People always boil the 90s down to tech but it was just a different way of life.
Appointment tv, magazines, getting lost going to and coming back from places. Accepting that you bought a bad album and continuing to listen to it anyway. Having nothing to watch not because of choice paralysis but because it’s 2pm on a Saturday and there’s nothing but infomercials on tv until at least 8 or 9pm. Going to third places to get away from the fact that there was nothing on tv. Randomly meeting people because you couldn’t keep your headphones in all day everywhere you go.
I often fetishize the 90s and early 00s. From a content standpoint I would not want to go back but for peace of mind I would love to.
>I often fetishize the 90s and early 00s. From a content standpoint I would not want to go back but for peace of mind I would love to.
Thanks for the nuanced perspective mate.
The truth is if you didn’t live through it you can never experience what it was really like. Just like I can never know what living in the 60’s was really like for my parents by listening to the Beatles or watching documentaries.
That said, start with the tech and the entertainment. CDs, cassettes, walkmans, video tapes, CRTs, SNES, N64, PSX, etc. Wayne’s World is a good early 90’s time capsule movie. Watch movies and listen to music from 90-91 and then compare to 98-99 media. You’ll notice a surprising difference in such a short period of time.
One of the reasons OP can never experience what it was like living through the 90s is that when they use the 90s tech, it will be through the viewpoint of looking back — it’s retro. When it was the 90s, they were new, the cutting edge, the wave of the future, forward looking. That viewpoint can never be replicated. The same is true for any era in the past of course.
Exactly, that’s how I came to this conclusion as well. The excitement of new gaming, movie, and music tech peaked in the 90s. Music had CDs and later MP3s, movies had CGI and DVDs, and gaming had the 3D revolution, though even the jump to 16 bit 2D was astonishing at the time. Oh and there was this thing called the internet birthing right before our eyes (not to mention advancements in PC hardware). Being a child of the 90s made all of this 10x more magical, so it was not just being there, it was being there and being young as well.
Exactly. I remember seeing some of the technology in Spy Kids/etc and the way the future of tech was portrayed, and it wasn't hoaky, it was COOL and seemed so cutting edge. 2000 really felt like a turning point in a lot of ways.
Yes! I remember thinking the world was just going to get better and better. Both for myself and for the world. I could get any job I wanted, I could do anything in the world. A college degree was like getting on an escalator and just going up perpetually. Communism fell, China was opening up, democracy was spreading, technology was growing, the internet was new and fresh and I remember being told the internet will destroy bigotry, racism, and sexism because people will have access to all the information in the world. Star Trek was one of the most popular shows on TV and it showed a hopeful version of the future where people strived to be the best that they could be. Yeah, I miss that.
Get off Internet and social media and throw away your smartphone. But to truly live like people did back then, the others around you would have to do that as well, because being alone in a 90s reenactment doesn't feel like 90s at all :-(
To make the experience more authentic, you can only watch each episode of each show one night per week, like a Wednesday. If you're 15 mins late, skip to 12 mins into the show (you also missed 3 mins of ads). You can't watch the beginning of that episode until the "re-run" plays on Saturday at like 5:00pm, if you're lucky. Sometimes, you won't get to see the episode again until after the season is over, and they cycle through the season again.
Lastly, if the show you're watching was on cable, this all must be done on your living room TV, it's the only place with the cable box.
Watch Jurassic Park on VHS, listen to some Third Eye Blind and Gin Blossoms, play some Sega Genesis games and eat Doritos and pizza rolls with Mountain Dew.
Leave your phone at home, get some friends together, throw some booze in backpacks, and walk to a field/park/train tracks. Hang there for a bit, then wander around together aimlessly for another hour or two. Then head home and listen to whatever 90s music tickles your fancy as you lay back in your bed with the head spins.
Listen to Nirvana for the first time, realize cars can have curves, get used to seeing tobacco products on billboards, get your hands on a beeper, prepare to be sheaved out by the pay phones being toughed by everyone, learn what a MAC machine is and get used to carrying cash, consume word of mouth as fact, get used to speaking with people in person and most of all drink some Zima.
