There was the threat of nuclear war during the Cold War, environmental concerns around overpopulation, deforestation and acid rain. And there were dystopian movies like Terminator, Alien and Threads with fears around technology, corporations and world war. Older people did have to deal with the possibility of bad future outcomes. It seems to have been forgotten in the 90s and and the first decade of the 2000s when those issues didn't seem so world ending in the absence of the Cold War and the failure of environmental doom predictions from the 60s though the 80s.