The Iron Curtain had fallen; there was hope for Russia to become a democracy, and the weight of living in fear of dying in a nuclear war was lifted. China was becoming, perhaps not democratic, but at least economically liberal.
The economy was doing reasonably well for most people - it wasn't the high inflation of the eighties, and 2008 was not yet on the horizon. It wasn't yet the two-level economy that it became - if you were lower class, there was still a plausible route to the middle class.
AIDS was becoming manageable rather than a death sentence. Climate change wasn't really on people's radar as a real worry yet - there wasn't a sense of doom about it.
There was still hope that technology would free and empower us rather than enslave us.
And no, I wasn't a teenager or in my early twenties. Though I did have a pretty sweet life then...
For the international stuff, that's possible. Still... Russia wasn't an adversary yet, even in the early 00s. Neither was China. Nobody was building bomb shelters and doomsday retreat bunkers.
People were definitely building bomb shelters and doomsday retreat bunkers in the aughts, although they were signifiers of adherence to a particular political outlook.
There was definitely a sense that US hegemony would not be contested by a rival great power, but there was also widespread belief that that hegemony would be undermined and chipped away at by a million insurgent groups and terror cells. IIRC a rivalry with China was speculative and sometimes dismissed as fanciful within the foreseeable future, but we had literal terrorism response drills at my high school. We currently live in the craziest possible international arena, but it's not like the Bush years were some utopia by comparison.
The OP doesn't claim the it was the peak of humanity, the claim is much tighter than that: it was the perfect balance of technology usage.
Almost universally, any time closer to today is better for most people in most ways than a previous time. But there are exceptions -- prehistoric hunter/gatherer lifestyle is superior in several ways to the modern one, but the risk of dying early in a horrible way is high enough that it's not true overall.
Should we live more like cavemen in very constrained specific ways? Probably. Do we want to force 8 billion people to starve to death by returning to that life? Heck no.
Similar, there are likely small parts of the 2000's that are better than today. That doesn't mean the 2000's are the peak of humanity.
"Almost universally, any time closer to today is better for most people in most ways than a previous time"
Wind that back 20 years. Yeah we got cheaper computing. Luxury items got cheaper, necessities got more expensive. I can make do with a 2010 think pad, but my rent is cooked and I'll never own a house. I'd rather be born in the 70s than the 90s.
20 years ago the average house cost 7-8.5 times the average income (cf 5X today). 2006 was the worst time to buy a house in America, ever. It was an exceptionally bad time because prices collapsed in 2008 and anybody buying in 2006 would have been seriously underwater.
You know what else you had in 2006? Loans, without jumping through hoops. "Being underwater" is the kind of thing people say when they look at their home as a thing they intend to make money reselling later. If you want to own the place you live, then you want easily-acquired loans and available inventory. It doesn't matter what someone else thinks it's worth, as long as you can pay your note.
You seem to have rose glasses for the actual situation. Many of those people with easily acquired loans have lost everything since the terms of the loans were as easily changed in 2009 and they could no longer afford the payments
Those loans are the only reason many elder millenials managed to own property at all. Not all of the loans given in that era were ARMs or otherwise amenable to modification; many were regular old fixed-rate mortgages.
What is truly unfortunate is that even if there was an objective way of looking at history, people would just dismiss it as "oh, shut up, it's just nostalgia." Being unable to be objective doesn't invalidate the argument.
So what if the early 2000s were, in fact, the peak of humanity? It doesn't seem so absurd when teenage people today rediscover 90s/2000s fashion and are nostalgic for an era they have never lived in. When I was a teenager in the 2000s I didn't give a rat's arse about the 80s, they felt old and stale and with terrible hairdos. Yet today young people yearn for the 00s aesthetic [1] than whatever sanitised corporate hell we live in today.
Maybe people aren't nostalgic for their teenage years in particular, but for a world that wasn't ruled by the Internet and computers. When the Internet wasn't an infinite plane of corporate capitalism ruling the world, coercing people to jack in the hamster wheel every minute of their lives through their smartphones.
