EDIT: Just to be clear, we can indeed argue that the world has more changed between 1900 and 1925 than between 1999 and 2024, my point was rather that the world did change a lot in the past 25 years and I'm actually surprized it could be argued otherwise.
Apart from the phones, I'll grant one other thing that has changed dramatically over my lifetime, particularly in the West, that hasn't been mentioned yet which is homosexual relationships going from exoticised at best to illegal at worst, to being grudgingly tolerated at worst to completely normal at best. You could argue it's a natural consequence of the sexual revolution of the 60s but I don't think it was necessarily so; certainly it didn't have to happen so rapidly.
That is a massive and rapid change for the ~10% who this directly affects (including me!) so I think it should be mentioned.
However, and I swear I'm not trying to be difficult here, my real genuine honest-to-god perspective is that, overall, big picture view, comparing the change I've witnessed over my lifetime (which coincidentally is about 30 years) with the changes I've read about prior, I'm forced to conclude that not much changed by comparison.
I'm probably not as surprised that people think the world has changed a lot in the last 30 years, as you do the reverse. Listing these big headline-grabbing events, Trump, Brexit, Ukraine, the Capitol, it sounds dramatic, but what has actually changed categorically, about the way we live and work and are governed? There are some huge local effects, of course: Ukraine 2024 is a completely different place even to Ukraine 2021, and Russian oligarchs with assets in the Mediterranean have to be a bit cleverer. But for the vast majority who are not directly affected, it's been business as usual.
It's not even clear how long Russia would remain ostracised from polite company. Russian athletes will compete in Paris, just not under the Russian flag, but Russian doping practices meant they were doing that anyway even before 2022.
And it's not just the West, I've lived in Thailand, and keeping track of the changes there. Besides it being marginally earlier to travel around certain parts of Bangkok now (because metro) and everyone now being addicted to their phones, what has changed? Not very much. Some progress has been made; people live a bit longer, have a bit more money, are a bit fatter. Comparing now to when I was a little kid, the biggest changes are same sex marriage and weed being legal.
Even when we talk about the events in the United States, I'm not sure if the Republican Party of 2024 is fundamentally that much
less more insane than the Republican Party of 1995 (when it was led by the famously moderate Newt Gingrich) or 2003 (renowned nemesis of fake news George W Bush), except perhaps in focus and intensity.
The world order is being "challenged" a lot, but aside from which players are capturing the headlines at any given time, how has the world order actually changed?
Is the US really now less of a "world police" than in the 1990s, during which among relative successes in the Balkans, it experienced defeat in Somalia, was "challenged" by Islamic terrorists, failed to prevent pro-Russian seperatists in Moldova and Georgia, failed to stabilise Haiti, failed to bring about a Two-State Solution, and didn't even try to prevent genocide in Rwanda?
Even in the way we inform ourselves, the dominant media have changed, we're all addicted to phones now, but what about the players? In my own country, the news articles people share on social media are from the same companies that dominated the news business thirty years ago, except they dominate even more now.
I guess if I were to moderate my position it would be "yes there has been a lot of changes in the last 30 years, but nowhere near as much as some people hyped it up to have been", and ultimately I agree with Amadeus' original comment that 2000 doesn't feel like a distant and unfamiliar past. It certainly isn't to me.