When I was younger, we had the Jetsons, the tail end of the space race, Star Trek, Carl Sagan, home computers took off, we witnessed increasing standards of living, politics were deescalating, the fall of the Berlin Wall and (effectively) the end of the imminent nuclear annihilation threat. Lots of reasons to be hopeful for the future and to see sci-fi-like technical progress as progress and empowerment.
Nowadays, we have no hopeful vision of the future--not even in sci-fi. We know tomorrow is going to be worse than today. We know technology advancements are meant to siphon our money and time away. We're not going to get flying cars, but we'll get costly subscriptions for everything. We're not going to get tours of Jupiter, but we will get mass-surveillance and phone addictions. Political extremism is increasing, with anger, belligerence, cruelty, and ignorance being major planks in political parties across the world. And finally, we know Climate Change is going to wreck everything, even if none of that comes to pass. Current generations no longer believe they will have it better than previous generations.