this post was submitted on 01 Jun 2026
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Not just music! (Though that is probably the strongest example)
It's telling how many people are nostalgic for a society that only existed before they were born. Recent History education sucks.
Damn we humans are bad as shit as forming our subjective opinion that doesnt get extremely distorted by nostalgia
I always go back to that line from Men in Black about the difference between a person and people.
In aggregate we really are the worst.
People often forget that nostalgia is the secret spice that makes the past great.... not the actual past.
And nostalgia is nothing more than there's shit happening in our brains at 10ish-20ish that doesn't happen any other time. Hormones and energy and lack of responsibilty and first experience bias combine to create a dopamine cocktail we cannot recreate.
I mean, I'll die on the hill of 90s was the best music, TV, movies, video games, and fashion. But I know that it's not objectively true. But that's how it feels for sure.
Other explanations could just come down to the structure of our current society.
I can see a clear and quantifiable decrease in my family support structure between childhood and now. Of course that's mostly due death and moving away from home. But my answer would be entirely different if I lived in a multi-generational home or kinship group. Which was the default for about 99.9% of human existence.
Music, fashion, and tastes are a lot more subjective though.
I'm way too analytical to fall into that curve, and I'm sure most people on Lemmy are like that too. Like, we literally have data going back decades on most of these metrics, so why are people even going with their gut? Quite a few are literally numbers you can check!
But alas, your average nobody ignores data...
I’d be very interested to see the age distribution of the people who were polled. It just says 2000 adults, but if they were all around the same age then it may not all be matters of opinion, especially for things like “political division.”
Judging by the footnote, it's YouGov which isn't a very good poll typically. That said, it's likely got enough people across ages to standardize it properly. They probably do have a larger amount in one demo vs another, but you can simply weigh them differently to balance it out.
There's probably plenty wrong with their methodology if we dig deeper though; these polls aren't very scientific typically. With political division, it could be how they were asked, for instance.
The one that surprises me is TV. It has objectively improved in quality so much, it’s basically on par with movies at this point. Writing, acting, costuming, all of it. I’d never claim that TV from the 90s was superior to now, even though I was a teen back then.
I will absolutely argue that TV was better between 2006-2016 than 2016-2026. I think the detailed ratings (especially on streaming) ended up feeding studio decisionmaking into shallower works that their algorithms suggested audiences would like, and that we lost something in the process. The collapse of mid budget basic cable original programming also has hurt the genre as a whole.
Also, there's nothing quite like a high budget but mediocre show, that looks visually stunning but just doesn't resonate with you.
Absolutely, Netflix is the worst at this. They rate their in house series based on how many people binge it in the first week or two. No slowly enjoying a show. That's what so many of their good originals have been canceled. Apparently they weren't addicting enough for Netflix's tastes
I feel like it has way more to do with how knowledgeable you were at the time. Kids generally don't have the most critical eye for any of those things and most people don't go back to see what they missed.
I just said to a friend this morning, "every kid's favorite movie is the last movie they saw"
It would be interesting to see that study carried out in other countries as well. In my country, for example, many older people will tell the tales from hiperinflation and how they had episodes of starvation when younger. I believe most people would agree with the best economy being post mid-90s, only varying on when, so it woud give a considerade skew to that chart.