The difference is, that those of us who lived in the 1980’s and 1990’s knew that we were living the best of times – perhaps the best times ever to have lived. San Fran in the 2000s, Seattle in the 1990s, Paris on the 1920’s, Germany in the 1900’s, London in the 1890’s.
2008 was the end of the keynesian experiment. It was the culmination of the attack on western civilization started by the marxists, then the economic pseudoscientists, then the jewish socialists, then the french postmodernists.
The West spent from at least 1500bc to the present developing rule of law. The bronze age collapse set us back 1000 years. The abrahamic (jewish/christian/muslim) dark age set us back 1000 years. The second abrahamic dark age ( pseudohistory, pseudoscience, pseudo rationalism) is about to set us back another thousand.