1: provided you are in the same algorithmic bubble of mine full of late teens/early adult people finding joy in analog experiences away from technology.
I, too, often think of the early 2000s as the peak of humanity. But I find it's important to recognize when your judgment is being clouded by nostalgia, especially the extremely well-known and extensively documented bias to see how things were when you were in your early adult years as the way things ought to be in perpetuity.
There were a lot of things that sucked about tech in that era! It was literally when pets.com ads blanketed the airwaves. (edited to add: And more specifically, I think the exact time the OP is describing was already too far down its current path of ubiquitous social media (remember Friendster, MySpace, LiveJournal, AO3, etc.?) and omnipresent commercial surveillance. The fork point to avoid those fates was probably a decade earlier.)
But I think we can all agree that it is absolutely when music peaked, and pop culture has just gone downhill since then. :)
Wait, are you saying the pets.com era was worse than the current era where websites even more dubious (gambling, prediction markets) are still openly advertised?
You’re saying that the era that sets us down the path of social media is worse than the one today where they rule the world?
Sure, the 2000s weren’t an idyllic time, but the point is that they were much better than today, and likely than earlier due to the technological advances not yet turning out for the worst.
You wouldn't have looked to the 80s, you would have looked to the 70s (maybe punk). The 90s are now 30 years ago, and in the 90s, young people did have false nostalgia for the 60s. "I wish it was the '60s, I wish I could be happy / I wish, I wish, I wish that something would happen"
Most of my friends spent the back half of the 90s railing against corporate culture, bland mass media and bemoaning the shift from early 90s counter-culture to late-90s glossy consumerism. It was a quick skip from Columbine to 9/11 and then into the Iraq war. Absolutely nothing about that time felt like a golden age.
I've known about people born in late 2007 and 2008 "missing" the Windows Aero & Mac Aqua aesthetic and even going to the point of saying that everything was cook back then when they were really young or weren't born yet. Kinda odd but I'd like to know if some other people thought that way about the age they were born
It was a great time for a certain group of people, but if you happened to be black, or gay, or trans, or Muslim, or had a pre-existing medical condition, it was not so rosy.
I was in my late teens / early 20s at the time, and not in any of those groups, but I did not find the late 90s/early 2000s to be particularly "amazing" or objectively great. I wanted to make movies, but film was incredibly expensive, and digital video wasn't yet good enough. I wanted to make ambitious software, but absolutely everything was harder and lower-level back then.
It was harder and more expensive to get something delivered, and before you say that was better and we're all spoiled by Amazon, the net result was that you had to drive all over the city to pick stuff up.
We knew high-speed internet would change things, but it wasn't there yet. The internet kind of sucked (sorry). I remember spending hours on Excite and AltaVista searching for obscure information that now wouldn't be considered obscure in the slightest, and when I finally found something, it was rarely helpful. Don't get me wrong, I have nostalgia for the early internet, but at the time, we all knew it would get better. I wanted every video to look as good as Apple's movie trailer site, and it took about 10 years for that to happen.
There were plenty of good things about that time, but this "good ole days" thinking is dangerous. It's the antithesis of gratitude. It gets in the way of having vision and imagining a better future.
One last thing: all the stuff we "lost" is still here. You can still hand-write a letter. I still play CDs and take photos on 35mm film. People wax poetic about the time before phones, by typing these nostalgic thoughts into their phone. If you hate Instagram, get off Instagram.
Comments
I don’t know the author’s age but suspect this is an entry in the “<my teenage years/early twenties> were the peak of humanity” genre.
Perhaps so, but it was a really nice time.
The Iron Curtain had fallen; there was hope for Russia to become a democracy, and the weight of living in fear of dying in a nuclear war was lifted. China was becoming, perhaps not democratic, but at least economically liberal.
The economy was doing reasonably well for most people - it wasn't the high inflation of the eighties, and 2008 was not yet on the horizon. It wasn't yet the two-level economy that it became - if you were lower class, there was still a plausible route to the middle class.
