
Yes, the ozone hole is healing, we have less lead in the environment coming from leaded fuel, cars in general have become more fuel efficient, there are plenty of things that are way better now, than 30 years ago.
There is great music being made here in 2025, though the general music taste has stagnated for a long time.
Medical procedures have absolutely got better, as has tech in general, in 1995 we used CRT monitors with our computers, we used ball mice that constantly needed to be cleaned.
This is just some of the things that have improved.
Thank you. It's hard to see what's better sometimes but I have definitely benefited from a surgery that was "dark ages" 30 years ago.
Yeah, currently there is so much negativity on the news that it is easy to forget the good stuff that does happen.
Implying that the CRT has yet to be improved upon in any material sense. (Okay, maybe in terms of weight.)
::: spoiler Tap for spoiler I am (mostly) joking by the way :::
Trump wants to allow the production of CFCs again.
This is interesting, CFCs have as far as I can tell been banned since the 70s/80s, so reintroducing it would mean that a lot of industrial production lines would need to be rebuilt, costing vast amounts of money.
I don't think any established producer would want to pay a lot of money to restore an old process to end up with a product that can't really be sold outside the US...
I still use one. Though, it is the Logitech Trackball, but it still needs to be cleaned, like the old school mice.
But you could throw the mouse ball at someone across the classroom. Throwing an optical sensor doesn't have the same impact.
The teachers at my school had a very smart idea of using super-glue to seal to ball cover to prevent students stealing and/or throwing the balls.
After about a week the every computer mouse was basically useless as it was impossible to clean the gunk off the rollers
Now we have PFAS and microplastics in the water.
Before it was lead, chromium and Christ knows what since there was little visibility and less oversight.
Now we have inexpensive, easy to install reverse osmosis that is within reach of nearly any person who isn't destitute. During the lead days, it was out of reach for nearly everyone due to size, relative complexity, cost and general availability.
Today we have test kits for many type of pollutants and the water authorities have mandated reporting for water quality.
When I was a kid 30 years ago, we lived in the country and drank shit water from a well out in the country. Tasted and smelled like sulfur. We also had a neighbor who owned property with nothing on it but what looked like a cistern cap (underground water tank). Every so often a tanker truck would show up and leave shortly thereafter. We never knew what the hell that tanker was putting into the cistern or if there was even one down there. It could have very well just been a cap that led right into the damn dirt. Every person in my immediate family has endocrine/thyroid problems, none of the extended family does. Was it the mystery truck that was dumping fucky chemicals right into the ground? I will never know, but if we had reverse osmosis back then, none of us would be at the fucking doctor as much as we are. Hormone replacement as a 35 year old man is some shit. Hashimodos is a pain in the dick.
My kids grew up drinking nothing but purified water. If the local water authority was lying and producing shit, at least I've been able to add a layer of protection all for about $250 and an hour of my time to set it up.'
I'm voting for better now, shittier then.
Damn that's tough to hear. I'm sorry you and your family are experiencing long term medical issues. Water pollution by industry is a real evil and I'm glad there's more awareness and better technology to deal with it today.
I'm interested in reverse osmosis systems, but the most inexpensive ones I've seen that could be installed in a rental home are still around $100-200.
I bet we had microplastics in the water, then. We have only now been able to detect them.
We had that back then too. We just didn't know about it.
For LGBTQ rights? Definitely. For the climate? Way worse. Politically? Way worse. Economically... I'd way we are in a big bubble like the roaring 20s before the great depression. And when it pops, it's gonna be bad, thanks to idiot voters and corrupt Republicans.
Government-wise...things are not looking good. It will take a very long time to rebuild.
Now...state-wise, I know my state is way better off than it was 30 years ago, but that doesn't mean we aren't about to get slammed by braindead antics of the federal government. But we have made a lot of infrastructure investments that are paying off locally. The future of America will be exclusively in states that put a premium on science and progress.
Technology is better, crime rates better, environmental issues were better, LGBT rights and racism seemed better. But the gap between rich and poor has grown, wages have stagnated. And now I fear we are regressing.
Gay rights and racial equality were getting better up through the Bush era, IMO, and then they started to move in the other direction. Now they're getting worse very quickly.
Violent crime is down. Smoking is down. Teenage pregnancy is down.
That's about all I've got.
Violent crime about to explode as abortion now illegal in many places--the knock-on effects of it pretty well isolated as the only reasonable explanation to the sudden drop in violent crime in the mid 90s that has continued through today and was a central thesis in Freakonomics.
With abortion now illegal, hushed up, or hidden in many states, the crime and its vicious cycle will return. Bet your money, when those who would have otherwise been aborted come of crime age in ~15 years, full Judge Dredd world will be on in the US. Teen pregnancy, from the 2nd generation of otherwise aborted kids, will of course explode to the delight of evangelicals everywhere.
I think there won't be nearly as much unwanted pregnancy still. Kids these days - first of all - just aren't fucking as much. But also they are better informed about the risks of pregnancy and how to prevent it. And abortions are quite destigmatize now, and people are motivated to get them. If necessary, they can buy an abortion pill on the internet or drive across state lines.
