To think the 90's/early 2000's was when we peaked and everything has gone downhill since due to technology

I agree OP. Mid 90s, from when you could have a mobile, to late 00’s were the best.
Smartphones have utterly ruined humans.
I wish every day I could have had my kids 15 years earlier. Actually so do they. A lot of young people recognise the 90s- 00s period as a golden age and it was.

The 90s did seem quite good. All the shit stuff on the news was happening in other countries far away, and we felt extremely lucky. My dad used to say to me: "What are you going to say to your kids? You'll be saying 'All we had was a fully carpeted house, 2 cars, TV, video and CD player in our bedrooms. But we were happy!'"

Well, this is partially nostalgia. Everyone sees the period when they were young and carefree as the Best Ever. My 81 year old dad is constantly harking back to the 1950s/60s as being great- and I'm sure it was if you were a straight white 18 year old man in London! The flipside to that of course is that any subsequent changes to London - and the UK- in that period he sees as signs of a Terrible Decline From the Golden Age, which has just fed his racism and right wing views.

While I think it's true that there was a period of optimism in the West in the 1990s - traditionally measured between the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and 9/11 in 2001- life still wasn't great if you were a woman, gay or neurodivergent. All those late- diagnosed perimenopausal Gen Xers (me included) were suffering quietly on the sidelines, often being taken advantage of by abusive men, without the widespread knowledge of the power dynamics there is today.

I recently tried to go back and watch Peepshow- always seen as a cool classic- and didn't make it through one episode due to the dated attitudes to women and relationships. I think we forget the widespread sexism and internalised misogyny of the 1990s (or at least we would if we didn't have all those delightful Gen X men clinging on to those attitudes to remind us 🙄).

The mistakes we are currently making now will make the 2020s look good in 20 to 30 years time I fear.

I do think of the late 90s/early '00s as the peak, but largely due to the technology, rather than because there was less of it.

Back then, there were new and fantastic things being invented all the time. Ceramic hair straighteners. Digital cameras. Garmen running watches. Super thin sanitary towels. Flat screen TVs. Eventually, smart phones. It felt like real innovation, and felt within reach of most people.

I can't remember the last time I saw something new, that was going to improve life. In fact, everything is getting lower quality. Appliances break quicker. Innovation has turned to how to make cheaper, shitter versions of things that exist, rather than improve things.

The only exception I can think of is in the car industry, with continuous improvement in safety standards and EVs.

That said, I am in no doubt, that my quality of life now is higher than any previous generation of my family.

No you weren't.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook
Facebook is an American made social networking service owned by the American technology conglomerate Meta. Created in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with four other Harvard College students and roommates, Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz, and Chris Hughes, its name derives from the face book directories often given to American university students. Membership was initially limited to Harvard students, gradually expanding to other North American universities.

You can trace the generational divide to this. The issues it creates long term in terms of economic inequality are very visible.

It's been identified as generally anyone over 47 being significantly better off than anyone under 43, with us Xennials between 43 and 47 being a mixed bag caught in the middle.

(Weirdly if you count 2008 as the beginning of the end, then that also puts 2012 as the end of the end which is the other date really cite).

It's essentially whether you had bought a house before the crash or not. If you did you got more value for money and easier access to a mortgage and therefore weren't as exposed to issues over housing. You are less likely to have had to rent for so long, you are less likely to get caught out by leasehold issues, you are less exposed to issues with stagnant wage growth and the due to when the crash fell (looking at the average age you bought a house in 2007) the numbers of people going to university meant a degree wasn't as important so you didn't have the debt from that either and you had better opportunities if you didn't have the education as you could still start a good career without one.

This also lies along a technology line - Gen X are identified as have an analogue childhood whilst Gen Y are the digital generation.

Again Xennials get stuck in the middle of this. There's a few of us who as early adopters were part of a first wave of understanding how bad the internet was/is but also understand how beneficial it's been to our lives too. So we cross the boundary again between older people who still don't understand the internet and younger people who don't understand life without it.

It's no one thing. 2008 really was the point where the errors of the then Labour government began to become very apparent.

Not preparing and foreseeing the crash (when it was visible incoming from the moon). Not understanding the implications of fifty percent of people going to university with no thought or investment in the other fifty percent. Not taking the revolutionary nature of the internet seriously enough - I was having lectures in 1998 about this. The only public figure I saw say it would be a revolution was a certain David Jones (his interview from the time really stands out on the subject). These are three key issues.

You also get the rise of leasehold ground rent issues starting around this point - you councils refusing to adopt estates so you start getting service charge issues too. They don't really exist for estates built before 2004 but by 2007/8 they were starting to become the default. You also have the impact of poor planning decisions hitting. There was a trend for small ftb homes forced by government policy which led to developers only really building large family home to maximise profits - no thought was given to 'second tier small homes'. We now face issues relating to this as wage to housing price ratios mean families can't afford big houses anymore whilst boomers want to downsize meaning ALL the pressure in the market is on the very type of home that wasn't being built in the late 90s to 2010s. This is one of the reasons we have a 'housing crisis'. We have a shortage of the right type of house not simple a shortage of housing. But it goes back to policy decisions made at this point.

And please do not get me started on the disaster that is PFI. We should have just borrowed more as it'd have been cheaper in the long run and maybe some public services now would have been more fit for purpose. But it made the books at the time look better than they were.

