News reporting is a big factor.
It’s hard to imagine now, but back then there were still 3 and only 3 big networks. which were trusted and respected by everybody.
Of course, there were other networks, and cable TV was pretty common (though not universal), but news was not the nonstop, in-your-face .experience we know today. And of course no constant connection to the internet and facebook.
So life in the 90’s was calmer.
It may not have been a “golden age” like the way the 1950’s is depicted, but hey, nostalgia ain’t what it used to be.
Right - I remember a lot of that cynicism being directed toward other Gen-Xers for “selling out” by getting a “J-O-B.”
Save for 1989-92, real (CPI-U-RS) median personal income increased every year 1981–2000.
The dream of the 90s is alive…
IMHO a lot of that was ennui due to things going well for middle class and upper middle class people. That’s why musicians like Alanis Morissette and movies like Fight Club were so popular at the time. The popularity of depressing music and movies was a response to living in a time of prosperity.
Which is itself proof that the economy was fairly prosperous. In bad times, people dream of “selling out”.
Yeah, that is an interesting point - the 90s were the era of grunge and other down-tuned music.
The advent of 24-hour news and definitely enabled people to be hyper-aware of events around the globe, and exposed to stories that wouldn’t necessarily be covered by the traditional networks, perhaps simultaneously causing fear and optimism.
The 90s were a time of the tech bubble being inflated, with low interest rates and nearly free money, stock options at risky enterprises paid off in a lot of cases and typical office drones could become millionaires - everyone in Silicon Valley knew someone who scored big, and everyone thought it was possible for themselves, too.
For me it certainly was a time of optimism. I got my first good, career-type job, got married, bought a new car, bought a starter home, traveled, became a parent. But yeah, 9/11 and the response to it really changed things the following decade.
I remember that, and I remember thinking what a silly idea it was that we were at “The End of History”, though I guess in hindsight I can appreciate that it made for a good meme-able catchphrase.
I also remember well the crazy internet tech boom of the late 90s-- when barely more than children were getting and burning though tons of venture capital for their startups when they often had nothing much more than an idea for what the company was actually going to do or sell. Those were the days when silly, old-fashioned business concepts like “profits” were considered outmoded-- getting market share was the real name of the game! People were selling their online businesses and software solutions that were barely more than vaporware for billions. That’s how Mark Cuban became a billionaire-- selling a company called broadcast[dot]com to Yahoo! for 5.7 billion in April 1999-- mere months before the tech bubble burst; it’s been called one of the worst internet acquisitions of all time. I was still a graphic artist then-- I didn’t get into IT and web dev until 2000, too late to make a billion dollars by selling my own vaporware-ish idea to a Yahoo! or some other flush-with-cash internet company 
Some context is required to determine whether this is a good or a bad thing. This is just one person’s impression, but I remember there being fewer unpopular or controversial military actions during the 1990s than in the decades before or since. And the way the (first) Gulf War was handled meant the U.S. trust in our military was relatively high.
Things then were getting better. That seemed to stop with 9/11, when the Patriot Act got such widespread support. To my mind, America hasn’t been the same since. But in the 20th century, the problems felt solvable.
Of course, some of that was white privilege—I, at least, didn’t understand the depths and pervasiveness of racism the way I do now, but I thought I did.
I was born in the late 1960s, and yes, the 1990s were an optimistic and positive time in the United States. The Cold War was over. The government ran a budget surplus.
Politics was not nearly as divisive in the 1990s. Ruth Bader Ginsburg was conformed for the Supreme Court by a vote of 96-3. It’s impossible to imagine any President’s Supreme Court nominee receiving 90 votes today, no matter how moderate or reasonable a choice they are.
I’m not the right person to ask, but I don’t remember racism being any worse then than at other times.
As other replies have noted implicitly if not explicitly, “hope and optimism” doesn’t mean that conditions are great and there are no problems; it means that conditions feel like they’re improving and problems look solveable.
