Interestingly, I don’t remember the 70s being especially pessimistic about the future when I was a child either. Probably because it was a step up from stuff like Vietnam and the Cuban Missile Crisis that happened before I was born.
I feel like the pessimism started in the 80s, about the time Gen X started becoming teenagers. Where the 70s was still “shiny rocket ships and space jumpsuits”, the 80s vision of the future was a dark dystopia of massive wealth disparity, oppressive and indifferent global megacorporations, ubiquitous but invasive technology and a government typically run by buffoonish and corrupt megalomaniacs. Actually…not unlike our present.
Strangely enough, being here in the Rust Belt, I remember a lot of optimism in the early 80s (Reagan years) even as everything around us was falling apart. I don’t remember the permanent gloom setting in until late in the decade with few bright spots after that. With the move from heavy industry to smaller start-ups and what was called “incubator businesses” back then people had some serious hope. YMMV and this was just some towns around here but it wasn’t as bad a time as today.
Polling shows that there were significant periods in the last few decades where people felt pretty good about stuff. Especially in the late 90s and early 2000s, and some times in the 80s. Our protracted sour mood is about 15 years old and counting.
The 70s I remember the future being a full on bummer. There was Soylent Green where the future was so crowded that strawberry jam was an unimaginable luxury and people had to be fed algae and worse. Logan’s Run where the world has so few resources everyone is killed at 30, Silent Running where all plants are extinct. One of the reason Star Wars was so revolutionary is that it was optimistic and fun in contrast to the rest of sci fi.
Same here. Recessions, inflation, gas shortages (and predictions that we’d soon be out of oil), President Carter talking about the malaise that had taken hold in America, the Iranian hostage crisis, to name a few low points.
hmmm I definitely felt it in the mid to late 90s. In the early 2000s I kept hearing about people buying multiple houses. I mean people who I know did not have the funds. I checked into it and found out that mortgage companies were throwing money out like candy for loans that they were then repackaging and reselling on the market.
I remember thinking at the time this is going to end poorly and it did.
So in hindsite I don’t think that those good feelings were actually positive, only deceptive for a lot of people.
'I know since 2007 my govt contractor job has gotten much harder with people being let go (especially anyone over 50) and the ones left made to pick up the slack.
Well, most of the other notable '70s sci-fi films before Star Wars were heavy on the dystopian future view (Silent Running, Logan’s Run, Soylent Green, Rollerball, etc.), and the fact that the good guys won in Star Wars was, in and of itself, pretty different.
I think maybe that’s part of the problem. Even though the economy has generally been growing, individually people find themselves having to work harder under crappier conditions with less job stability.
Well, I’m old enough to remember the late 1950s and I would say they were optimistic times. One working parent was generally enough to sustain a middle class household in good shape.
Of course I was a little kid, and white and middle class. Maybe not so much for other folks.
