I think in the 90’s, people were just a single digit number of years removed from the end of the Cold War, just a few decades removed from the Great Leap Forwar

I think in the 90’s, people were just a single digit number of years removed from the end of the Cold War, just a few decades removed from the Great Leap Forward, another few decades from the holocaust and gulags, not to mention WW2, which had a combat death toll that is just utterly unimaginable today, but which was comparable to WW1, just a few decades before that. Then there was the Spanish Flu in there. That just barely covers the past hundred years, but there were a ton of people alive in the 90’s who had lived through all of that. Anyone born since the late 80’s has lived through basically nothing like that. Certainly, lots of bad stuff has happened in the meanwhile, but in my opinion, nothing that remotely approaches WW2 or the Great Leap Forward as far as death and destruction, and I think it’s hard to argue that anything like that is more likely to happen in the future than it was in the 90’s (which also gave us attempted genocide in former Yugoslavia and Rwanda). I think people in the 90’s were informed, but they weren’t bombarded with negativity the way people are today. That’s not because there wasn’t negativity around. I don’t remember where I saw it, but someone had a post about how far the Overton window has shifted in politics, and compared quotes from Bill Clinton on immigration in the 90’s to quotes from modern day Republicans (if I recall, they sound almost identical) to emphasize just how much our sensibilities have changed, which was another illustration for me of how our perception of the nearness of dystopia is not necessarily very accurate.