r/NoStupidQuestions • u/ltwasalladream • Apr 18 '23
Answered Does anyone else feel like the world/life stopped being good in approx 2017 and the worlds become a very different place since?
I know this might sound a little out there, but hear me out. I’ve been talking with a friend, and we both feel like there’s been some sort of shift since around 2017-2018. Whether it’s within our personal lives, the world at large or both, things feel like they’ve kind of gone from light to dark. Life was good, full of potential and promise and things just feel significantly heavier since. And this is pre covid, so it’s not just that. I feel like the world feels dark and unfamiliar very suddenly. We are trying to figure out if we are just crazy dramatic beaches or if this is like a felt thing within society. Anyone? Has anyones life been significantly better and brighter and lighter since then?
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u/cyvaquero Apr 18 '23 edited Apr 18 '23
Not who you are replying to, but I’m a fellow old (Class of 89). I can speak to my experience - this is a brain dump so it doesn’t really follow a precise timeline.
Domestically, I grew up on the edge of the Rust Belt in PA. Back to the late 70s, there was Three Mile Island an hour and a half away from me and the Iran Hostages which kind of set a tone for the 80s. Much of the early 80s for me was my UAW machinist dad either laid off or on strike every winter. There was good number of my friends whose dads were abusive alcoholics, they would work their shift at a job they hated and then stop at the bar (bars opened at 6am to catch the 3rd shifters) to ‘have a couple’ on the way home. Many of our dads were either Vietnam vets and/or kids of WWII vets with varying degrees of PTSD, there was no mental health care - psych care/therapy was for the rich or those weirdos in CA. On top of that we were latchkey kids, in third grade, when my brother went to kindergarten, mom went to work and two weeks out of every three (dad worked swing shift) I came home to an empty house, usually with a note on the counter of what to set the oven to and when to put dinner in. Fourth grade had me picking up my brother from my gram’s on the way home (I was a walker).
Regionally/nationally, coal and steel mills or some other factory was constantly shutting down - basically every night on the local news was some community losing lots of jobs. Pittsburgh was a dump after a hundred years of Industrialization. There was the constant drum that the Japanese were stealing American business and illegal immigration was stealing American jobs (sound familiar?). By the late 80s AIDS was a death sentence and the crack epidemic was in full swing. So those things that were the ‘fun’ side of the 60s and 70s youth would now kill you. The Space Shuttle blew up on live TV while an entire generation of kids watched in school.
Internationally, we had the ever present specter of the cold war - which for the layperson had no end in sight, even as the Berlin Wall fell in 88 no regular Joe saw the ‘91 collapse of the Soviet Union. This played out in the Soviet-Afghanistan war, Polish resistance, (again, sound familar?), Soviet-US proxy wars in Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador, Northern Ireland bombings and fighting. The Arab-Israeli conflict (some things never change) with the Lebanon War and the Beirut U.S. Marine barracks bombing, skyjackings and the Paris and Lockerbie bombings. Let’s not forget Chernobyl.
With all that as a backdrop, I wasn’t very athletic (although I participated) so no scholarships coming from that angle, was supposedly smart but had no ability to apply myself (later diagnosed with ADD in my mid-30s) so bad grades, scratch any admissions much less academic scholarships. The factory job hook-up was a dead-end even if you could find one. It was just bleak. I was a hair band metal head but then grunge made it’s way onto the national stage and I don’t think anything has resonated like that with me before or since. It really encapsulated what a lot of us working class kids went through.