[mulmen]

Between those two, young in a good time for sure. But really, just young in a time. Essentially none of the issues we face today are new in the last 20 years. You were just less aware of them then.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1999

[jeegsy]

> You were just less aware of them then

True, but with the near instant access to records of events via the Internet, we should try to maintain a distinction between what we remember/experienced and the digital chronicles of the era. I get the feeling that this is going to be even more critical going forward.

[mulmen]

Sure but in 1999 you had access to the Internet. You were just using it to download mp3s instead of find out how many people got blown up in a synagogue halfway around the world. Not to single you out because I was doing the same thing. Also there's clearly more information on the internet today, but we also use it differently. Social media did change how we consume information and created feedback loops we didn't (specifically) have in 1999.

I think you have hit on something very important to internalize though. We tend to look at the past, and especially our youth, through rose tinted glasses. It's important to maintain a realistic perspective on history as it relates to the current day, especially because we know more about the past now than we did then.

My mom thinks the 1960s were a wonderful time to be a kid because that's when she was a kid. She might be right, but I struggle to say civilization was better in 1960 than in 1990 or even 2020. It's all a matter of perspective.

To put it another way if we think the world was best in our youth we probably also think it went to hell when we became adults and started looking around.

[DaiPlusPlus]

I’m not aware of any raging worldwide pandemic like we have today though - not in anyone’s lifetimes going back a few generations.

[asveikau]

HIV/AIDS probably fits the bill or comes close. It doesn't seem as drastic as covid, because of the means of transmission. However, it was newly discovered in many living people's lifetime, and it did spread throughout the entire world relatively quickly.

The others that I remember being scary in media reports contemporaneous with the Winamp-ish era were Ebola (discovered in the '70s, an outbreak in '95), and SARS (2003), but thankfully those never spread worldwide.

[DaiPlusPlus]

> HIV/AIDS probably fits the bill or comes close. It doesn't seem as drastic as covid, because of the means of transmission

Actually, I take back what I said. Looking back at the perception of HIV/Aids (or "GRID" was it was originally known) it's terrifying in context because for a number of years there wasn't any idea about the nature of the disease nor how it spread - whereas with Covid we were able to narrow-down the virus' means of transmission within months.

[tpmx]

https://www.unaids.org/en/resources/fact-sheet

> 32.7 million [24.8 million–42.2 million] people have died from AIDS-related illnesses since the start of the epidemic.

Hopefully covid-19 could end up causing ~10x fewer deaths.

[asveikau]

When you put it that way, my comment looks pretty insensitive for trying to hedge. Of course HIV/AIDS counts for this!

[tpmx]

I didn't intend to put you on the spot. I was equally surprised when I looked up the numbers. I knew HIV/AIDS death numbers were bad, but not that bad.

And as an FYI, from the same UN site (abridged): Yearly HIV/AIDS deaths have been reduced by 60% since the peak in 2004. In 2019: 690k deaths. In 2004: 1.7M deaths.

Things weren't necessarily better in the past.

Technology and science developments help! It's not all tech gloom.