I agree with your assessment of current state; add in a few cohorts of 10 commandments in classrooms, reduced access to birth control because they're taken out of schools, reduced education because the DOE has been rebranded and now education takes place through public school Grok portals or God knows what, sexual content is heavily censored and restricted which doesn't do good things for teen pregnancy rates.
Lol drive across state lines? In the palantir big brother world of 5 years from now? Read up on the data gathering and now nearly realtime tracking of movement that can and is being done by "law enforcement" and red state government agencies in the name of stopping abortion. Just like how facial recognition of protestors will be weaponized, the new fascists will take anything they get their mits on and warp it to their ends.
Absolutely agree that abortion was a significant reason for falling crime. Should be interesting to see what happens. I personally think crime will never quite get back to where it was because we condition kids to spend more time indoors these days.
You might be right; they'll be hooked up to the Matrix, eyes glowing
Slavery across the world ia actually at its highest point.
Perhaps in absolute terms.
I was around for that time, and yes in many ways the world is better now, it's a mixed bag but:
My kids were not beat up in school for being queer.
The bay is much cleaner (though that is going in the wrong direction)
Solar power has come down in cost so much that there is hope for the clean energy transition to accelerate.
I was literally paid less than the men doing the same job I was doing, openly, in the early 1990s. And there was smoking in offices.
Violent crime is much less prevalent than it was back then. My kids don't have to be as careful or afraid as I was.
Overall - I don't think it is useful to be nostalgic, there are enough changes in a positive direction, sure we had more hope for the future in the 1990s but the reason we needed it was because things were kinda shitty.
Yup, 100%. Gotta acknowledge the mixed bag.
It's almost certainly better today for anyone who is gay or trans than 30 years ago. We have a long way to go, and there may have been some backsliding in the last 5 years, but things are undeniably better today than in the 90's.
Certain aspects of race are better today. As recently as 1993, a majority of Americans still believed that interracial marriage should be illegal.
Food is way better. Back in the 90's, there wasn't a ton of variety in restaurants available in all except the biggest cities, and a lot of food trends were still boring with flavor (plus we were still in the low fat craze that made things taste worse). Even groceries were pathetic in comparison: fresh produce didn't have nearly as many choices, and was expensive, so most people were eating canned and frozen produce by default. Little things like being able to choose apples that weren't red delicious, or potatoes that weren't russets, tend to be taken for granted today.
Health and safety are better in most ways, but worse in some others. Obviously obesity and related diseases are worse today. So are some conditions like allergies, certain autoimmune disorders, certain cancers. But most cancers are less deadly today than 30 years ago. Traumatic injuries from workplaces and car accidents are down, and are better treated. And the huge diversity in the population for health means that a lot of people are living healthier than ever, even while a lot of people are less healthy than before. Life expectancy keeps creeping up in the cities, health expectancy seems to be up, too.
Air quality seems way better, with smog and acid rain pushed down with successful regulations. And people don't smoke as much anymore, especially indoors.
We can pursue our diverse interests from anywhere. If you drill down on pretty much any hobby, people who are really into that hobby have way more opportunities to share in that interest with people worldwide.
There's a bunch of bad stuff, too. But we should also appreciate the good things that have improved in recent times.
Do you have any idea how many people were always shut out of those things, in the USA? Any idea that our prosperity at home came from brutal repression and denying them to people in the global South, Asia, Africa, far away from our eyes and ears?
We still have it good. Yes, not as good, but good. Are we sliding headlong at a gallop towards overt fascism at home? Also yes. What happens depends on us, and the sacrifices we're willing to make, now. Or not.
Yes, 30 years ago the AIDS crisis was still going strong and, in the US at least, same-gender relationships were illegal and the LGBT community didn't have a right to work, and on top of that same-sex marriage was illegal. A lot of rights are rolled into marriage, including the ability to remain at the bedside of your loved-one when they are at the hospital or on their deathbed, arranging and/or attending your partner's funeral, and being allowed to remain in your house after your spouse dies. Through the 80s and 90s, gay men were losing partners left and right and some were kicked out of their partners' funerals and then kicked out of the house they had lived in for decades because the title was in their partner's name since they couldn't sign together.
Don't Ask, Don't Tell was also started in 1994.
Same sex relationships weren't made legal until June 26, 2003 (Lawrence v TX) Same Sex Marriage on June 26, 2015 (Hodges v Obergefell) Discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity in the workplace was barred in the US June 15, 2020 (Bostock v Clayton)
Even with all the holes Republicans drilled into it, the Affordable Care Act helps many people get health insurance. We also have medication that prevents the transmission of HIV and that prevents the onset of AIDS, saving many lives.
In 1995, the internet was in its infancy, at least compared to today and was largely text-based. If a website had a bunch of pictures, it took take 5-15 minutes to load depending on your location, provided nobody killed the connection with an incoming call.
Sure the mindset nowadays is much more pessimistic, even thought the ruling class from the 90s is aging out of power. We just need people ready to push us forward as more of the silent generation and baby boomer politicians leave office.
