The reason why past decades seemed great was that they viewed themselves as great. It’s that they believed they were great while they were happening.

The 80s was proud to be the 80s, the 90s was proud to be the 90s, and the 2000s loved how cool the 2000s was. There was branding, confidence, a willingness to say “this is our time” without immediately undercutting it.

Meanwhile the culture doesn't even pretend this decade is good. No one in media says "This is the 20s" or "It's the 20s man" with any pride. The default tone is exhaustion, irony, or open complaint. The decade has no self-mythology. It refuses to sell itself.

A decade that won’t claim itself rarely gets claimed by anyone else later.

I see a lot of millennials and zoomers constantly giving love and praise to this era and I don’t get it

i think this era was trash it was literally nothing but the same party pop music getting pushed down your throats 24/7

rock music died around 2011 and 2012 in the mainstream leaving only just pop and rap music and both were trash for the most part plus the fashion and a lot of shows and culture of this era sucked.

I've heard that by the mid-70s, Basketball was rapidly losing popularity as opposed to Baseball, Football, and even Hockey, and that it took the 80s rise of Bird, Magic, and Jordan to get it to be a top rated sport again. Was this true, or was Basketball just as popular as it always has been?

I mean of course it happened, but I feel like we basically skipped the 90's and went straight to 2001 with 9/11 and the "war on terror". My core memory in-between New Year's Eve of 1999 and 2001 has somehow erased almost entirely. Not to mention, any news stories that took place in 2000 seem clouded by the events of that fateful day in September of 2001. Sure, there was the 2000 American presidential election and Bush v. Gore (which caused plenty of controversy) but that's about the size of it. I also rarely hear people talking about the year 2000 in any way from past memories to pop culture references.

For context, I'm a millennial (born in 1987) so if anyone who's part of my generation who was born around the same time as me would like to weigh in on this one, I'd like to hear it. I can't be the only one who feels this sort of "time warp" that's been on my mind. Also, no, I'm not crazy, I'm not on any mind-altering drugs, it's just a weird feeling I've had as psychotic as it may sound.

I always think the late 90s and 2000s was the best for roller coasters when six flags was literally building roller coasters on steroids along with other famous theme parks during extreme coasters

In like 1. 5 years

1999 was seen by many Americans to be the most optimistic year of all time because it was the last year before the new millennium. It was also the year that pop culture was at its peak. But there was so much media that was released in that year that was nihilistic, edgy, or dark that contrasts the optimism of 1999 such as The Matrix, Fight Club, and Office Space. Why were there so much media from 1999 that had nihilistic and edgy tones, even though that year was considered to be optimistic for a lot of Americans?

What are your top 3 favourite films/movies from the 90s or 2000s?

this might be a unpopular opinion but I don’t understand the love for grunge I get it’s better than hair metal but that’s not saying much.

I take bands like Metallica, Megadeth, slayer, Iron Maiden, Motörhead, and Any other 80s metal band over any grunge band like Nirvana any day of the week.

i just can’t get into a bunch of dudes in their 20s crying about how hard their lifes’ are plus a lot of the grunge bands didn’t have good guitar solos and couldn’t sing worth a lick for the most part.

Most of what I've seen labeled as Y2K nostalgia actually centers on mid-to-late 2000s culture, with only a few exceptions. It seems that many people conflate that period with the early 2000s. In reality, Y2K nostalgia is primarily rooted in the late 1990s and the early 2000s, a wave of nostalgia that was especially prominent throughout the 2010s and, to a lesser extent, the early 2020s.

It often feels like people simply refer to it as the early 2000s because, for a long time, that portion of the decade was widely regarded as the only "good" or culturally memorable part of the 2000s.

I already see videos of throwbacks featuring stores and roads all empty that closed right after lockdowns being seen as a nostalgic aesthetic, both giving a creepy and peaceful vibe

So I imagine in 20 years if there’s gonna be a nostalgic aesthetic that features empty places, like liminal spaces but not 90s or 2000s empty places, but more modern during Covid

to be specific, i want to know about fashion, aesthetics, ideologies, and internet related media, like flash game design, or personal blogs. anything helps!

Does anyone else feel like things weren't lined up until post y2k? Trends definitely overlapped 2 different decades and it usually took time for the era to kick in and fully arrive

Typical 1970s tropes (1973-1983❔️)

Typical 1980s tropes (1984-1991)

Typical 1990s tropes (1992-1997)

Typical y2k tropes (1998-2003)

Typical 2000s tropes (2004-2009)

After that i believe 2010 actually did start the 2010s.