You also have pension issues which go back even further (to the 80s) but by 2008 - 2012 they were starting to have an impact as the boomer generation started to retire. Final Salary Pension schemes were in their death. By 2004 more than 60% had closed with most of those remaining following shortly after. The oldest boomer's were 65 in 2011. Demographically they are the biggest generation in terms of numbers and therefore voting power, so you see a shift away from the most important voting cohort from being workers with income to pensioners with fixed assets. This political has shifted focus away from the interests of the working population. It's a major change in policy focus for political parties chasing votes. It makes it much more difficult politically to address the triple lock. And of course 20 years down the line, the loss of FPS to young people and the unaffordability of Final Pension Schemes has become much more noticeable combined with the stark affluence of those who benefitted from them.

So was the 90s through to 2010s a golden age? I think it was an age of massive errors, mistakes and poor planning we overlook because it was a period of better economic times. It's harder to hide these same type of errors when the economic outlook isn't so great. Many of these errors were fucking obviously going to be long term disaster zones and many people did voice these concerns at the time but were drowned out by those who were after short term gain.

With the benefit of hindsight it really doesn't look as good as you initially believe when you actually start to THINK about it.

I don't think technology is the primary course of problems. I think it brought significant changes that we didn't really well consider but the biggest issues we have now are much more basic and entrenched in other areas of political decision making which are far more traditional and aren't as easy scapegoats. If you are part of the boomer generation it's easier to look to blame technology change than decisions made during your earlier life. If you are part of generation z technology is of course sacrosanct because you don't know any different and it's easy to blame everyone older than you rather than come up with reasonable workable solutions (perhaps because you don't have the life experience to understand the difference between wishful thinking and how the world is interconnected).

@Galdos how, I thought facebook launched in the mid 00s in the UK?!

In the mid to late 90s I was tasked with monitoring what people posted on Facebook … the drivel and madness was depressing, and I’ve not looked much at Facebook since! Mumsnet seems to be the only sensible online forum IMO

I completely agree with the OP.

Since the early 2000s I think, with few exceptions, we have seen the enshittification of everything at the expense of huge profit for multinationals and a few billionaires.

With regard to consumer goods almost everything has gone downhill except cars. £2 dresses that fall apart after one wear, hideous chocolate, plastic crap that doesn't even do the job it was made to do and goes straight to landfill.

People are much less optimistic and happy now and seem to have a life full of angst and short of joy. Ill health, including mental health seem almost built in now.

Oh yes, social media on steroids with other delightful side effects like mass unemployment and societal collapse.

I agree.

I dislike the impact of social media, but I think in 20 years time the impact of AI will have made the social media revolution look like child’s play.

Obviously some things have got better and somethings have got worse. I suspect OP means overall well being for the majority of people.

And how we raise our dcs. Stop telling them they can all be premier footballers or pop stars. Teach them to choose well, to be healthy, decent, hard working.
Not to waste time or effort on trivia and superficial rubbish.

What matters, as a country, is how we manage ourselves going forward. That is largely down to those aged around forty. You will be the ones in key positions in companies making decisions, in Councils, in Government, the judiciary. Older people will have died, retired.
What changes would you make ? To improve life for all.

Is that what they are doing?

According to the news channels they're murdering younger children, forming gangs and stabbing class mates and beating old ladies with their own walking sticks and throwing them in rivers !

It's not tech as such. It's social media. SM tears communities apart because consensus doesn't drive engagement but division does.
Social media also favours short-form writing and is killing off our ability to write long thought-out arguments.

For me the 1980s and 90s were the golden age. In the late 80s and early 90s I was a mature student doing a series of degrees. So no personal responsibility. In the 90s - early 2000s I was working as an academic and had plenty of money to travel. There were mobiles but not smart phones so I could practice my hobby of being "difficult to contact" and not becoming involved. Smart phones make it harder but I know some older people struggle with them so I can always prentend to be a non-techie.

I’m grateful about some advances in technology.
Technology isn’t all internet, AI and robots taking jobs. Advances in medicine mean my daughter will now have a “bionic” leg rather than amputation for her cancer. Her consultant says just 5 years ago would likely have been amputation.

Otherwise I broadly agree. The lack of human interaction particularly is worrying. Anxious teenagers struggling to get on with life rather than being out and about. 80s and 90s were golden years for me!

@Monty34 I'll admit the potholes and foreign owned water but we do manufacture stuff, just not cars/heavy engineering. Our creative industries and science based sectors are booming to name just two.
I chose where to live for no congestion, clean air, ample employment, easy access to a gp and a dentist (next village).
London and the South East are crammed and infrastructure is creaking but not everywhere is like that. I'll never own a 4x4 (don't need or want one) but a comfortable home and fun are achievable..

I don't think it's about the decade so much it's about your point in life. In some aspects of life technology has made things way better, the thread I read earlier about the hard graft our grandmother's did when they were mother's and how washing machines, robot hoovers and dishwashers mean our life is much easier. But of course there's the flip side of remote working and 24hour emails which increase stress. However, I reckon midlife with lots of responsibilities and more awareness of your mortality was always a shitty, anxiety inducing period. Late teens and carefree early 20's was always more fun and people have fewer worries.

Better to be a mediocre country than have an empire of other countries we’ve taken over, oppressed and stolen their resources.

Do you think? Dc stories from school suggest otherwise. The arsehole dc from the 1990s are now arsehole parents…

My musing is that humans (men) always have to push things too far. Things are good a real improvement for everyone but no it’s not enough. We have to keep pushing on and on. Invading countries. Why not just stop at mobiles. Imagine not having smart phones. Extreme porn. Fucking AI taking all the kids jobs. Why keep going? It’s insane if you think about it. Pushing on to the next thing. Why can’t we just stop and enjoy life?