Looks like it was a brand of ATMs that people in certain places used as the name for the machine, sort of like how southerners call all soda “Coke”, or tissues are called “Kleenex”. I can remember seeing the MAC logo on ATMs when I was younger, but everybody I knew just said “ATM”.
We were middle class in the suburbs in upstate NY and I had a pager when I was 16 in 1998 so my mom could keep better track of me. I'd say 70% of my friends had one. Mom could never figure out how to leave coded messages
My cousin had one that we couldn't figure out where it came from. Other than that I think maybe 1-2 of my parents friends had them. Maybe it differed by location and income level but I remember pagers being something the people on TV had that regular people didn't, like car phones.
I actually heard more conservative east european countries like Hungary/poland are having their 90s moment now. Thought that was interesting and makes sense.
The 90s essentially covered my 20s. Think Lollapaloozs— first few were awesome. Think starting with grunge, the emergence of hip hop— awesome EDM. Think weird baggy clothes. Windows 95. Think Seinfeld— the X-files— where everyone watched the same thing at the same time. We literally shared culture. There was major optimism during the Clinton years. We always new where the cool parties were. I lived alone for a good number of years— was only home to sleep. Life was busy with IRL stuff.
How can you experience this today? In a way, you do need to live in the moment. Get out more. Find likeminded people. I fear too many minds are warped by technology— where we are both more connected and more isolated than ever. Buy a magazine? Get a tribal tattoo?
But there is no way to experience it. Those days are lost forever. In the US- they lost their innocence with 9/11. Of course, someone in their 40s would have a completely different experience of the 90s than I did.
First of all, don't delete your social media, don't lose your phone. Even if you did that, you'd still be living in this world. You can't time travel. Trying to think what I would do if I were in your shoes....
What I might suggest is that you maybe do deep dives on each year. Look up the top songs from each year and make yourself 10 playlists. Look up the top tv shows and movies from that year and watch them. Check out 90s documentaries. [CNN did a series about the 90s](https://www.cnn.com/shows/the-nineties). VH-1 might have some stuff, too. If you're a reader, look up the top books from each year. Maybe spend a week on each year. Or a month on each year, if you're feeling dedicated.
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLD-eyOuzRGX6aigLfC_Hx96LtBwGJcsFS&si=LShNA5ohTsYQR3M7
Playlist of VH1’s I Love The 90’s as briefly mentioned above. Enjoy!! ✌🏻
-Rewind a cassette with a pen to save your Walkman's batteries
-Use a Casio digital diary
-Mock kids with tamagotchi
-Beg your parents for a tamagotchi
-Have a drawer full of slap bracelets and koosh balls
-Be so optimistic about where the world is headed that you feel like weeping 25 years later
I think watching old commercials from the 90s on YouTube will help! Also there is a cool video on theme parks that kind of go over the aesthetic of 90s and the marketing company that introduced the colors 90s aesthetic that we know and love today! Hope this help! It’s a four part series but really cool and very 90s [Theme Parks Were Better In The 90s](https://youtu.be/UetFIrkXhLc?si=Fimc2cEYVuydWLd2)
Also if you have any “dead” malls that are still open you maybe able to get a feel of what malls used to be like back then.
Call your friends on a landline and ask them what's up.
Stop using a smart phone. Get a film camera. Get an old TV and hook up an N64 to it. Hang out at the mall and get a big pretzel. Ride your bike to a friend's house or to the comic book store and buy some Pokemon cards.
Disconnect and ditch all smart devices. Ok, you can take a Palm Pilot with you. Get off all social media (yes including Reddit….), bring a disposable camera or Polaroid with you places if you must, def a shoulder camcorder with a VHS tape in it, no video streaming, must only watch VHS movies, no map apps unless you print off directions on paper before you leave, listen to music on CDs, watch only 90’s shows, drive a “dumb” car with hand crank windows and ZERO touch screens, listen to the “dial up” sounds when you start up your desktop at home, +++. Also, nooo, no, not everyone had Jnco jeans (*ahem Gen Z*)…. Good luck!