You're right that a lot has changed for the better, especially when it comes to legal rights for LGBTQ+ people. The AIDS crisis was devastating and compounded by the cruelty of being denied the most basic recognitions like visiting your partner in the hospital or even being allowed to stay in your home after they passed. Legal victories like Lawrence v. Texas, Obergefell, and Bostock were historic, and they represent real, hard-won progress.
But I think it's also important to recognize that legal inclusion doesn't always mean liberation. A lot of those rights are still tied to institutions like marriage, which leave out anyone who doesn't fit that mold. Marriage shouldn't be the gateway to healthcare or housing security. That just reinforces the idea that some relationships or lives are more worthy of protection than others.
Same goes for healthcare. The Affordable Care Act helped, but it still left healthcare tied to jobs and profit. Life-saving medications exist, but they’re still out of reach for many because of how expensive and inaccessible our system is. PrEP, for example, is amazing in what it can do, but the fact that it's rationed through patents and insurance barriers says a lot about who this system really serves.
And while the internet has opened up huge spaces for connection and organizing, it also turned our identities into data and our attention into profit. Social media connects, but it also surveils and exploits. So even in our victories, the system keeps finding ways to profit off our survival.
I think the pessimism today is more than just a vibe shift. People feel it because they know deep down that we’re still not free. That our progress is fragile, often built on the same systems that oppress others. The question isn’t just whether things are better. It’s whether we’re building something that won’t keep leaving people behind.
What are you talking about with PrEP? It's not tied to having insurance, there are LGBT sexual health clinics where you can get free PrEP even if you don't have insurance. If you go the traditional route for medication and get a prescription through your PCP it'll depend on your insurance, but that's also not always the safest route. Granted if you live away from the city, you will have to go the traditional route, because there aren't likely to be any LGBT clinics nearby unless you decide to drive into the city for your quarterly appts.
In the 90s, health insurance was almosy exclusively tied to your job. There were a couple policies that you could get if your job didn't offer insurance, but they were expensive. Today, if your job doesn't offer insurance or if youre out of a job, you can not only get insurance on the marketplace, but you can even get financial assistance. That financial assistance didn't exist in the US 30 years ago outside of Medicaid. It's not universal Healthcare, as seen in other countries, but the ACA is overall an improvement on the system.
I agree that there are still rights to be won and attitudes to be changed so that people can live their lives openly without threat of violence, just noting that the overall situation is better now than it was 30 years ago. For example, I saw a story about a trans teen in North TX (a small town north of the DFW metroplex) in the last couple years. If that story was from the 90s, it would've been about the death of the teen and that's what I was expecting. Instead, the article was about the teen being kicked out of a school play because they were trans. It was a relief that the teen was still alive, which shows some positive growth, however there's still work to be done.
The younger generations are better at inclusion and I'm hoping that trend will continue. As the Silent Generation and Baby Boomer politicians (who have been ruling for the better part of 60 years) leave office, I'm hoping they are replaced by younger, more open-minded politicians. I've seen articles mention how in some elections that's happening, it just hasn't reached the leadership of the various branches yet. Hopefully, when it does, we can reshape the system to help everyone and build better defenses against those who would abuse their power for the rich. My concern is that if the conservatives are rallying behind a goal, while progressives grow increasingly pessimistic, that we may not see shift that we really need to make progress.
It's kind of mind blowing how dismissive of the ACA people are, even those who were aware before it went into effect. It wasn't by any means what it should have been, but medical access unequivocally improved vastly as a result of it.
The fact that it was Mitt Romney's idea should speak volumes about the propaganda from the Democrats. It has its pros, but like everything else the Democrats support, it must first and foremost benefit corporations.
Yes, and I still have access to my same doctor! But I don't even go to the doctor when I need to anymore because my family insurance went from a $500 deductable to a $10,000 deductable. I have insurance, but I legitimately lost access to healthcaret, I can't afford it. I went to the hospital two years in a row and had to pay it off in installments for the next two years.
My mom's medicare got amazing, and I couldn't complain about that. But holy shit my medical expenses went up. And I'm pretty well off, I just can't afford a $18,400 pay cut and save any money in this economy.
Yeah it’s better than in 1995.
I’m sure there more I’m not thinking of. I’d have a hard time going back to 1995.
I miss the wild west internet of the late 90s, early 2000s but it wasn't better. Dial-up sucked.
Apart from cigarette smoking inside again I wouldn't really miss those that much
I like having a high quality camera, mp3 player, and gps in my pocket.
Without elaboration all you're saying is smart phones are poopy.
Gay marriage was only legalized due to a Supreme Court decision that declared same sex marriage bans to be unconstitutional.
Since then, Republicans have appointed replacement justices, and it was they who overturned Roe v Wade and upheld a lot of Trump's recent antics.
Yes and no. Some things got better and easier than 30 years ago. Some things entshittified beyond reasonable expectations.
We got phones which act as a device to connect the world with endless amount if information, entertainment and is a great tool for personal comfort yet the same things are twisted to a degree where we cant live without a phone anymore. Can't not to have a social media account, we got fully compliant to the surveillance that is happening to us not even that we are tracked not only for the governments of our countries but mainly by advertisers in order to manipulate us into buying crap we don't need.
