>> “Because we’ve been being told massive meltdowns are going to happen any minute now for 50 years” <<
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That statement is utterly false.
The only ‘meltdown’ that was notoriously promoted in the past 50 years was Y2K, and most here were well aware that there was no significant computer date issue on the horizon, since mortgages have been standardized to 30 years, and nothing was going wrong in mortgages written after 1970.
Sorry but you’re wrong. 1962 was when Silent Spring got published and “the world is going to end” became a popular cult. Then we start getting Paul Ehrlich’s clap trap in the late 60s. Then of course in the late 70s there was some talk about the next ice age. In the 80s we get the hole in the ozone layer, followed very closely by global warming hysteria which is still with us. And of course over long stretches of time there was fear of nuclear war, and that got replaced by economic collapse which is still quite popular today, especially with conservatives that don’t buy into global warming. And that’s just the relatively sane popular doom predictions, not even getting into the stuff the woovey-groovey crowd got into like planetary alignments and the various interpretations of Nostradamus and 2012.
The fact is there’s been at least one group taken fairly seriously predicting the world (or at least the chunk of the world they live in) is going to end for a long time. We have two full generations of adults that grew up in the post Silent Spring world, and a lot of them have grown quite weary of the drumbeat.
And actually there was a lot of software that was going to have serious problems with Y2K, but it got fixed. Made a lot of old COBOL programmers a lot of money. Of all the threats it was probably the closest one to true, at the time the alarm was raised in the industry there was a lot of software that was going to fail without a fix. By the time people outside of software heard of it though we were already well on path.
Well, there was that little business about the cold war, nuclear holocost, etc. that really started the whole "survivalist" thing.