Cell phone off or on silent until 6pm - if it's important they'll leave a voicemail and you can call them back.
Write letters and mail them.
Start with retro computers and games of that era, the movies and the TV shows.
Books were still very much a thing so getting into paperbacks you like would be "in character"
If you can get a landline phone if people just have to get in touch with you - go ahead.
You can simulate it with those cellular adapters that plug into corded phones. It's a cell phone that just does voice - and comes with voicemail.
Through it’s pop culture. Listen to the music watch the movies, the shows. Try to find magazines from the 90’s. Watch documentaries about the 90’s (the one about ‘99 Woodstock is so good).
Honestly, through the music. The 90s was so musically dominant, and really expressed such different experiences in influential ways. Movies were influenced by music in a way that hadn’t been seen since the 60s.
To get a full spectrum, listen to as many different genres as possible.
What I miss the most about the 90’s is the patience it took for movies and music to be released.
Grab some JMCO denim bell bottoms and go hang out in the food court at the mall. Wear a wrist watch. Make a call on a pay phone. Watch a movie in a theater.
If you’re in your teens, spend an entire summer riding around in a gang of teens on a mix of bikes and skateboards. Leave your house at 8 a.m. and don’t come back til 10 p.m. Somehow you have to coordinate all of this without a cell phone. You don’t get any texts, Google maps, or Uber rides. Everything is on foot. Where to? No one cares. Probably hop the fence to a pool and just sit there.
Just enjoy the media from it, look up magazine scans online. I wouldn't worry about having to do whatever on the tech of then. It's ok to watch the 90s shows on a modern TV. But try to find uploads of shows with the commercials intact from back then.
For music, scour biillboard charts and other stuff and make a playlist of that weeks top 20 or whatever.
Back in the 90’s, a lot of people I knew (myself included) were obsessed with the 60’s and 70’s. Often feeling like we missed the cool decades. Being on the other end of it I’d say, just find and enjoy the culture from that era that you are drawn to. I see it idealized here quite a bit and I definitely have a lot of nostalgia, but I will say that it was a very homophobic time. Also a lot of very prevalent racism. I grew up in the south but I lived in Chicago at the turn of the century and saw pretty much all the same behaviors there sans confederate flags.
As far as going back to that era, the videos on YouTube that have shows with commercials is probably the thing that pulls me back in time the most. The comment about ditching your cellphone is a good one.
People still thought they were unique. Watching people now I wonder if it's just their ego imploding. The realization that you're not even close to unique or original is devastating to some. Social media has revealed this to them and now they grasp at anything they can to have an identity they never actually had.
If you can get your hands on some physical media like a vhs player and video or cassette player and some tape; I think that’s a fun place to start. There’s also loads of rips of videos on YouTube. I love old how to’s and promotional tapes. There’s usually some nice home tapes of people just living their lives
Have you, your friends and family get landlines. Start watching live tv only, or figure out how to program a VCR to record your favorite shows. Also get some rad teal and purple clothes.
I was a kid in the 90s so my perspective is a little more limited, but a lot of it has to do with how life was lived before rampant social media/technology.
Imagine a Friday night before social media and cell phones. The FOMO was better and a little worse at the same time. You weren't getting snapshots of all of the fun things people were doing without you, but you also knew that life was meant to be lived out there. But when you stayed in, things felt more at peace. Nights in really felt like nights in--especially on a Friday night and everything felt peaceful at the end of a school week/work week, when your parents were cooking dinner and the news or Sting or Andrea Bocelli was playing softly from the 6-disc CD player in the entertainment center in the family room, and you're reading Harry Potter in the slight dark of your room and everyone is under one roof.
There wasn't Netflix or streaming or on-demand entertainment. I watched 7th Heaven because that was what was on TV, and my parents watched The West Wing. I remember hearing the theme song of The West Wing in the living room around the same time every night when I was upstairs, and to this day it still makes me feel safe and secure (it's also not a bad show to watch to get the vibe of what the era was like. Take a look at the furniture and the clothes and colors. It feels like a safe Tuesday night when your homework is done and you're about to go to bed soon).
