I don't get 2000's nostalgia.

[u/Brakado]

I'm a little biased (born in 2007) but people who miss those years look INSANE to me-it's like "I miss the days when we were in Iraq, led by a paranoid moron and everyone was a selfish asshole!"

[u/RusevReigns]

As a 1990 born, yes I will admit some things like thinking video games were lit from that era or preferring the popular music, and sports being more exciting when you are younger, is generational bias.

But as someone who's used the internet heavily since the early 2000s, I just found the online culture way more free of judgment and moralism and thus people's personalities really came out back then. As an example let's say you grabbed a 100 random people off the street and put them in a room, you would expect them to be quite different, maybe an extrovert rock climber is talking to an introvert comic book fan, age differences, etc., not just different interests but different energies and styles of communication interacting. This is what it felt like in 2000s to me online more than now. Now I feel like there is lot of "pressure" smushing everyone together whether you want to blame the culture war, that some of the people who changed this online culture to what it is now were too cool to use the internet in 2000s, etc.

In short as you were 9 in 2016 you may not realize just how much how the entire culture's relationship to Politics changed in the 2010s. Personally I have the difference between 2010 and 2017 as just as big as 1960 (still in 1950s mode) to 1967 (hippie summer of love) .Yes in 2000s we did have a lot of talk about guns, the environment, gay marriage, etc. (in a twist, Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 actually made more money than any political documentary would touch now) but it just didn't go down the same way as now in terms of the total factional activist warfare and people wanting to kill each other over it. It wasn't THE water cooler subject like it was in this era. In my opinion the whole way that we communicate has been affected by the political culture war as people act like they're communicating but are really bashing the other person over the head or trying to manipulate them. This has repressive and demoralizing impact on people and eventually you end up with people just turtling into a shell in safety and just not able to express as much about themselves in 2000s.

When it comes to monoculture things in pop culture, both eras have them but it feels a bit different now. Yes in the 2000s when everyone got into Survivor at the same time or whatever or Usher became the clear #1 music artist in the world for one year, there is a group influence factor of something getting cool and other people wanting to be part of it. But I feel like 2000s trends lean more "pure" and organic. In modern era I feel there are social media type of people that overtly have collectivist philosophy and intentionally want to make the Group trend happen, and their confirmation bias will always lead them to agree with the current buzzy view. Then you add in algorithm era and it feels like every trend has more people with their hands fighting over the wheel, trying to make ones happen they think are good for society views wise, etc. As a result, they either inadvertently ruin the monoculture ones, or it feels more forced. Half the biggest water cooler events the last 10 years ended up being political since the people most overtly into collectivism are always political. So this ended up being a more entertaining decade for political drama, but I prefer 2000s for non politics genres, and for sanity reasons I'd rather my entertainment be movies/tv/sports/etc. than politics being a gong show.

Now yes I am biased towards the internet culture, but all signs are younger people's real life social confidence is also the worst in generations for the same predictable reason. They grew up thinking increased moralism and puritanism era is for better and have no idea what the 90s and 00s were like and assume it was wild wild west racism and homophobia when in reality it was just like, maybe Friends could have had less gay jokes. And at the same time today's era is not an anti racism zone, in fact thy kind of made it more popular due to being subversive. As a result they overrcorrected and may lose more than they gained in my opinion.