The person who posted this says 2001 in Canada felt like a normal time for an 8th grader.
My response:
I accept your testimony but am so surprised. For kids around the world but especially in the West, and I would think in Canada which has such a (laudable) high immigration culture, it was a very scary, unstable time. They felt vulnerable in a way they had not any time before, and in a way kids that age didn’t experience since Cold War nuclear anxieties.
Of course, many readers would be in groups that were subject to harassment and worse. But even white Christian “mainstream” culture students were subject to fear and the sense that adults were alarmed and the world was out of control. And then some of the most awful war news and videos anyone had ever seen, all for problematic reasons.
This seems to be ubiquitously reported from anyone in grades 4 to 12. Your account seems anomalous.
In any case, whoever made the meme could have used 2000 as a more optimistic time. It probably was the last Western exceptionalism optimistic time pretty much even. By the time 9/11 settled down, we almost sank the ship with an economic catastrophe. The majority never recovered from that, and slammed hard right to destabilizing reactionary populism, with the left also felt more intensity of isolation than since the 1960s.
So I’d go with 2000 as the ideal childhood nostalgia moment of inflation. It was the start of the current era, that itself is finally coming to a paradigm shift. But 25 years is unusually long compared to the ten-year eras of the 20th century.