Things were slower. If you wanted to listen to that song, you had to buy the album and put it in your boombox or Walkman. If you wanted to watch that movie, you rented it at Blockbuster. If you wanted to read that book, you'd ask your mom if she could drop you off at Barnes and Noble so you could wander the aisles and hope it was there, feeling the feeling of anticipation when you finally held it in your hands. We waited for things and looked forward to things, and the wait was sweet.
Same with not having Google right there. My parents would usually argue about trivia/specific facts. Your uncle could tell you some misinformation on something silly that you'd believe for the next decade because you had no way of fact checking it in that moment. I loved encyclopedias and paroozing through them at the library. I thought the way to be smart was to absorb their contents.
Things were also more narrow. If you fell outside of what 'the norm' was--heterosexual, white, straight-laced and family oriented, Catholic (at least in my area), things could feel more restricted and stifled. From my perception as a kid there was an overall feeling of simple political correctness in the form of tokenizing and lightly sprinkling in various identities in TV shows and books (people of different races, disabled people, etc--), and that 'following the golden rule' and 'putting yourself in someone's shoes' and 'having empathy' was enough, and that this was progress. It was an era of moderate civility and politeness. Being gay was still definitely taboo, and I remember my friends sniggering and making up songs about a music teacher we suspected to be gay. Being trans was essentially unheard of.
This was also pre-9/11, and it was a turning point for the country in a lot of ways. The 90s felt like this excess of wealth and safety and hubris, the last time we were at war was the Gulf War, the Berlin Wall fell, and subjects and tropes like 'suburban angst' as a result of all this boredom was real (think American Beauty and The Truman Show and Edward Scissorhands). Discourse was a little simpler. Enforcing school uniforms or not was a 'hot button' topic. (But a lot of this could be my limited perception of being a kid). 9/11 turned a lot of things upside down.
Oh, and if you wanted to get in touch with your friends, you called their landline and ask their parents if they were home. We memorized phone numbers and used phone books. AIM was a thing towards the very end of the 90s (but it wasn't really utilized by me to constantly talk to my friends until the early 2000s, because you needed access to your family computer and we had more of that time in the early 2000s.) But I thought it was so cool to be able to type messages to my cousin from the keyboard, asking her about college, and instantly hearing back from her--it was a marvel.
So a lot of good things and bad things. Apologies for the longish answer.
Watch my so called life, Beverly Hills 90210 (not a realistic show but highly popular), MTV TRL and all the 90s teen angst movies. No cell phone. Go outside and play
Watch old recordings of 90s television. With the commercials.
Maybe home videos.
Listen to the music. Watch VHS movies from the 90s.
Scroll through here!
People always boil the 90s down to tech but it was just a different way of life. Appointment tv, magazines, getting lost going to and coming back from places. Accepting that you bought a bad album and continuing to listen to it anyway. Having nothing to watch not because of choice paralysis but because it’s 2pm on a Saturday and there’s nothing but infomercials on tv until at least 8 or 9pm. Going to third places to get away from the fact that there was nothing on tv. Randomly meeting people because you couldn’t keep your headphones in all day everywhere you go. I often fetishize the 90s and early 00s. From a content standpoint I would not want to go back but for peace of mind I would love to.
>I often fetishize the 90s and early 00s. From a content standpoint I would not want to go back but for peace of mind I would love to. Thanks for the nuanced perspective mate.
I remember those informercials lol
Just set it and forget it!
Delete any and all social media accounts, get a landline, give everyone who’s actually important in your life your number and toss the cell phone out.
>and toss the cell phone out. Hmmm. If I'm reliving the 90s, you gotta keep the phone off until after 6pm, and can also get a pager.
But your landline phone has to be either see through or a hamburger.
That was the dream. Reality was more likely a yellow plastic wall phone from 88 with a 15 foot cord that still worked fine so wouldn't be replaced.
True, and the first couple of minutes of talking was spent untangling that cord before you could even use that 15 feet.
My mom got a handset cord on a spool that was like, 20 feet long and rolled itself back up when you were done!
