Some of us are old enough to remember life in 1999.
That Prince song—party like it’s 1999—was constantly on the radio in anticipation of the year 2000. Plenty of doomsayers were predicting the end of the world because of the Y2K software bug. (Spoiler alert: It didn’t happen.)
And in general, it was an exciting time. The economy was doing great, the world was more or less at peace, and America was the undisputed global superpower. No one else was even close.