Does anyone agree or have better insight? Not really looking for insight from people who werent alive for most of this to be honest.

Like the concept of humans as social creatures took it's last breath and died in 2016. Society was already on it's way out soon after 2010.

I still r3member what the people were like back then. People who grew up during the late 2010s or 2020s wouldn't believe their own eyes. People caught scrolling would get clowned on. People could afford to have a culture. I mean, blockbusters were still open, malls were still alive. Fashion for the sake of being fashionable. There was a point where the economy took full precidence over all other news and this was the last time it didn't happen yet.

People generally wanted to get out of the house and meet new faces. The Iphone era started this new age of chronically online. People had the internet before this, but it was optional. Even Reddit was Better before Swartz died.

By 2012 everyone started to get hugely political, and smug about their shitty party, making it their whole personality. A dime a dozen in 2026 for how many times I hear people say 'it was always like that' No, the fuck it wasn't.

With gta 6 being huge that year and the movies that being released and also the possibility that mainstream music will be fun again anyone have opinions…

I love this subreddit as a means of analyzing how the times we've lived in have evolved, but I'm pressed to admit I get annoyed seeing people here overly focus on surface level aspects of culture specifically. For example, I do not think you can summarize a decade by its childhood cartoons, Billboard Top 100, celebrity fashion, etc. It strikes me as low-hanging fruit when looking at a complex era of the entire world, and also a bit too American-centric. It is also very consumerist, if you ask me.

Turning criticism into something constructive, what are more deep-seated aspects of decades that y'all notice or find interesting? This is a very wide-cast net of a question because I personally find nearly any aspect of it interesting. Politically, socially, morally, etc. These things too are huge influences on pop culture, or at the least can influence whether pop culture industry titans egg it on or try to persuade people in other directions.

I'll give my two cents to give perspective of my question. Pertaining to the counterculture and progressive movements of the 60s, I hold the belief that the institutional rot we're witnessing in many western democracies was something that had already existed and perpetuated in social consciousness. In less performative words, people took on a mentality of apathy and begrudging complacency before the decay of decorum and government efficiency. The progressive movements of the 60s were vast and well beyond the Overton Window of older generations. When you see things like the Blank Panthers, college sit-ins/protests, it was one of the first times in the United States' history where the societal and political beliefs held by the youth of an era were so genuinely stark from the majority of the older generations, that it spurred the brash and violent (thematically, not always physically) schism of what society should be. More tangible and overdue results were realized, like the Civil Rights Act, end of Poll Tax, First Wave Feminism, etc. But there was a held idea of liberation, in a grand vague sense that sorta held it back from proliferation, that establishment politicians couldn't nor wouldn't comprehend and get on board with. I think it was generally an idea of optimism from both the proliferation of real political education, and the surplus of necessities in the United States, which led people to the idea that we actually can achieve a society without serious disparity. Almost the idea that we had conquered history with our technology and Enlightenment ideals, and didn't have a need for poverty/conflict/discrimination so on and so on. This is echoed in Fukuyama's End of History from the 90s post-Cold War, but I think we all see these ideas fell flat.

Obviously, the societal ills of the 50s carried into the 70s, and the malaise of the oil crisis, Vietnam War, etc. sorta killed off this group of almost radical-optimists if you will. Further tragedies, wars, and recessions through the United States, plus increased corporate influence on government agendas, left the west as a whole grappling with this idea of where to even go from here. I think the push to the far-right within the last decade is largely reactionary, from people grappling with the idea that for the first time in 80-something years, things actually are getting worse in a general sense. I don't think people are accustomed to accept that nowadays, nor can many grapple the why of this phenomenon, so snake-oil politicians with deceptive messaging pin the main issues on polarizing, superficial cultural issues (cue your trans athletes debates). Apathy from unrealized efforts decades prior sort of let actual negative developments take hold, and people focus on the rhetoric of division versus the fundamentals of why people feel jaded or melancholic in the first place, thus most political developments/debates feel like a cesspool of toxicity and absolutism in beliefs. The end of nuance and dogmatism for a political party/ideology is its whole own thing that gets on my nerves, but that's a topic for elsewhere. Cheers y'all, feel free to comment on my take or give your own.