I was 38 in 1995. I think it’s an inkblot test like any such question. Personally I was very happy in that period. I’m more in tune with politics than the truly average person, but not among the IMO very small minority, though over represented on the internet, where what they thought of Bill Clinton would factor in any serious way into how happy they were in the '90’s.
In contrast my parents were major pessimists on the state of the area (Tony Soprano’s actually), country and world in the 70’s. They married late so were older relative to us than me to my kids, but talk about jaded. I didn’t feel that way at all about the world when my kids were similar age in the 90’s-00’s. That kind of difference can be from some personal effect of a major issue (long term unemployed in a depression, victim of a serious crime, loved one is killed in a war, etc) but none of those applied to my parents. It was just their personalities I think.
Also I admire The Soprano’s (it’s not my all time favorite but certainly a good show) but have always felt (having gone to JH/HS right near where Tony Soprano is supposed to have lived) that the show was basically about 1970’s mobsters released into the world of ca. 2000 and the amusing ways they dealt with that shock. The basic anachronism at the center of that show IMO is also relevant to ‘how people felt about the 90’s’ based on the show.
I was 44 in 1995, and it was a pretty good time. And it was right before the internet revolution and the rise in the market and decline in unemployment. And things were pretty good for me even before that.
Of course there were people who moaned about how hard it was to get a job - but with unemployment levels below what was thought possible then, it was probably them and not the economy.
I agree with others that the line was probably about Tony feeling that the glory days of gangsters were behind him. Not to mention he was a shlub.
The late 1990s were a time of prosperity and peace. The early 1990s were not a time of prosperity, but rather a time when the market corrected all the excesses of the 80s. Granted, it wasn’t the longest recession, but it was big enough to kill the Bush presidency.
1953 baby here and my general frustration levels were brewing but that might have been because of a personality quirk that makes me believe that almost any system can be improved, whether with a few tweaks or a total overhaul. That quirk has only become stronger as I’ve aged, which admittedly might not be a good thing. It does mean that I’ll never be a Republican, though.
I’m younger than the OP requests, but I was somewhere between 18-27 during the 1990s, and there was a certain “Where do we go from here?” kind of feeling, especially in the 1992-1995 stretch. The Cold War had a definite way of clarifying a lot of things, and once that was over, there was a lot of uncertainty and confusion about where the nation went from there- do we concentrate on domestic policy? Do we try and remake the world? What’s the next threat? (this last one is important- different groups interpreted that question differently)
Along with that, there was a pretty good paradigm shift going on in the economy- it had shifted from manufacturing in the 1970s, and had shifted into technology somewhat in the 1980s, but that didn’t really shift into high gear until the second half of the 1990s with the advent of the Web and the need for computers in everyone’s home. So as a result, there was a lot of trepidation on the part of mid-life workers- are their jobs going to be there for another 10-20 years? What will my industry look like? What are these newfangled computers? Why do I have to use this thing? What’s the internet? How is it going to mess up my kids? Violent video games! Pornography!
On top of that, the 24 hour news cycles accelerated a bit with the advent of the web- no longer did hot articles/stories have to wait for the next printing of the paper or next cycle of news. They could be published instantly on the web from anywhere. So our parents, who were used to newspapers and the 5/10 news, were suddenly bombarded with even more news and stuff than ever before- I’m sure that without pausing to think about it, it seemed to them like more worse stuff was going on than ever before. Which wasn’t, isn’t, and never has been the case, but I don’t doubt it seemed that way to them at the time.
All this combined likely put our 40-something parents under more stress than you might think for such an economically successful period.