I Declare War on Nostalgia

because breaking up wasn't easy in the 90s...

Quick poll …

Most people would NOT say this one. We’ve had a bad case of pandemic, a mild case of inflation, and two rather serious cases of elder abuse in the White House.

I’m guessing you didn’t say the 2010s, either, which started with Occupy Wall Street, turned left at #BlackLivesMatter, right at a presidential upset, then inward at Brexit. New England alone had a bombing and an elementary school shooting. We impeached the same guy twice then ended the decade arguing about who was in charge.

So, not the good old days.

I noticed several years ago that I could guess someone’s politics just by asking when they thought the best decade was. Conservatives usually say the 50s or the 80s. Liberals pine for the 60s and the 90s.

Here’s the History Channel’s Version:

I call this the Sam Hunt Problem. He “bet that breaking up was easy in the 90s.”
No, Sam, it sucked then, too. We were freaking out, Sam. We were scared. That great sucking sound was our parents’ jobs going to Mexico, so much so that 20% of them voted for Ross Perot, a man who looked and sounded like a ventriloquist’s dummy came to life. Japan had already won the race to the future. A single US company lost over $4 billion in a quarter, the same season Ace of Base released Cruel Summer. The top movie plots mostly tracked the real-time implosion of an economy that just so happened to house half of the nuclear weapons on the planet and a lot of suddenly unemployed bioweapons scientists. To quote Peter Thiel, “Whatever the cultural fascination with Nirvana, grunge, and heroin reflected, it wasn’t hope or confidence.”

Do I really have to do this for all the decades? If you think everyone was happy “Back Then” then you forgot what happened back then.

Okay, fine. We’ll do the 60s. Between 1967-1970, a majority of Americans disapproved of NASA going to the moon. Half the decade saw unemployment rates over 5%, a number we haven’t seen (other than the COVID) since 2016. In 1961, two (two!) nuclear bombs fell on North Carolina. One nearly went off. The other is still missing. They didn’t put kids under desks for better views.

When I tell people they live in the greatest moment in American history, my wife quickly makes up something to distract people from her husband’s early onset dementia.

Not to go all C.S. Lewis on you, but either I’m crazy or its true.

My grandfather proudly placed The Encyclopedia Britanica in the front room of a home he literally built himself on weekends with his brothers. (Fun fact: the bestselling book of 1950 was Your Dream Home: How to Build it for Less than $3,500. Spoiler alert, build it yourself and be wary when using dynamite. I own a copy).

Everything we could know was on that shelf, and if you had a question the first thing he would do was send you there to read an article about hornets or corn varietals. Of course, whatever edition they could afford was the edition you got, so if hornets or corn evolved, you’d have to learn that in college.

If you wanted to absorb any of the following skills, you could get a solid start right now on YouTube: statistics, Python, the essentials of buying fast food franchises, advanced excel tricks, reading income statements, API integration, sales funnels, web scraping, and how to calculate the time value of money.

You are living in the greatest decade for flourishing (and probably the nation where that flourishing is greatest) in the history of humankind. Ever. Like, it was never better at any point before.

PETA should get involved as often as I’ve beaten this horse. You live longer and soon will live even longer, still. Why? Waymo to the rescue!. While AI was coming for all our jobs, the employment rate went up, nearing all-time highs. Before AI can steal work, it must increase productivity, the very thing making society rich enough to work less. You can train for another job if you wish: 32 states have free community college. Whatever your views on gender, women’s professional status has never been higher, a net good for society. Boys spiraling on Reddit should know there are plenty of jobs for young men to be, well, men. In a world where 28-year-old electricians earn over $200k and employers can’t stop them being poached, the problem is not that work left the Rust Belt. It’s that the families didn’t leave, too. As I’ve written (and dozens of smarter people have proven) you earn more working less in an easier and less dangerous job than at any time in history.

Think of the sheer scale of food diversity. My other grandfather ordered his first pizza, which he mispronounced piss-a, when he was nearly 40. Today you can live in Huntsville, AL and eat Japanese, Korean, Thai, Vietnamese, Indian, Cuban, Jamaican, Italian, German, Greek, Cajun, and Dairy Queen. There are multiple options for each.

But we’re broke? No. Consumer balance sheets are now 10x liabilities, the highest ratio in history. Are the asset values inflated? Sure, but the point is that the debts didn’t inflate, too.

Source: Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System

Odd thought: you are the beneficiary of all the recessions that came before. Whatever you think of the FED as economic QB1, it’s gotten a lot better at not throwing dumb interceptions under pressure (1930, 1937, 1960s, 1970s, 2000s). There is institutional memory inside those suits, and they manage to keep the economy out of the ditch many more years than not.

Yes, a lot can go wrong: A nuke/pandemic/oil crisis/tech outage/ Men in Black being propaganda to acclimate us to aliens.

But a lot can go right, too. A lot is going right, right now.

The 90s weren’t that great. It was the tail end of an older world. Many of my classmates still went into the few factories and mills that survived NAFTA. A girl I regularly flirted with married someone else, took one of those jobs, and lost her left arm in the machinery.

The only way you’ll see the good ahead is to stop looking over the cultural shoulder with such fondness. No, it wasn’t better back then. Every reason you give that “nobody can get ahead” people were saying in your preferred decade. Except they were (maybe) right, and you’re not.

Okay, Doomer.

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