Feels like a double edged sword to me personally.
Technology is better slightly
Society is worse
The economy is worse
The environment is worse
For most of the world's population, things have significantly improved by almost every conceivable measure.
I strongly recommend Roslings book, Factfulness. The difference between how people think things have changed and what's happened is wild.
Edit: Just saw the (US tag, sorry.)
30 years ago most people weren’t yet on the internet, there was very little entertainment media, you couldn’t use online accounts for most stuff, and most people didn’t have online bill paying. 30 years ago I helped bring my company online as the first full investment company, and my bank was still rare for doing online bill paying.
30 years ago, most of the US were in denial over climate change, renewable energy was expensive and there were no practical EVs.
Idk what you mean about entertainment media because sitcoms were all the rage. And while the U.S. was in denial about climate change they were also emitting far fewer ghg and climate change was much less evident
…in the cloud. People were still glued to their TVs back then. I don’t know whether that was before or after commercials balooned
They were also in denial that sitcoms were, for the most part, terrible.
30 years ago? So 1995. As one who was there: fuck no. The 90s where cool, everything seemed fixed, osties travelling through Europe in their Trabant 2 stroke miniature cars. (That was fun on the Autobahn) Only Saddam was jerking around and that was far away, internet was brand new, everything seemed possible. No terrorist threat of the RAF, IRA or the bask separation front. There was even hope for peace in Israel.
But if you would say 40 or 50 years ago? I would say fuck yes. It's much better nowadays.The cold war was wild. The recession of the 80s was bleak af, Thatcher, Reagan. PLO, RAF, IRA, Basks. No man, there was a reason behind films like aliens, Terminator and punk music. Why they resonated with society at that time. Contrary to current popular belief the 80s was not a decade long neon party. Many people lost their jobs. Youth unemployment was at it's highest ever. No jobs, no houses available. It was dark. Darkest time of my life. Everyone thought nuclear war was inevitable. We would all die of radiation or in the cold harsh nuclear winter. Yup. That was the Outlook at that time.
70s was the all time high of the cold war, oil crisis, something else i'm forgetting. But I was a small child back then so everything about that era is hearsay.
But for me? The 90s where good. 80s sucked hard. (End) 70s also had a lot of downs.
I agree. When people criticize the 90s, it often sounds like they're thinking of the 80s.
A few technological aspects of life are incredibly easier and more accessible. We have instant access to any form of information, from porn to encyclopedia articles. Comparing prices and ordering things - commonly called "mail order" 30 years ago - took weeks compared to a couple days now. Communication is far easier and cheaper - talking between San Francisco and Stockholm or Singapore would have cost several dollars per minute 30 years ago, and now it's a built-in feature of network access. Most of us have in our pockets a telephone, photo/video camera, advanced computer, entertainment and game console. There have also been some notable medical advances - my friend died from leukemia in the 90s, and it's very treatable now, along with various kinds of tumors.
Tech is better. But life is a lot worse in general. Unless you're part of a marginalized group I suppose.
We've gone from a bright shining future to no future at all.
Tech was only better until like maybe 2015-2016. We're a solid decade into enshitification across the board. I can't even find a phone I actually want to replace mine that is finally failing after 8 years and the car situation isn't looking much better, fortunately I don't have to deal with that for a while (hopefully).
This is a pretty dismissive take. "Sure, things have improved for the blacks and queers, but what about us... uh, regular folk?"
Wasn't intended that way.
I mean, most of the people here didn't mention it at all.
Yes, it's better to be gay in America in 2025 than 1995, although might not be trending in a good direction now. Probably black too, although that's been a painfully slow process by comparison.
I don't disagree, but OP didn't ask for trend predictions. Anyone who tries to convince you "things" are worse today than than they were in 1995 is either trying to gaslight you, or doesn't consider the experience of the LGBT community to be as equally valuable as everyone else.
I think a lot of the tech is responsible for the shitty life. Tech got better until perhaps end of the naughts. After that it's just one bullshit excuse after the other to make devices obsolete as quick as possible. Plus the complete enshittification of the internet.
I'm just glad that decentralized social media is becoming a thing and the FOSS movement is huge.
Medicine has improved by leaps and bounds. We have greater life expectancy and mostly a better quality of health along the way. Child mortality is down globally.
https://ourworldindata.org/life-expectancy
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/child-mortality?time=1996..latest
Improvements in our understanding of neurodivergent students has resulted in better educational and quality of life outcomes for millions who in past decades would have fallen through the cracks.
The proliferation of environmental lead from paint and gasoline are WAY down, and the hole in the Ozone was just about peak in 1995.
Open source, public domain, and freely available knowledge have democratized education, technology, research, and product development in ways that would have almost been inconcievable in 1995.
We are able to communicate more globally, even with total strangers, often across language barriers, and for free.
Video games, films, and television are able to create visions that would have been technically impossible 30 years ago. And technology has reduced the barriers for people to gain entry into those industries.
I carry around a tiny super computer with instant access to all the world's knowledge. That would have been a dream in 1995.
