My kids and I were recently discussing how many times my generation has been told the world is ending.
- 1976 — Swine flu (Ford's mass vaccination push over a pandemic that fizzled)
- 1975/76 — Global cooling (Newsweek-era "coming ice age" panic)
- 1970s on — Rapture/end-times prophecy (Hal Lindsey, The Late Great Planet Earth, 1970)
- 1979 — Nuclear meltdown dread (Three Mile Island)
- 1980s — Nuclear Armageddon (Reagan-era arms race, The Day After, 1983)
- 1981/82 — AIDS
- 1985 — Ozone hole
- 1986 — Chernobyl (reinforced meltdown fears specifically)
- 1990s — Mad cow/BSE
- 1994 — Asteroid impact (Shoemaker-Levy 9 hitting Jupiter)
- 1996 — Alien invasion (second wave — Independence Day, X-Files)
- Late 1990s — Y2K
- Late 1990s/2000s — Left Behind-era rapture revival
- 2003 — SARS
- 2003 — Mad cow human-transmission fears peak
- 2005/06 — Bird flu (H5N1)
- 2008 — LHC black hole panic
- 2009 — H1N1 (swine flu, round two)
- 2010s — Global warming/climate change (becomes dominant secular frame)
- 2010s — Supervolcano/Yellowstone
- 2012 — Mayan calendar apocalypse
- 2014 — Ebola
- 2020 — COVID
- 2020s — AI takeover (the live one)
So, if you find yourself wondering at the oddity behind why Gen X doesn't seem to care about things... yeah, been there, done that, got the t-shirt.