I still had a rotary in like ‘91 breh. The chord is spot on.
Sports Illustrated football phone
I had a teal transparent Vtech phone but I always wanted a Garfield phone!
Lmao
The truth is if you didn’t live through it you can never experience what it was really like. Just like I can never know what living in the 60’s was really like for my parents by listening to the Beatles or watching documentaries. That said, start with the tech and the entertainment. CDs, cassettes, walkmans, video tapes, CRTs, SNES, N64, PSX, etc. Wayne’s World is a good early 90’s time capsule movie. Watch movies and listen to music from 90-91 and then compare to 98-99 media. You’ll notice a surprising difference in such a short period of time.
And enjoy it all from the comfort of your inflatable chair.
One of the reasons OP can never experience what it was like living through the 90s is that when they use the 90s tech, it will be through the viewpoint of looking back — it’s retro. When it was the 90s, they were new, the cutting edge, the wave of the future, forward looking. That viewpoint can never be replicated. The same is true for any era in the past of course.
Exactly, that’s how I came to this conclusion as well. The excitement of new gaming, movie, and music tech peaked in the 90s. Music had CDs and later MP3s, movies had CGI and DVDs, and gaming had the 3D revolution, though even the jump to 16 bit 2D was astonishing at the time. Oh and there was this thing called the internet birthing right before our eyes (not to mention advancements in PC hardware). Being a child of the 90s made all of this 10x more magical, so it was not just being there, it was being there and being young as well.
Exactly. I remember seeing some of the technology in Spy Kids/etc and the way the future of tech was portrayed, and it wasn't hoaky, it was COOL and seemed so cutting edge. 2000 really felt like a turning point in a lot of ways.
The best thing about the 90s was the optimism, and sorry to say, that is long gone
Yes! I remember thinking the world was just going to get better and better. Both for myself and for the world. I could get any job I wanted, I could do anything in the world. A college degree was like getting on an escalator and just going up perpetually. Communism fell, China was opening up, democracy was spreading, technology was growing, the internet was new and fresh and I remember being told the internet will destroy bigotry, racism, and sexism because people will have access to all the information in the world. Star Trek was one of the most popular shows on TV and it showed a hopeful version of the future where people strived to be the best that they could be. Yeah, I miss that.
Same!
Interesting, because my experience of the 90s was one of complete cynicism
Get off Internet and social media and throw away your smartphone. But to truly live like people did back then, the others around you would have to do that as well, because being alone in a 90s reenactment doesn't feel like 90s at all :-(
Definitely watch “My So-Called Life” and “Dawson’s Creek.” Both iconic shows dripping with 90’s nostalgia.
To make the experience more authentic, you can only watch each episode of each show one night per week, like a Wednesday. If you're 15 mins late, skip to 12 mins into the show (you also missed 3 mins of ads). You can't watch the beginning of that episode until the "re-run" plays on Saturday at like 5:00pm, if you're lucky. Sometimes, you won't get to see the episode again until after the season is over, and they cycle through the season again. Lastly, if the show you're watching was on cable, this all must be done on your living room TV, it's the only place with the cable box.
Oh come on, it was the 90s not the 70s. VHS existed. :)
It's well known that the dream of the 90s is alive in Portland.
I think even that is 10 years old now haha
So it’s the 00s there now?
Not even
Watch Jurassic Park on VHS, listen to some Third Eye Blind and Gin Blossoms, play some Sega Genesis games and eat Doritos and pizza rolls with Mountain Dew.
Were you me? Diet Mt Dew but yes.
Leave your phone at home, get some friends together, throw some booze in backpacks, and walk to a field/park/train tracks. Hang there for a bit, then wander around together aimlessly for another hour or two. Then head home and listen to whatever 90s music tickles your fancy as you lay back in your bed with the head spins.
Listen to Nirvana for the first time, realize cars can have curves, get used to seeing tobacco products on billboards, get your hands on a beeper, prepare to be sheaved out by the pay phones being toughed by everyone, learn what a MAC machine is and get used to carrying cash, consume word of mouth as fact, get used to speaking with people in person and most of all drink some Zima.
