We (As a Society) Peaked in the 90s

Tracker music was always a hobbyist thing, with a few exceptions. Not really relevant in the greater music scene.

But digitally produced music was of course a huge thing in the 90s. Countless genres of electronic music – techno, trance, house, whatever have you, all of that made on computers. And of course pop was almost all synth – digital synth – just like today.

Yup that's the thing: it's not only people who lived that era who do wish they could live in it today.

I never wanted to live in the post-WW II late 40s/50s: maybe the sixties though. For honestly the late 40s and 50s looked incredibly dull. Just dull: movies were dull, acting was dumb, music was mostly pathetic save for a few exceptions.

The boomers really lived the absolute dullest, naive, era and nobody fantasizes on it.

There's never been a teenager from the 80s or 90s saying: "Oh wow, I so wish I lived in the 50s". That's not a thing.

And yet I see many young persons asking me, today, about the 80s and 90s. They like some of the music (sure, some were cheesy but it wasn't the uber dull pathetic stuff from the 50s: not to mention the incredible poor recordings unless you were as successful as Elvis Presley) and they definitely enjoy some of the epic movies. And the cars: many twenty-agers do love cars from the 80s and 90s.

They understand it was pretty much today's world, but less soul-sucking.

Quality of life has a lot to do with how you choose to spend your time.

I know lots of people that have no idea what Reddit is. They’ve never had a Facebook account.

Those aren’t happenstances - they are the result of the choice on what they spend their time doing.

I’m not surprised people who spend most of their time exposed to the rage bait that fills social media think the world is falling apart. Especially if you’re not aware that it’s not an accurate or balanced view of reality.

Agreed. Though I hated it at the time, in retrospect I am grateful for how often I was bored, growing up in the 80s and 90s. I'm sure I owe my career to it, I started programming computers from a lack of anything else to do.

I think about this issue a lot too, and while I think everyone calling out that these feelings are cyclical, and choosing a decade of that persons own life means that it's just nostalgia has validity, but I also think that, there is probably truth to the idea that our cultural peak is behind us. Some Cultural historians would probably put it some time in the 17 and 1800's when we were building cathedrals and making classical music.

I've become something of a cultural conservative, thinking that most significant cultural lessons, the ways to live the good life can be learned by looking behind us.

There are probably multiple peaks though, and I think a peak in the late 20th century is one of them. I think the 20th century in and of itself will probably always be considered a peak, or significant and the reason is the invention of the motion picture and the way motion picture technology evolved over those 100 years. Our image of ourself as a society will never have quite the evolution you get from having like low fps black and white imagery early in the 20th century, to basically 4k sci-fi like the Matrix in 1999.

But I think the like Stranger Things running around on bicycles, getting to experience the birth of modern technology, sort of a combination of maximal freedom and maximal aesthetic experience, shared cultural touchstones and while not yet introducing social media and post-9/11 anxiety is a signifcant cultural peak.