What golden ages are we in, right now?

I finally had a chance to post to AskMeFi a question that had been on my mind for a few weeks: What “golden ages” are we as a society in, right now? I tried to gussy my post up with a little armchair philosophy to avoid deletion (Ask Metafilter has a policy against open-ended, chatty questions), but really I was most curious about everyone’s idea of what we should be enjoying right now, knowing that it’s about as good as it’s going to get.

What I didn’t really think about, going in, was that the idea of a golden age is ultimately a little depressing. As much as I might like to imagine how nice it would be to live at the peak of, say, the Beatles or postwar internationalism, it would be a heavy burden to know that the decline and fall was just around the corner. Fortunately, predicting the future is free of any buzz-kills like verifiability or precise dates. Nevertheless, I’d bet some of these golden ages are coming to an end sooner rather than later:

• Airline travel, cross-country road trips (I’d have said this golden age ended with the first fuel crisis), and other petroleum-heavy activities
• American television (The only new-ish shows I’ve been following at all are Lost and 30 Rock. I realize I’m missing out…)
• Seafood (Out of  everything, this  might be  most likely)
• Readily-available pornography
• The Web, as such
  • Specifically, “free online video” (I’d demur — we can do a lot better than hyper-compressed YouTube videos)
• Availability of gourmet food (but not necessarily the food itself)
•  The social standing of nerds (good point!)
• Disposable products (I hope this one’s accurate)
• Boston sports (note that this response was entered before the ALCS began…)
• Free water
• Cellphones (couldn’t disagree more)
• The American dollar (at best, as the commenter points out, we’re at the tail end)
• Physics as we know it
• Traditional manufacturing (to be supplanted by nanotechnology, if not the oil crunch)
• Punditry (yeah, I can see this one being true)
• Laptop DJ’ing (had a good run for a few years)
• Cheap high fashion
• Media piracy (I can’t imagine this going away any time soon)
• Money in politics (let’s hope!)
• Craft brewing, and beer in general
• Philanthropy (to some degree, as Robert Reich would say)
• The American middle class (at least to hear Lou Dobbs tell it)
• America’s National Parks (I’d date the end of this age to the start of Bush’s presidency)
• Leveraged finance
• Zombies not eating our brains (gotta love Metafilter)
• Plentiful energy in general

One closing thought: it’s pretty plain to see that a lot of these responses divide themselves handily into just one category: scarcity. What’s free today, I guess, probably won’t be free forever. This isn’t news, of course — we know that some resources are diminishing (oil) and others are being spread ever thinner (fresh water) — but it’s still provocative (to my non-economist’s mind, at least) to occasionally get one’s bearings on the problems of the world by reflecting that so many of them all have the same basic root. Huh.