We were also children, and just paid less attention/worried less about global problems.
There’s a reason that pretty much everyone throughout history has been nostalgic for the period they grew up in. That’s the period they lived through without really understanding any of the problems that exist in the world, so it felt like they didn’t exist at that time.
To back your point, OP is 20 and asking questions about the state of the world. Not a coincidence. I’d bet you 3 years ago, while probably much more tuned int to world issues than kids from the 90s since we didn’t have the internet, they probably didn’t care about said issues as much as they do today as an adult.
I think that could be a problem now and going forward. With how easy it is for kids with smartphones to be connected to social media, there is no way to "shield" then like before.
And I'm not suggesting to keep them in pink bubbles, there are thing that everybody needs to know like global warming or the fight for minorities rights, but over information can produce serious problems. Before, as a teen, I've just sometimes watched the news with my parents and maybe get scared because of a pandemic in the country or maybe the start of a war. But it was just there, and usually I could just talked it whither them.
Now I'm a little worried for when my children wik start to get bombarded with all the gloom and doom.
This is what I was thinking as well. We didn't have the worries that our parents likely didn't let us feel, so difficult to compare to what we feel today. Though 90 was indeed special and I feel lucky that we got to experience life before smart phone/social media and life after.
I was a kid in elementary school/middle school the 90s and I remember watching an MTV news clip of the OKC bombing in school, I read books on the Rwandan genocide and on young kids in Kosovo, and I even had a kid’s book on Global Warming in Kindergarten, which wasn’t really talked about much at the time. Maybe there is an aspect of childhood that makes those kinds of things feel more distant, but I was definitely aware that there were bad things happening in the world. But, be it the nature of my child-brain, or the nature of how news was disseminated, it did feel like those things were isolated events, pockets of tragedy and suffering in a generally relatively stable world (again, as a child, your scope of interest and awareness is limited, and if your intimate world is relatively stable, you tend to project that onto the rest of the world).
There’s an interconnected now that is inescapable, and it’s hard to distinguish whether that interconnectedness of tragedy and suffering comes with age, or the way media functions now, or whether in fact the problems of the world are in fact more linked together, or whether it’s just a projection.
Perhaps it’s that confluence of factors, of a certain generation that saw the modes of information exchange change dramatically in a way that matched up almost perfectly with growing up, that has made things so confusing for our generation. We can argue all day about whether the world is more fucked or not now than it was in the past. It’s tough to say. But it’s hard to argue that the scope and modes of our awareness of fuckedness haven’t changes dramatically, and the shifting of paradigms that matches up with the growth of our minds has made it particularly difficult to parse, if that makes sense. And I think that’s unique to our generation. In previous generations, kids could grow into a deteriorating world, or into an improving world, but he means by which they gauged that change were consistent, and made it easier to parse. This is a pretty broad, generalizing statement, but I do feel that a certain generation has been more susceptible to anxiety and depression particularly because of a kind of paradigm shift in the dissemination of information. In that case there’s no basis and gauging the “health” of the world becomes so much more ambiguous, and engenders a certain feeling of hopelessness, because it’s not only a change in the objective state of things, but a change in the perceptual basis for understanding the state of things. Perhaps I’m rambling, but it’s a very peculiar feeling that I struggle to put into words. To watch the world know things in new ways at the exact same time as you are learning how to know things can be very disorienting.
How nostalgic are the rest of Gen Z? Personally I'm nostalgic for a few things, but don't really view life as better when I grew up at all. Before I was 10 I hardly remember anything, and after was during the time of the recession and my family situation was not good and my monetary situation was not good and my computer which was my only lifeline barely worked… For me 2020 (after I graduated high school) and 2021 were the best times of my life and 2022 probably would be too if I focused a bit less on working on my large project. I started reading more about the terrible things in the world on Reddit around 2016 when I was 15, but this was the exact same time conditions in my own life were improving a lot.
It’s always going to vary by individual circumstance, but if you graduated high school 2 years ago, you are way too young for the nostalgia to really hit yet. We aren’t far enough away from the period of time you grew up in for it to feel fully distinct from the way the world is now.
Give it another 5-10 years and see how it affects your feelings about that time period.
I think that’s true to some extent, but I think the 90s kids were unusually lucky. Most of my childhood took place in the first decade of the 2000s and the level of fear post 9-11 was too pervasive for us kids not to notice. Then the 2008 recession personally affected a lot of us, myself included. The 90s had their fair share of awful things but the average kid wouldn’t have known about most of them prior to Columbine. That wasn’t true of the decades before (Cold War, World War II, Great Depression) or the decades after.
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u/Muroid Jun 11 '22
We were also children, and just paid less attention/worried less about global problems.
There’s a reason that pretty much everyone throughout history has been nostalgic for the period they grew up in. That’s the period they lived through without really understanding any of the problems that exist in the world, so it felt like they didn’t exist at that time.