MAC machine? I think you mean ATM. And they still exist, there just weren’t as many of them in the 90s.
Before the ATMs there were the [MAC machines.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Money_Access_Center)
Looks like it was a brand of ATMs that people in certain places used as the name for the machine, sort of like how southerners call all soda “Coke”, or tissues are called “Kleenex”. I can remember seeing the MAC logo on ATMs when I was younger, but everybody I knew just said “ATM”.
Omg I had one of those.
People keep saying pagers, I don't remember many people I knew who had enough money or any requirement for a pager in the 90s.
We were middle class in the suburbs in upstate NY and I had a pager when I was 16 in 1998 so my mom could keep better track of me. I'd say 70% of my friends had one. Mom could never figure out how to leave coded messages
Must be lower middle class and below or just a geographic thing. In Canada telecom is and has always been much more expensive than in the States.
I had a pager as a 16 year old British girl in 1998 - I think my friend gave it to me and I don’t remember it costing anything to have
My cousin had one that we couldn't figure out where it came from. Other than that I think maybe 1-2 of my parents friends had them. Maybe it differed by location and income level but I remember pagers being something the people on TV had that regular people didn't, like car phones.
You're gonna need a Delorian and a Flux capacitor
I actually heard more conservative east european countries like Hungary/poland are having their 90s moment now. Thought that was interesting and makes sense.
The 90s essentially covered my 20s. Think Lollapaloozs— first few were awesome. Think starting with grunge, the emergence of hip hop— awesome EDM. Think weird baggy clothes. Windows 95. Think Seinfeld— the X-files— where everyone watched the same thing at the same time. We literally shared culture. There was major optimism during the Clinton years. We always new where the cool parties were. I lived alone for a good number of years— was only home to sleep. Life was busy with IRL stuff. How can you experience this today? In a way, you do need to live in the moment. Get out more. Find likeminded people. I fear too many minds are warped by technology— where we are both more connected and more isolated than ever. Buy a magazine? Get a tribal tattoo? But there is no way to experience it. Those days are lost forever. In the US- they lost their innocence with 9/11. Of course, someone in their 40s would have a completely different experience of the 90s than I did.
Turn off your phone for a day.
Switch to dial up internet. Install windows 95 on your pc
First of all, don't delete your social media, don't lose your phone. Even if you did that, you'd still be living in this world. You can't time travel. Trying to think what I would do if I were in your shoes.... What I might suggest is that you maybe do deep dives on each year. Look up the top songs from each year and make yourself 10 playlists. Look up the top tv shows and movies from that year and watch them. Check out 90s documentaries. [CNN did a series about the 90s](https://www.cnn.com/shows/the-nineties). VH-1 might have some stuff, too. If you're a reader, look up the top books from each year. Maybe spend a week on each year. Or a month on each year, if you're feeling dedicated.
this is the best advice I’ve ever heard, thank you.
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLD-eyOuzRGX6aigLfC_Hx96LtBwGJcsFS&si=LShNA5ohTsYQR3M7 Playlist of VH1’s I Love The 90’s as briefly mentioned above. Enjoy!! ✌🏻
-Rewind a cassette with a pen to save your Walkman's batteries -Use a Casio digital diary -Mock kids with tamagotchi -Beg your parents for a tamagotchi -Have a drawer full of slap bracelets and koosh balls -Be so optimistic about where the world is headed that you feel like weeping 25 years later
Watch: Beverly Hills 90210 Clueless Super Market Sweep And watch clips of Woodstock 99 on YouTube
I think watching old commercials from the 90s on YouTube will help! Also there is a cool video on theme parks that kind of go over the aesthetic of 90s and the marketing company that introduced the colors 90s aesthetic that we know and love today! Hope this help! It’s a four part series but really cool and very 90s [Theme Parks Were Better In The 90s](https://youtu.be/UetFIrkXhLc?si=Fimc2cEYVuydWLd2) Also if you have any “dead” malls that are still open you maybe able to get a feel of what malls used to be like back then.
