When I was in my 20's George W Bush was president of the US, Tony Blair was supporting him 100% on the importance of invading Iraq, and then when I was 26 the bottom dropped out of the economy in the worst economic crash since 1929. So yeah, life wasn't great! Part of why now seems worse is that underlying trends kept getting worse- both US specific things like healthcare and college loans, plus things across the Anglosphere like real estate, and things across the world like climate- but I think a bigger part of it is the lack of real alternatives and the "End of History."
It seems clear to me that the 1930's everyone was down too: between The Great War, the Influenza Pandemic, and then the Great Depression everyone was clear that the world was on the wrong track and couldn't continue the way it was going. Depending on their particular biases, lots of people ended up thinking Fascism was the answer, and lots others thought that Communism was the answer, but not nearly as many thought that (small-l) liberal democratic capitalism was the way to keep going- the world of 1932 seemed to discredit that entire mode of living. A fascinating book _Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time_ by Ira Katznelson argues that the American leaders who built the New Deal were aware of that, and that they created the New Deal in conscious opposition to either Fascism or Communism. Unless they acted RIGHT NOW, with a response of sufficient scale to offer something better one or the other would inevitably take power.
And today, decades after the end of the Cold War, leaders and people largely can't conceptualize any other way of organizing people and power, and if they do it's largely in dystopic stuff like "what if companies ruled everything." (This is what Francis Fukuyama meant by the End of History, not that events would stop but that the great struggle of how best to organize people and power was decided and capitalism and democracy won.) Which has meant that we're right back in the same situation, but no one seems to be taking seriously the threat of losing the fruits of the Enlightenment, so they aren't acting with sufficient vigor or scale to deal with the scope of the problem.
It seems clear to me that the 1930's everyone was down too: between The Great War, the Influenza Pandemic, and then the Great Depression everyone was clear that the world was on the wrong track and couldn't continue the way it was going. Depending on their particular biases, lots of people ended up thinking Fascism was the answer, and lots others thought that Communism was the answer, but not nearly as many thought that (small-l) liberal democratic capitalism was the way to keep going- the world of 1932 seemed to discredit that entire mode of living. A fascinating book _Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time_ by Ira Katznelson argues that the American leaders who built the New Deal were aware of that, and that they created the New Deal in conscious opposition to either Fascism or Communism. Unless they acted RIGHT NOW, with a response of sufficient scale to offer something better one or the other would inevitably take power.
And today, decades after the end of the Cold War, leaders and people largely can't conceptualize any other way of organizing people and power, and if they do it's largely in dystopic stuff like "what if companies ruled everything." (This is what Francis Fukuyama meant by the End of History, not that events would stop but that the great struggle of how best to organize people and power was decided and capitalism and democracy won.) Which has meant that we're right back in the same situation, but no one seems to be taking seriously the threat of losing the fruits of the Enlightenment, so they aren't acting with sufficient vigor or scale to deal with the scope of the problem.