| HN Mirror

So this is a mixed bag.

I definitely agree that some conditions went undiagnosed or weren't even considered a disorder. Teachers who deal with autistic children will often tell you that there's almost this game of figuring out which parent has undiagnosed autism. 20-30+ years ago someone was just really into trains.

Going back further the baby boomer generation absolutely had a host of undiagnosed and untreated mental health issues, in part because they were raised by the generation who survived the Great Depression and WW2. Generational trauma is absolutely real.

And yes, there was (and is) a lot of self-medication that creates alcoholism and addiction issues.

While all that's true, a lot of my people my age or older (who were adults in the 90s) describe the 90s as the last great decade and there's lots of reasons for this.

First, the Cold War had ended. In the 1980s and earlier you had this ever-present threat of annihilation hanging over you. Go back even further and American schoolchildren would be doing duck-and-cover drills. I guess that's been replaced by active shooter drills. Oh yeah, school shootings weren't a thing yet either (until 1999).

Second, I cannot describe how different air travel was pre-9/11 if you didn't experience it. You see this in older TV shows and movies where non-passengers go up to the gates. Of course that doesn't happen anymore but it did.

Third, the cost of living relative to your income was unbelievable better. I remember paying $80 per week for a 2 bedroom apartment. The average house price in London was 70,000 pounds (now 700,000+). A friend told me about his college friends who lived in Iowa in a 4 bedroom house for $175 per month where they all lived very comfortably on $13,000 per year.

Fourth, crime (particularly urban crime) began to recede. There's a lot of speculation on why this happened. The two leading theories I believe are either it coinciding with 18 years after Roe v. Wade was handed down or that it's related to removing lead from gasoline. Politically, the crime hysteria shows how short our memories are. Look at any charts that go back 30+ years, not 3.

There was bad stuff too. We had Reagan and Thatcher in the 1980s. The 1990s was when New Deal Democrats gave way to Third Way Democrats ending 60+ years of near-total dominance (Republicans had held the House in 1952). We saw the 1994 Crime bill and the start of mass incarceration. Clinton and Blair completed the destruction of the labor movement and embraced (disastrous) public-private partnerships. The AIDS epidemic was in full swing still.

I do wonder how different this might've been if we had the access to information we have today.

Material conditions really peaked in the 1970s and have been going downhill ever since in real terms. The crazy thing is people who fetishize the 1950s and "traditional" life seem to forget the top marginal tax rate then was 90%.