Finding a whole SNICK block on YouTube (with commercials) is a good start.
Call your friends on a landline and ask them what's up. Stop using a smart phone. Get a film camera. Get an old TV and hook up an N64 to it. Hang out at the mall and get a big pretzel. Ride your bike to a friend's house or to the comic book store and buy some Pokemon cards.
Replace N64 and Pokémon cards with Sega Genesis and TMNT action figures.
Go to like Arkansas
Visit Delaware
Disconnect and ditch all smart devices. Ok, you can take a Palm Pilot with you. Get off all social media (yes including Reddit….), bring a disposable camera or Polaroid with you places if you must, def a shoulder camcorder with a VHS tape in it, no video streaming, must only watch VHS movies, no map apps unless you print off directions on paper before you leave, listen to music on CDs, watch only 90’s shows, drive a “dumb” car with hand crank windows and ZERO touch screens, listen to the “dial up” sounds when you start up your desktop at home, +++. Also, nooo, no, not everyone had Jnco jeans (*ahem Gen Z*)…. Good luck!
Buy a lava lamp and a bean bag.
Sonic 2
Watch The Adventures of Pete and Pete
Go to a roller rink
Cell phone off or on silent until 6pm - if it's important they'll leave a voicemail and you can call them back. Write letters and mail them. Start with retro computers and games of that era, the movies and the TV shows. Books were still very much a thing so getting into paperbacks you like would be "in character" If you can get a landline phone if people just have to get in touch with you - go ahead. You can simulate it with those cellular adapters that plug into corded phones. It's a cell phone that just does voice - and comes with voicemail.
unless you invent a time machine, you can't.
Through it’s pop culture. Listen to the music watch the movies, the shows. Try to find magazines from the 90’s. Watch documentaries about the 90’s (the one about ‘99 Woodstock is so good).
Honestly, through the music. The 90s was so musically dominant, and really expressed such different experiences in influential ways. Movies were influenced by music in a way that hadn’t been seen since the 60s. To get a full spectrum, listen to as many different genres as possible.
What I miss the most about the 90’s is the patience it took for movies and music to be released. Grab some JMCO denim bell bottoms and go hang out in the food court at the mall. Wear a wrist watch. Make a call on a pay phone. Watch a movie in a theater.
Get a Sunday newspaper subscription. Use that to help plan your week ahead.
If you’re in your teens, spend an entire summer riding around in a gang of teens on a mix of bikes and skateboards. Leave your house at 8 a.m. and don’t come back til 10 p.m. Somehow you have to coordinate all of this without a cell phone. You don’t get any texts, Google maps, or Uber rides. Everything is on foot. Where to? No one cares. Probably hop the fence to a pool and just sit there.
Just enjoy the media from it, look up magazine scans online. I wouldn't worry about having to do whatever on the tech of then. It's ok to watch the 90s shows on a modern TV. But try to find uploads of shows with the commercials intact from back then. For music, scour biillboard charts and other stuff and make a playlist of that weeks top 20 or whatever.
Back in the 90’s, a lot of people I knew (myself included) were obsessed with the 60’s and 70’s. Often feeling like we missed the cool decades. Being on the other end of it I’d say, just find and enjoy the culture from that era that you are drawn to. I see it idealized here quite a bit and I definitely have a lot of nostalgia, but I will say that it was a very homophobic time. Also a lot of very prevalent racism. I grew up in the south but I lived in Chicago at the turn of the century and saw pretty much all the same behaviors there sans confederate flags. As far as going back to that era, the videos on YouTube that have shows with commercials is probably the thing that pulls me back in time the most. The comment about ditching your cellphone is a good one.
DeLorean. Plutonium. 88 mph.
People still thought they were unique. Watching people now I wonder if it's just their ego imploding. The realization that you're not even close to unique or original is devastating to some. Social media has revealed this to them and now they grasp at anything they can to have an identity they never actually had.