There are of course many things that are worse. It's a harder time to be starting out in life. "Luxuries" are dirt cheap and necesities are unaffordable. We've traded our sense of community for a paranioa of "others" even as the world has gotten safer. Globally the world has been swinging toward extremism and it constantly feels like capitalism may collapse and we don't know what comes next if that happens. But failure to see how much is better and for how many seems like too much doom scrolling and too narrow and outlook.
We drag them to the future. There is no other direction.
Some of this is just the noise that society makes though.
Our billionaires have a lot of power, but I don't think they're near the Robber Barrons of the US past. The LLMs are trash, but your boss used to put who you should vote for in your paycheck and the only media that existed was sole property of big business.
I'll grant that the last few decades have been rough, but it beats the past.
Just gotta keep moving.
Everyone's experience will be personal to them, so it's not anyone's place to say your experience isn't worse, but as a whole, things are better.
Crime, no matter the category, is down ~33% since the mid-90s.
Median household income, adjusted for inflation, is up ~25% (despite the narrative).
Here's a post/graph I think about all the time: https://bsky.app/profile/simongerman600.bsky.social/post/3ktds56nqus25
Regardless of age, we are generally nostalgic for a time in our youth. Or even earlier. Notice that something like half (or nearly so) of people think "the most moral society" was before they were born.
What's the ratio of household income to the cost of living? I understand that's going to vary wildly from place to place, but my point is income, as a statistic, seems meaningless without knowing the cost of living to see if people are actually able to afford rent, groceries, etc on that 25% increased income.
That crime statistic is going to spike drastically from 2025 on..
Look up medical advancements over that time.
When was the last time you saw someone with Polio? Or someone die of sepsis?
Update: My point about sepsis isn't that it is gone, But that we've gone from hearing about it still being a thing from knowing someone who it was a thing for. As far as polio is concerned I'm 39 years old currently. While polio wasn't around while I was a child my aunt's uncle's parents knew someone who had polio while they were growing up. Friends of the family who were adults knew someone who had polio while they were growing up. That's mostly what I mean, We went from knowing someone first or second hand who suffered from all kinds of ailments to only hearing about it because there's a small amount of it.
Not trying to lessen your point, but people do be dying from sepsis all of the time still. Granted, we do have way better treatment and protocols, but it's a fast killer if not caught in time and a lot of different things can cause sepsis
But polio, for sure way better. Never seen anyone with polio before irl
Also stroke treatment. Wayyyy better now than before. We didn't really have anything except aspirin until the 90's, and now we're straight up removing the clots from the brain (when we can). It's kind of wild how much stroke treatment has improved in 30 years
Well yeah, if you go back to your grandparents' generation you're gonna see polio because you're taking 30s and 40s. My grandfather talked about it too, but my parents' generation didn't.
HA no. I was there, it was... Well differently bad, maybe less in aggregate. Cultural attitudes really took a HARD turn when 9/11 happened, and the government abused it just about as hard as they could think of. President Obama did try to bring back some of that 90s optimism, but then along came Trump and ground it into dust.
Billionaires aren't new. I also don't really think LLMs will be as impactful as they get hyped or feared to be, and actually think AI as a whole outside mere chatbots will be positive if not the revolution it gets hyped as.
Honestly I do think there has been an improvement. It might not seem like that when viewing the past, but the past is easy to overestimate- we don't have to live it anymore.
As to civil rights, it should be pointed out that while recent years have seen regression in the US, its not always a regression to the point that things were at back then, and more importantly, the rest of the world does not necessarily share the political woes of the US.
Actually billionaires are a new thing. There were like 2 of them in 1992. Now there's what, over 15? I forget.
Because of inflation and such, but the important aspect of them is being super rich compared to everyone else (hence we don't count people that have a billion of some much less valuable currency), and that's a very old problem.
The American oil magnate John D. Rockefeller became the world's first confirmed U.S. dollar billionaire in 1916.
Edit: Five years after the introduction of the Forbes 400 List, the magazine launched its famous World Billionaires round-up. Forbes highlighted a total of 140 billionaires in 1987, including 96 outside of the US, which means that between 1982 and 1987 the number of American individuals with 10-figure-plus fortunes grew from 15 to 44.
1995? For me, personally, I'd say some things are better, some are worse. I was struggling to get by on $8.60 an hour back then, couldn't live on my own so I had a room-mate. I was still a year away from the tech job that would crack open my real career and bring me where I am today.
1996 - first tech job, income doubled+ overnight. Got my own first place. Commuting between Portland and Chicago every 2 weeks for a year. Feels like that was when my life really started.
2025? Still working in tech, married 14 years, 6 figure salary, bought a house 4 years ago. OTOH - 2 heart attacks, congestive heart failure, cancer scare in the past 2 weeks. Looks like they got it all, but I need to back in 6 months for a re-check.
Good luck at your next appointment! 🤞
Melanoma? They can get all that shit pretty reliably these days. I just passed my last 6mo check and I'm back on yearlies.
If not melanoma then good luck, fellow traveler. Fuck cancer.
15 polyps and 2 actual tumors. :(
If there’s anything better now than 30 years ago it’s science, technology and medicine combined to make better treatments for cancer and other diseases. The 6-month checkup is good news (from my experience), then it will be yearly. Good luck!
