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.
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.
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 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.
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.
Yes, everyone will say “civil rights improved”
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, 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.
Implying that the CRT has yet to be improved upon in any material sense. (Okay, maybe in terms of weight.)
Tap for spoiler
I am (mostly) joking by the way
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.
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…
we used ball mice that constantly needed to be cleaned.
I still use one. Though, it is the Logitech Trackball, but it still needs to be cleaned, like the old school mice.
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.
We had that back then too. We just didn’t know about it.
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.
Can you imagine <pick a thing> back then? Your neighbor could light up and there was nothing you could do but sit there and stew in the smoke stream
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).
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”.
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.
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.
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!
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
Do you have any other fruits with medical tech?
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.
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.
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!
30 years ago we had a future to look to
You were less cynical, I remember people in the 90s saying the world was shit and getting worse, that there was no future.
the unshittified internet
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.
great music
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.
affordable land/housing
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.
affordable durable cars
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 actually interacted in real life
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 trash
No social media at all, social media is not 100% bad, you’re using one now
Now, we have billionaires
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.
and LLMs.
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.
I don’t see how anyone can possibly think times are better or going to improve.
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.
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. :(
Ohhhh shit. Good luck with treatment
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
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.
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
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.
