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If anything i feel like its the opposite. The world is smaller and much more comprehensible. Everything is homogenising and genuine cultural differences are being sanded down to the extent that people don't really understand that they exist at all. People speak about diversity more than ever but understand it and accept it less than ever. A single small country used to contain more diversity than a continent does today.
The romance of the unknown and the unexplored is disappearing and to the extent that things don't work it pisses people off more because they assume maliciousness when they feel like they understand the causes of the dysfunction.
Why were things better in the 90s/00s? Because things felt like, globally, that they were going in the right direction and all boats were rising. Communism had largely collapsed, there was rapid economic growth (including in the remaining "communist" countries), there was "peace" (at the very least no threat of global war) and a form of genuine global cultural idealism. All this then collapsed in various stages. People's impression of how things are is at least as influenced by where they perceive things to be heading as by where they currently are. People are perceiving a downward trajectory(or it's first and second order derivatives), even in America.
That is it. Collapse of the Berlin Wall, now the Cold War was over and there was no threat of nuclear war. Capitalism had won and every country would pursue money-making, and to do that trade needs open markets and political stability and no wars. People were doing better as we came out of the 80s recession. There was a sense of optimism. Colour blindness was in, idpol wasn't yet a thing. Gay rights were winning. We had environmental problems, but they were solvable (see the ozone layer and doing away with CFCs), e.g. adopt recycling and do away with pollution, not the intractable problem of climate change. Things were getting better and would always get better because now we were smart, educated, peaceful, and Science and Progress would bring us into the ever more bountiful future hand-in-hand.
It was the End of History and the liberal project had won.
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