The big one (30mm) they not only removed, but they tattooed the spot where they took it from for future checks.
So now I can legit say "Yes, I have a tattoo... no, I won't show it to you!" LOL.
You are hilarious! Glad you have a sense of humor. Not that it’s a contest but I got you beat… I have 4 dots! Lol
Ohhhh shit. Good luck with treatment
If you were in the 1% or whatever of the developed-world population that had it, a nice collection of bookmarks and an hour to load every image over your shitty dialup.
Like, I'll go ahead and say the internet has gotten worse, but only after a decade or two where it got much, much better.
As for the rest of the stuff, the 90's were kind of a sweet spot. The Cold War was over, the new gilded age was just starting to gather and some of the 20th century problems were on their way out. Leaded gasoline, rampant littering, near-disposable cars and cigarette smoke everywhere are more 1980's and earlier in my head.
90's music is often terrible to my ears, by the way, and grinding was weird.
90s alt rock is a pretty deep genre. Music-wise, I might take the 90s over either of the decades that followed it. And I'm sure that's because it's better and not because I grew up with it.
Okay, I do like some music from the 90's. Some of it straight up sounds like parody now, though. I wasn't sure WTF was going on when I heard "Too Close" for the first time.
Yeah. 90s internet was really novel and interesting and unique, but after a couple hours you got bored. There wasn't that much happening on it. Also slow as all hell.
Then internet speeds picked up and there was enough content to keep you basically permanently entertained. Lot of entertaining stuff. The Age of Memes was truly upon us.
Then the bad actors and village idiots were able to easily get access and understand they could use the internet for nefarious reasons and it's been getting shittier for about the last decade or so. Realistically, probably around the time smartphones came out and the influx of fools was of tsunami proportions.
For the middle aged white American or...? Even then, the question seems to mean more as words than as an actual inquiry. It's just too big of a question for it to mean anything. 30 years ago different brown people were getting bombed, for instance!
Times are looking tough right now but the pendulum can swing back at any moment. And when it does we won't be starting back at square one. Might be a few years and a few wars until then. Maybe just an arms race and the odd proxy war. No way to know. All we can do is resist and wait.
Some things are better. Other things are worse.
I'd still go back to when I was 10 if given the chance tho.
As an example: luxuries have gotten cheaper while essentials have gotten more expensive.
Economically for the working class, no. But it’s undeniably better to be gay or coloured in western countries than it was 30 years ago.
Not I. I grew up thinking overall we were on a good track and humanity would get better. The star trek utopia future type. This started to break apart in the early 90's but I held out hope that tech was going to get us through but that started to fall apart by the late aughts and really by the 20teens is about when I lost most hope. Brexit and the first trump win was pretty much the nails in the coffin. Biden did pretty well considering but you can see how behind we already are and how we would actually have to maintain a decent path in way we just had not for the last couple of decades.
According to social psych, this is called reconstructive memory, "reconstructing past behaviour" - tending to underreport bad behaviour and overreport good behaviour, sometimes remisrecalling our past as worse to justify self- improvement.
well things are certainly better for me...
It really depends where. In the global south? Way better, in China, it's debatable. In Poland, way better. In the US, way worse. In the UK, way worse.
It's good to bring it into perspective with numbers like Hans Rossling used to do https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z8t4k0Q8e8Y sadly he died and nobody took this over after him to visualize data in this way so publicly yet.
What parts of the global south? Seems a lot of poverty, disease, famine, war in many places still.
Yes, but compared to 30 years ago overall it seems way less. But yeah, I would need to go through the numbers to be able to point to real data points, you're right.
Also how much of that is from usaid and eliminating smallpox which is running in reverse now.
Ah, I also didn't see the "(US)" tag.
In the 90s, people's minds were blown by Crash Bandikoot, now I play Balatro and Hollow Knight. Sometimes I play The Finals, a 3D game so realistic you need to use a sniper scope to see textures, and buildings can be completely destroyed every match. While this may blow the minds of most people in the 90s, honestly it doesn't even phase me, Balatro and Hollow Knight are so good, I prefer them most days.
Yeah, this is way better.
Hmm, I actually love older games just as much as new, so that doesn't bother me. Plus there is a lot more to life than gaming that has gone way down hill
Yee, unquestionably IMO. There is of course plenty of fucked up shit but we are doubtless better off in America, on the whole, than in 1995.
I guess it depends on the person. 30 years ago, I was actually living and working in the US. I was driving a 1988 Volvo 760. I was still driving it 10 years later; best car I've ever had. Gas was under a buck. Interest rates were so high that once I got some savings, I lived off the interest and ended up saving 80% of my salary (years later, when the rates went down, I used those savings as a down payment for my house). I could get lost for a full day at Borders. I was able to hitchhike up the east coast, get odd jobs without any resumes or background checks, while on a road trip across the continent. There was a lot of new and exciting technology: CD's and discmen, computers and the beginnings of the Internet. I read the news via Gopher (unless it was Sunday, then I bought the papers for grocery coupons). I feel that now there are too many limits on people. Lots of them are self-inflicted: I'm middle aged and with kids, so I need to be far more responsible. But when I look at my kids, I feel that they won't have the same opportunities I had, for travel, education, personal growth, or independence.
