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There were definitely other gen Xers who did not experience the same optimistic 90s you speak of. To many of us, the changes after 9/11 were merely the surfacin

There were definitely other gen Xers who did not experience the same optimistic 90s you speak of. To many of us, the changes after 9/11 were merely the surfacing of a darkness we already knew within our world and our nation. There was already a malaise from the 80s and a sense of a disneyesque veneer covering shameful realities. To be clear, I am not trying to invalidate your memory, but only address your opening aside about where it might come from. There was certainly more than one experience of gen X and more than one experience of the 90s...

api 6y ago
Yeah, this stuff always comes with "your mileage may vary." What I remember is a lot of very optimistic ideas being discussed openly without a lot of cynicism or irony. Go find some old Mondo 2000 or other early-mid 90s futurist material. I also remember a wave of new technology people could touch and interact with: the PC and Internet revolutions. Shiny starships are awesome but I will probably never ride in one. The 80s-90s was also the last era of musical innovation. If you include the 80s too there was: hip hop / rap, drum and bass, techno/rave and all its variant genres, grunge, shoegaze, dreampop, math rock, new wave, synth rock, I could keep going... Since 2001: very little except slight variations on the above and reboots of older forms. For some reason music totally collapsed after 2001. I've toyed around with economic interpretations but ultimately it feels like there's some psychological wall there. We can't think of anything new.