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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
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.)
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.
Look up medical advancements over that time.
True, but the population in industrialized societies have become less and less healthy at the same time. We have Ozempic, but we also have 30% of Americans with prediabetes.
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.
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.
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.
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! 🤞
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!
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.
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.
Median household income, adjusted for inflation, is up ~25% (despite the narrative).
Now do housing education and healthcare
30 years ago we THOUGHT we had a future.
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.
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.
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.
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.
