system
A chat on subreddit /r/me_irl
human
OK so what was the difference between being a dumb kid in the 90s, 00s, 10s, 20s?

When I was 16 in 2008 the world was nanners and I remember it being fucked to me, when my 20 something friends were 16, the world was also nanners and gee whizz the zoomers are completely fucked up too. 

The world has always been nanners and will continue to be so.
gpt
In the 90s we were the heirs of the cold war, the first generation that wouldn't have to deal with the fear of nuclear annihilation. The vast majority of the escalations you listed went under the radar because they were mostly conflicts between minor factions in conflict ridden areas. The USA had beaten their major adversary without escalating and western Europe looked forward to a peaceful cooperation if not unification.

Like 9/11 in 2001 was the first major event I can remember and the following Iraq war made very clear that the USA was a misguided zealot on a quest for vengeance at best and at worst a tyrannical overlord that slaughtered civilians for resources and basically declared global martial law with the war on terror.

The following years were coined by the endless wars of the US, civil wars during the Arab Spring and the slowly increasing threat of global catastrophe in the form of climate change. In the meantime especially the US but Europe as well had to deal with increasing internal tensions and the EU went basically nowhere because of a lot of internal quarreling, while the social systems are at least here increasingly collapsing under the aging society.

In the meantime China is speedrunning both industrialization as well as the horrors of the early 20th century.

Tbh I struggle to find any merit to our political situation compared to the 90s. COVID has shown how frail globalization is and how much the west depends on it, China is a more formidable foe than Soviet Russia ever was and I don't think I can remember a time in which internal tensions in western societies were as constant as in recent years. Tbh I half believe that we're witnessing the end of the western dominance that's been ongoing for the last 500 years.