AIDS was becoming manageable rather than a death sentence. Climate change wasn't really on people's radar as a real worry yet - there wasn't a sense of doom about it.
There was still hope that technology would free and empower us rather than enslave us.
And no, I wasn't a teenager or in my early twenties. Though I did have a pretty sweet life then...
seems like you are confusing early 00s with early 90s
For the international stuff, that's possible. Still... Russia wasn't an adversary yet, even in the early 00s. Neither was China. Nobody was building bomb shelters and doomsday retreat bunkers.
People were definitely building bomb shelters and doomsday retreat bunkers in the aughts, although they were signifiers of adherence to a particular political outlook.
There was definitely a sense that US hegemony would not be contested by a rival great power, but there was also widespread belief that that hegemony would be undermined and chipped away at by a million insurgent groups and terror cells. IIRC a rivalry with China was speculative and sometimes dismissed as fanciful within the foreseeable future, but we had literal terrorism response drills at my high school. We currently live in the craziest possible international arena, but it's not like the Bush years were some utopia by comparison.
the bunkers were due to "gub'mnt gonn get us" in the wake of ruby ridge and waco
weirdos and nutjobs running their cults. not hyper-rich, deepy engaged technical types.
The OP doesn't claim the it was the peak of humanity, the claim is much tighter than that: it was the perfect balance of technology usage.
Almost universally, any time closer to today is better for most people in most ways than a previous time. But there are exceptions -- prehistoric hunter/gatherer lifestyle is superior in several ways to the modern one, but the risk of dying early in a horrible way is high enough that it's not true overall.
Should we live more like cavemen in very constrained specific ways? Probably. Do we want to force 8 billion people to starve to death by returning to that life? Heck no.
Similar, there are likely small parts of the 2000's that are better than today. That doesn't mean the 2000's are the peak of humanity.
"Almost universally, any time closer to today is better for most people in most ways than a previous time"
Wind that back 20 years. Yeah we got cheaper computing. Luxury items got cheaper, necessities got more expensive. I can make do with a 2010 think pad, but my rent is cooked and I'll never own a house. I'd rather be born in the 70s than the 90s.
20 years ago the average house cost 7-8.5 times the average income (cf 5X today). 2006 was the worst time to buy a house in America, ever. It was an exceptionally bad time because prices collapsed in 2008 and anybody buying in 2006 would have been seriously underwater.
Well I live in Australia. The situation is quite different.
You know what else you had in 2006? Loans, without jumping through hoops. "Being underwater" is the kind of thing people say when they look at their home as a thing they intend to make money reselling later. If you want to own the place you live, then you want easily-acquired loans and available inventory. It doesn't matter what someone else thinks it's worth, as long as you can pay your note.
You seem to have rose glasses for the actual situation. Many of those people with easily acquired loans have lost everything since the terms of the loans were as easily changed in 2009 and they could no longer afford the payments
Those loans are the only reason many elder millenials managed to own property at all. Not all of the loans given in that era were ARMs or otherwise amenable to modification; many were regular old fixed-rate mortgages.
In the US, adjustable rate is extremely rare in general. I had never even heard of them until my 30s in threads like these.
From the literal title of the article:
First sentence there-after:
Titles are almost always over-simplified clickbait and frequently contradict the article.
Looking at his linkedin he went to college in 2008 so must have been about 13 at the "sweet spot was somewhere around 2003".
What is truly unfortunate is that even if there was an objective way of looking at history, people would just dismiss it as "oh, shut up, it's just nostalgia." Being unable to be objective doesn't invalidate the argument.
So what if the early 2000s were, in fact, the peak of humanity? It doesn't seem so absurd when teenage people today rediscover 90s/2000s fashion and are nostalgic for an era they have never lived in. When I was a teenager in the 2000s I didn't give a rat's arse about the 80s, they felt old and stale and with terrible hairdos. Yet today young people yearn for the 00s aesthetic [1] than whatever sanitised corporate hell we live in today.