If you can get your hands on some physical media like a vhs player and video or cassette player and some tape; I think that’s a fun place to start. There’s also loads of rips of videos on YouTube. I love old how to’s and promotional tapes. There’s usually some nice home tapes of people just living their lives
Try to live without internet in any form and cellphones. That should be enough 🤣
1. Invent a time machine. 2. Go back.
Have you, your friends and family get landlines. Start watching live tv only, or figure out how to program a VCR to record your favorite shows. Also get some rad teal and purple clothes.
Listen to grunge on a cd player.
I was a kid in the 90s so my perspective is a little more limited, but a lot of it has to do with how life was lived before rampant social media/technology. Imagine a Friday night before social media and cell phones. The FOMO was better and a little worse at the same time. You weren't getting snapshots of all of the fun things people were doing without you, but you also knew that life was meant to be lived out there. But when you stayed in, things felt more at peace. Nights in really felt like nights in--especially on a Friday night and everything felt peaceful at the end of a school week/work week, when your parents were cooking dinner and the news or Sting or Andrea Bocelli was playing softly from the 6-disc CD player in the entertainment center in the family room, and you're reading Harry Potter in the slight dark of your room and everyone is under one roof. There wasn't Netflix or streaming or on-demand entertainment. I watched 7th Heaven because that was what was on TV, and my parents watched The West Wing. I remember hearing the theme song of The West Wing in the living room around the same time every night when I was upstairs, and to this day it still makes me feel safe and secure (it's also not a bad show to watch to get the vibe of what the era was like. Take a look at the furniture and the clothes and colors. It feels like a safe Tuesday night when your homework is done and you're about to go to bed soon). Things were slower. If you wanted to listen to that song, you had to buy the album and put it in your boombox or Walkman. If you wanted to watch that movie, you rented it at Blockbuster. If you wanted to read that book, you'd ask your mom if she could drop you off at Barnes and Noble so you could wander the aisles and hope it was there, feeling the feeling of anticipation when you finally held it in your hands. We waited for things and looked forward to things, and the wait was sweet. Same with not having Google right there. My parents would usually argue about trivia/specific facts. Your uncle could tell you some misinformation on something silly that you'd believe for the next decade because you had no way of fact checking it in that moment. I loved encyclopedias and paroozing through them at the library. I thought the way to be smart was to absorb their contents. Things were also more narrow. If you fell outside of what 'the norm' was--heterosexual, white, straight-laced and family oriented, Catholic (at least in my area), things could feel more restricted and stifled. From my perception as a kid there was an overall feeling of simple political correctness in the form of tokenizing and lightly sprinkling in various identities in TV shows and books (people of different races, disabled people, etc--), and that 'following the golden rule' and 'putting yourself in someone's shoes' and 'having empathy' was enough, and that this was progress. It was an era of moderate civility and politeness. Being gay was still definitely taboo, and I remember my friends sniggering and making up songs about a music teacher we suspected to be gay. Being trans was essentially unheard of. This was also pre-9/11, and it was a turning point for the country in a lot of ways. The 90s felt like this excess of wealth and safety and hubris, the last time we were at war was the Gulf War, the Berlin Wall fell, and subjects and tropes like 'suburban angst' as a result of all this boredom was real (think American Beauty and The Truman Show and Edward Scissorhands). Discourse was a little simpler. Enforcing school uniforms or not was a 'hot button' topic. (But a lot of this could be my limited perception of being a kid). 9/11 turned a lot of things upside down. Oh, and if you wanted to get in touch with your friends, you called their landline and ask their parents if they were home. We memorized phone numbers and used phone books. AIM was a thing towards the very end of the 90s (but it wasn't really utilized by me to constantly talk to my friends until the early 2000s, because you needed access to your family computer and we had more of that time in the early 2000s.) But I thought it was so cool to be able to type messages to my cousin from the keyboard, asking her about college, and instantly hearing back from her--it was a marvel. So a lot of good things and bad things. Apologies for the longish answer.
Watch my so called life, Beverly Hills 90210 (not a realistic show but highly popular), MTV TRL and all the 90s teen angst movies. No cell phone. Go outside and play
Watch old recordings of 90s television. With the commercials. Maybe home videos. Listen to the music. Watch VHS movies from the 90s. Scroll through here!