memes

100% agree with this. The 90's were awesome for white males in North America and a few places in Europe born after 1950, and not a ton of other people. The same could be said of the 80's or the 60's up to 1973. Just because the Boomers (and then later Millennials) were great at the marketing associated with the entertainment detritus of when they had general periods of feeling awesome about life*, doesn't mean it was the peak of anything.

Case in point, TWO of the most popular TV shows in the US in the late 80's/early 90's were one about living in the 1960's (Wonder Years) and a show that included a lot of time travel to the 1960's (Quantum Leap).

• To clarify this, Boomers dragged Western culture around on their emotions, so periods where a lot of them hit seminal age ranges (15-20 becoming and adult, and 30-45 when you have career and family and haven't yet hit midlife crisis point) line up generally with larger periods of nostalgia setting in and being marketable. This is then extrapolated out to Millennials, who unlike Gen X, gobbled up their Boomer training and penchant for nostalgia hard. So the 80's and 90s were sort of this perfect inflection point of career-oriented Boomers taking the lead and feeling like kinds of the world, then selling us the most brightly-colored plastic crap in the history of humanity, and then Millennials thinking that time, when they were also hitting 15-20, was the peak of human civilization. While the births per year are not quite a bell curve, there's a range of earlier people in the generation that set the tone of that generation, which people a few years younger often go a long with. So it's the first 5-10 years of a generation that are setting the trends and tones, and then another 10 years backing them up. Schools, specially high schools and colleges with 4-year cohorts, facilitate this by having the older classes informing the younger classes pre-internet. Thank you for coming to my TED Talk.