Some things are better. Some things are worse. Some things are about the same.
Crime has declined by 50% or more beginning in the mid to late 1980s and early 1990. While we still have some of the highest crime rates compared to other developed countries. I still think that this is something to be proud of.
Also we are improving our urban planning to make our cities more walkabke, bicyclable, and livable.
I don't think they are at all.
Times in general? No. Certain aspects? Yes, even with fascist rule.
You were less cynical, I remember people in the 90s saying the world was shit and getting worse, that there was no future.
Do you really remember the internet back then? Of course it wasn't enshittified, there were only dozens of people online. And it really depends on what you mean with enshittified, the designs were horrible and polluted, sure it didn't had ads, but realistically even a page with adds nowadays is more readable than most websites back then, with tiling images background, gifs everywhere and interesting font choices.
I'm sure that the vast majority of stuff you do online today wasn't available in 95, so yeah, it might have become "enshittified" but it also became usable, and a shitty usable thing is better than a pure useless thing in my book.
That is relative, I bet young people today feel 90s music was good and old people feel it was bad, because it depends on the age you had at the time. Generally we tend to think that the music that was popular in our group when we were around 14 to be good, so I bet that 14 YO today love today's music, and telling them their music is bad sounds exactly the same as when old people used to tell us that the music was better in their times.
Was it though? Let's pick a place, let's say NY since it's a well known city worldwide, minimum wage was apparently $4.25 and an apartment in NY costed $328 per sqft (as best as I can find out), this means that you had to work 30 years with all your money going into an apartment to afford it. So no, it wasn't affordable, it's become worse since then, but it wasn't the wonderful past where everyone could buy a house that you seem to think it was.
Is it though? Most cars from the 90s are in dumpsters by now, they consumed so much gas that it simply wasn't worth keeping them. And by the 90s cars had already started using electronics so they don't even have the appeal that a purely mechanical car from the 60s brings to the table. Also again with the affordability probably wasn't all that much better than now, where you can probably get a used car for very cheap.
People still interact in real life, go check meetups or other local events. In fact we have more opportunities to interact in real life today because we can look for stuff that interest you to check out, I. The 90s it was my experience you mostly always hanged up with that same people in the same place because you never knew what else was happening in the city.
No social media at all, social media is not 100% bad, you're using one now
Those already existed back then, in fact they were mostly the same people. Also they had a lot more control over the media back then because without social media and internet there were no alternatives to mainstream media which is almost entirely controlled by billionaires. So long story short, the problem was already there, you just weren't aware of it.
What about LLMs? They're great tools for brainstorming and getting unstuck, but beyond that they're very limited and are a huge money sink that companies are desperately throwing money to try to get something out, but so far they haven't delivered. Yes there are people getting fired because of LLMs, and it really sucks for them, and I wish they had a good social net to catch them during this time, but honestly I think we're about to hit a turning point in the coming years where companies will understand that LLMs are all promise no pay (plus a few lawsuits from big companies getting their copyright infringed on will help) and will hire those people back.
Like you mentioned, civil rights are at an all time high, even with conservatives worldwide trying to revert the situation LGBTQ+ are well more accepted now than what they were in the 90s; Interracial couples is not a debatable topic anymore outside of the Klan; Smoking indoors has been banned and marijuana has been mostly legalized; Cars are lots more fuel efficient and that's without mentioning EVs; Billionaires are still a problem, but as a society they're now being criticized out in the open, whereas before they were not even discussed at all; Crime is at an all time low, and reporting percentage is better than ever (as in people didn't used to report crimes), not to mention that we have a lot more crimes being recognized (Marital rape wasn't even a crime until 93 in the US), and we have become a lot better at preventing innocents from being arrested and freeing the ones that had in the past; Life expectancy at an all time high, and medicine has become lots more affordable (although this might not be the case for the US, but it is worldwide) and better; Technology has not only advanced drastically, but it has become a lot more accessible both in terms of price and usability; Workers right have increased significantly, and work life balance is a lot better in general terms; etc, etc, etc, we tend to only remember the good things of the past and look at it with pink glasses, but in reality if you were to suddenly be transported back to 95 you would probably find it a worse time than today by most day-to-day metrics.
Do you remember the internet back then? Sure, there were some truly terrible websites around back then, but most of the internet wasn't like what MySpace looked like a decade later.
As someone who was around back then, the quality of 90's cars were far better than the 70-80's cars that preceded them (in general). By the 1990's a lot of issues that plagued the early electronics in cars (late 70's-80's) had been sorted out, things like fuel injection became standard, the quality of paints improved drastically - 1990's cars didn't rust out nearly as bad as cars from previous decades. Of course most of these cars are gone now - the newest 1990's cars are over 25 years old at this point, but it's still not uncommon to see them driving around. Much more so than seeing cars from the 60's-70's driving around in the 1990's.
Most of the internet in the 90s was either that or the complete opposite, i.e. a bare text with links. Tell me since you said you actually remember the internet back then, what did you used to do in it? What websites did you frequent?