Maybe people aren't nostalgic for their teenage years in particular, but for a world that wasn't ruled by the Internet and computers. When the Internet wasn't an infinite plane of corporate capitalism ruling the world, coercing people to jack in the hamster wheel every minute of their lives through their smartphones.
1: provided you are in the same algorithmic bubble of mine full of late teens/early adult people finding joy in analog experiences away from technology.
I, too, often think of the early 2000s as the peak of humanity. But I find it's important to recognize when your judgment is being clouded by nostalgia, especially the extremely well-known and extensively documented bias to see how things were when you were in your early adult years as the way things ought to be in perpetuity.
There were a lot of things that sucked about tech in that era! It was literally when pets.com ads blanketed the airwaves. (edited to add: And more specifically, I think the exact time the OP is describing was already too far down its current path of ubiquitous social media (remember Friendster, MySpace, LiveJournal, AO3, etc.?) and omnipresent commercial surveillance. The fork point to avoid those fates was probably a decade earlier.)
But I think we can all agree that it is absolutely when music peaked, and pop culture has just gone downhill since then. :)
Wait, are you saying the pets.com era was worse than the current era where websites even more dubious (gambling, prediction markets) are still openly advertised?
You’re saying that the era that sets us down the path of social media is worse than the one today where they rule the world?
Sure, the 2000s weren’t an idyllic time, but the point is that they were much better than today, and likely than earlier due to the technological advances not yet turning out for the worst.
No, I didn’t say anything of the sort.
You wouldn't have looked to the 80s, you would have looked to the 70s (maybe punk). The 90s are now 30 years ago, and in the 90s, young people did have false nostalgia for the 60s. "I wish it was the '60s, I wish I could be happy / I wish, I wish, I wish that something would happen"
Most of my friends spent the back half of the 90s railing against corporate culture, bland mass media and bemoaning the shift from early 90s counter-culture to late-90s glossy consumerism. It was a quick skip from Columbine to 9/11 and then into the Iraq war. Absolutely nothing about that time felt like a golden age.
Doubt that Gen Z or α will have that opinion
I've known about people born in late 2007 and 2008 "missing" the Windows Aero & Mac Aqua aesthetic and even going to the point of saying that everything was cook back then when they were really young or weren't born yet. Kinda odd but I'd like to know if some other people thought that way about the age they were born
Every generation has their “good ole days.” Unfortunately the old days never were that good for people who were around at the time.
You say that but people of a few different generations in my family all agree the late 90s / early 00s were amazing.
Some romanticise how things were in their childhood, but most would say that the late 90s / early 00s were objective a great time to be alive.
It was a great time for a certain group of people, but if you happened to be black, or gay, or trans, or Muslim, or had a pre-existing medical condition, it was not so rosy.
I was in my late teens / early 20s at the time, and not in any of those groups, but I did not find the late 90s/early 2000s to be particularly "amazing" or objectively great. I wanted to make movies, but film was incredibly expensive, and digital video wasn't yet good enough. I wanted to make ambitious software, but absolutely everything was harder and lower-level back then.
It was harder and more expensive to get something delivered, and before you say that was better and we're all spoiled by Amazon, the net result was that you had to drive all over the city to pick stuff up.
We knew high-speed internet would change things, but it wasn't there yet. The internet kind of sucked (sorry). I remember spending hours on Excite and AltaVista searching for obscure information that now wouldn't be considered obscure in the slightest, and when I finally found something, it was rarely helpful. Don't get me wrong, I have nostalgia for the early internet, but at the time, we all knew it would get better. I wanted every video to look as good as Apple's movie trailer site, and it took about 10 years for that to happen.
There were plenty of good things about that time, but this "good ole days" thinking is dangerous. It's the antithesis of gratitude. It gets in the way of having vision and imagining a better future.
One last thing: all the stuff we "lost" is still here. You can still hand-write a letter. I still play CDs and take photos on 35mm film. People wax poetic about the time before phones, by typing these nostalgic thoughts into their phone. If you hate Instagram, get off Instagram.
That isn't a universal statement. I personally loved the late 90s. Everything was legitimately great.