In 1979 — halfway through his presidency — Jimmy Carter nominated Paul Volker as head of the Federal Reserve to put an end to the rampant inflation of the Nixon era. I was born at the beginning of the 1950s. In 1979, I had just taken an MBA degree and a job with RCA Consumer Electronics in Indianapolis. That (the calming of inflation) was the true “Morning in America” for me that Ronald Reagan talked about. Once the requisite recession was out of the way, the economy began a recovery, and the future looked bright.
But the seeds of globalization were growing. The hollowing out of American manufacturing was underway. I left RCA shortly before it was sold to Thomson Electronics in 1985, a wholly owned subsidiary of the French government.
Here’s what the RCA site looked like four years ago:
- Indy East Promise Zone. “A New Life for Sherman Park.” 25 Apr 2019. 11 Sep 2023 https://indyeast.org/a-new-life-for-sherman-park/.
And it wasn’t just a single company or a even a single segment of the economy that suffered. Middle management everywhere took it in the shorts as corporations lost the will to live and decided to become stock-holding companies.
Well, I don’t think the doom and gloom were just a matter of “fashion”, at least in the 80s when I was growing up. The tale end of the Cold War really seemed bad to a lot of us at the time. The sudden collapse of the Soviet Union really caught us by surprise, and the lifting of that cloud of doom that had hung over us all for so long really seemed like a major improvement.
I think a lot of us knew that there were still problems. Rebuilding Eastern Europe in the aftermath of the USSR was clearly going to be a huge effort, but it’s one we thought we were getting a good start on. Russia hadn’t yet become the Kleptostate it would become. We had problems, but we also thought we had the tools to fix those problems, and the opportunity as well.
And that’s how it felt about a lot of things as well. Racism, sexism, homophobia - sure, they still existed, but the trends we were seeing were all positive. Things weren’t great, but they were getting better.
But there were also things we missed. No one saw 9/11 coming, of course, which is what really derailed things. We went from The End of History to The War On Terror without even a minute’s warning.
According to FRED, the St. Louis Federal Reserve’s website, median incomes were increasing faster than inflation during the 1984-2000 period. (Their numbers are unadjusted for inflation, AFAICT, but your inflation calculator is here.) Things slowed down between 1990 and 1993, but otherwise, incomes were rising nicely.
Their table starts at 1984, which means it misses the truly sucky early 1980s. (I was in grad school then. Good timing, me!)
As a 1954 kid, I remember the 1990s as being a positive time. Like other people have mentioned, the end of the Cold War was a BFD; we no longer had to worry that one day the USA and USSR would fire off all the nukes, and most of the world would be a radioactive hellscape. And of course, eastern Europe was freed from Soviet domination.
After the fairly mild slump of the early 1990s, the U.S. economy took off from 1993 on, median incomes rose, inflation and interest rates were dropping, and by the late 1990s, crime was going down.
The nascent Internet made it possible to have a ton of information at your fingertips that you used to need to go to a research library for. (I remember a thread in the Dope’s early days about whether the Civil War had really been about slavery - and Dopers were linking to the statements that each seceding state had made to justify their secession (which answered the question strongly in the affirmative), which would have been incredibly difficult to pull together just a few years earlier.) There was a genuine belief (since been proven wrong, alas) that the Web would quickly resolve factual disagreements, so at least whatever debates we had would be based on a shared set of facts.
OTOH, the problems we’d had didn’t seem to be getting any worse, and new problems didn’t seem to be arising. So overall, a very positive time compared to those times that preceded and followed it.
Check the headline: no-one is saying the 80’s didn’t have justified doom and gloom (I remember that decade, too). We are discussing the 90’s, where a pivotal change named The End of History was taking place.
They do have a CPI-adjusted series somewhere. No need to dig it up though.
Racism wasn’t anywhere near as bad as it was in the '50s, ]60s, & '70s. (And earlier than that, of course.) Part of the reason for optimism was that problems such as racism were getting better.
I mean, not murdering people and making it a pleasant public outing for the white folks in town is kind of a low bar to clear. And we still ended up with cops getting away with brutality and people deciding that blacks were the “real” racists because they were glad that OJ Simpson was acquitted…