As for the cars I never said they were worse than before, my point with the purely mechanical cars from the 60s or before is that people still keep them because they're fully mechanic, but that cars from the 90s don't have that appeal. Everything that made the cars from the 90s better than the ones from the 80s was improved upon since then, realistically today's cars are much better in any metric you want to compare.
Personally, I do the same things on the internet now that I did in the 90's. That's one thing that hasn't really changed.
Care to give more concrete examples of what you do on the internet now? You're on Lemmy, which didn't exist back then, neither did reddit. Other than that I don't know what you do on the internet, but what I do is certainly different, even if we were to consider that Lemmy is not so different from the various forums that existed then, and do the same with Whatsapp and IRC, just yesterday I used: YouTube, Spotify, Banks, Maps, Ordering food, Netflix, and Video calls none of which was available in the 90s.
I browse websites related to my interests more than anything else. I don't think the specific websites are important. Lemmy not existing as a brand name doesn't mean anything. I had the same experience on dozens of other websites. In terms of experiences/activities, everything on this list was around by the mid 90s except for ordering food, but I didn't spend much time doing those things.
Well, actually thinking about you would have to split the 1995 internet into the internet and the world wide web. I actually spent a considerable amount of time on usenet - this of course being back when it was more than alt.binaries. Probably around then I also discovered MP3s, and the main way I had of getting a hold of those long before the days of Napster was public FTP sites. With any luck, when I found a good one there would be others mentioned in the greeting and/or some sort of readme that I could then go check out. I could also try snagging them on usenet, but the server my ISP ran didn't really put much effort into making sure the binaries groups had any sort of decent retention, but every once and a while I could snag something. I also still had access to AOL, but I don't recall doing much in their client other than checking email.
In any case, that was all outside of the WWW. As for the WWW I remember using to do things like look up guides to video games I was playing, and other fun stuff like looking up Star Wars and Star Trek fan sites. It was more of a toy for me - for things like getting news, looking at the weather, or researching things I tended to go to "traditional" sources. Honestly, the whole every website had had animated gifs, blink tags, MIDI music, and horrible background images is more a meme than anything else. Sure, that's not to say there weren't sites like that, but even so that was more of a late 1990's-mid 2000's thing (coughMySpacecough). In 1995 most things still pretty simple. In 1995 trying to get too fancy would result in your site taking a while to load at 14.4k (a single MP3 took forever), and would grind the average PC (something like a 486 with 4-8MB of RAM) to a halt.
As for cars, I agree with the OP is the 1990's is when the typical new car took a big leap in terms of quality. What they lack is the cool factor that cars from the 60's have. Things have gotten better since then in general, though I'd argue that some things like usability and ergonomics have taken a hit.
I wanted to post that we were in the hight of the cold war 30 years ago but then I calculated and now I am sad
Yes. You can fit all the great music from the 90s and before in your pocket now. You can also get newer music if you want but it's up to you. Lemmy is better than a lot of the old forums.
You don't have to use social media, I don't. Information is far more available now than it was 30 years ago.
Convenience-wise? Yes. A lot of things are easier to get taken care of now. From being able to handle DMV shit online to organizing events to paying bills. All way easier than they used to be.
Everything else....yeah, no. Things are not good economically. Things are not good socially. Things are not good civically. Stress levels are high. Suicides are up. Wealth disparity is getting insane. Finding career jobs with good employers is rough. Have fun buying a house. You might be on the street if you have a medical emergency. Fuck you if you're poor.
Generally speaking, things are getting worse, but we've got some cool tech and easier payment methods while everything else goes to shit, so we've got that going for us.
I was very happy in the mid 90's. It was my prime time with my friends. Mid-20s and high on life.
Now, I need to put in a lot more effort to be happy and have fun. I am grateful that many of those great friends are still in my close circle.
Yeah a lot of people in this thread seem to be comparing their personal good ol' days with now, rather than thinking broader.
I didn't give a rats ass about anything "broader" 30+ years ago. I'd love to ignore the global shit show of today.
30 years ago the Internet was tiny, and to this day you can largely get the same experience if you opt to ignore some of the more frustrating Internet. In practice it is a problem that extremist views can come closer together without the moderating influence of those physically near you. would definitely appreciate a harder push back towards federation and a break from subscription based software, though compared to 30 years ago, the free software today is better than anything we had back then.
Our cars were not durable, drive trains can take a whole lot more negligence than they used to and hoses and gaskets last longer than they did back then. There have been struggles with some cars adding turbos for efficiency, but even those are way less problematic than they used to be.
We can interact in real life, we just largely don't. As an adult I probably interact with peers about as much as my parents did when they were my age, not much at all. Constant hanging out goes away with age for most people.
There's a lot of regression in the world but that pendulum swings back and forth.
Yeah, definitely better, but for me personally. I... had a shitty childhood.
While medical advanced have improved, acces to medical treatment, at least in the US has declined. What good are cures and treatments that most of the population cannot afford? To me it's just as bad as not having them, or even worse.
30 years ago we THOUGHT we had a future.
Life and the world wasn't as dangerous. It was easier, less stressful. Simpler 😊