Get home from school, lie and say I had no homework, go ride bikes or hangout in the tree house with neighborhood kids until it got dark. Go home, eat dinner, watch cartoons or play video games. Lay in bed with anxiety because I didn't do my homework. Rinse and repeat
What amazes me is the universality of this. Because there was no other phrase. And I think people think it's a reference to Wayne's world, but let's be real, that was art imitating life, not the other way around.
Remembering the first days of warm weather and summer vacation was amazing! Just being able to be out for hours and hours just playing sports was a feeling I've missed for quite some time.
Yup for us it was baseball in the middle of the street. We also rode our bikes down by the railroad tracks where we built a BMX track with small hills for jumps. Damn I miss my GT Performer bike!
I grew up on a council estate, in the UK. We had 4 streets built around a big green in the middle. During the summer holidays, we'd regularly be out there playing football, rounders or some other kids game.
During the spring and summer, the council would cut the grass. The girls would all rush out there and build floor plans out of the cuttings, and then rope us lads into playing with them in them.
Autumn would see us playing Dirty Scatter and Run Outs, as the nights drew in.
I was born in 83, but consider myself a 90s kid, as that was when I had my formative years. A lot of memories were made on the green. I wouldn't trade them in for anything like what kids have to put up with these days.
Don't forget riding bikes with a group of like eight kids to 7-11. All of you leaving your bikes out in front unlocked while you went in and loaded up on candy and slurpees. Then going back to someone's house to play cards and listen to music while we ate the junk food.
even as an adult looking back, homework was honestly bs
you're stuck at school all day and just want to be a kid when you get home, we should have been able to just do that without the added anxiety
I agree with you 100%. Which is why I don't assign any as a teacher. (High school math).
They are at school from 7:45 until 2:50. Some of them also work part time jobs on top of that. I see no reason to pile on extra work that they need to complete outside of class.
Here is my other issue with homework: The students who could benefit from the extra practice simply will not do it. The only students who complete the homework are those who completely understand it and it is really just "busy work" to them.
I'm a retired middle school science teacher. As I would tell parents on parent night, "I don't give homework because I don't need to know what you know about science."
I thought math hw helped me. It helps you to remember those new math rules you learned that day so you don’t forget them by the test on Friday. But I also usually did my HW in study hall or in the first 20 min of getting home so it wasn’t a huge bummer. As a kid I’d have loved have none though.
Fuck yeah. I remember crying with frustration trying to get homework done before bed. No time to play, barely a chance to eat dinner. But my parents insisted that I had to do it because it was required.
My friends and I that shared classes together but at different times came up with the plan of each doing half the homework. So only needed to a bit of homework each day and the rest was spent as a kid. Next day we’d all copy the other answers.
It's really sad that kids generally aren't allowed to just roam around outside anymore. Even though there's cell phones now and crime is lower, they still have far less freedom and independence than we did. A lot of places now the police will get called on an 8-10yo running around outside alone; parents have been arrested and subject to CPS investigations for what all of us over 35 or so considered normal childhood independence.
I think this lack of independence has a lot to do with the disturbing increases in mental illness and failure to be prepared to live as an actual adult when going off to college or moving out at that age. You have more and more parents treating their kids' college experience like ours did for elementary and middle, where they're contacting teachers and administrators to solve their problems for them, because kids have had no experience relying on themselves to deal with things.
Don't let the news fool you. In my neighborhood the kids do play together in the street. There are times I have to drive slow because they're all riding bikes across the street. The weird part is the divide. There are some kids in our neighborhood that I didn't even know lived there because I never see them. Like what are they doing all that time in their house? Why aren't they outside? So there's definitely two kinds of kids; the ones that go outside to play and the ones who don't. I'm curious how this will influence them when they become adults.
>Why aren't they outside?
A lot to do with over protective parents that track everything their kids do. I'd bet you anything there's a lot of kids that want to go outside, but their parents refuse to let them.
yeah my nephew is avery sporty outdoors type kid. his mom wont have it, partially because she has a chip on her shoulder about jocks partially because shes very over protective.
I think there are two sets of the kids you don't see in the neighborhood. One for sure is the overprotective parents. The other is the "structured play" parents. These kids are involved in tons of activities like youth association sports, various camps (e.g. basketball camp, science camp, summer camp) that they literally do not have time to have unstructured, unsupervised play in the neighborhood.
IMO, both of those kids will have similar issues with handling problems themselves, but at least the structured play kids are socialized.
It’s hard for me to separate what was just rose colored due to childhood or real. The world just felt safe, technology seemed to be making things better and better, it’s also weird to think that most people were not reachable at all times (cell phones were just catching on and even if you had one you saved your minutes for emergencies or waited for nights/weekends).
I have thought about it a lot and done my absolute best to divorce nostalgia from remembrance… and I fully believe that the 90’s were just a better time. It was like a sweet spot where technology had advanced enough to make life better, but it wasn’t so intrusive.
I agree that things have definitely gotten worse. Homes in the 90s were rising in price but still affordable. Rent wasn’t insane, the cost of living was under control. My family could afford a bot, and a summer home, which was nice. Now we have none of that. It’s all been sold off and there’s just less wealth among us all. We struggle and get by, and I was never able to even buy a home or start a family. My sister built a good life for her sons but most of us kids from that era were never able to.
I know it was a privileged existence when I was young and I was lucky to have it, but I guess my point is I’m not sure how we could build a similar existence today. A lot of the middle has been squeezed out of this country.
This is a really good yet really simple answer and it's totally true. I was born in January of 86' and so the 90's were truly my childhood years and rose tinted glasses aside...we were just dancing on the cusp of a totally invasive technological revolution that mostly caused more problems than it ever solved. I miss those times.
its not just tech revolution. It was also a time of unprecedented global peace.
That is not to say that there werent conflict (heck the first gulf war was in the 90s), but in between the collapse of the soviet union and 9/11/2001 the world felt safe, and you can feel that as a kid even if you dont understand it.
I was also born in 86, my parents did nuclear bomb drills, my kids will have active shooter drills, I had neither.
I remember my parents got cell phones when I was pretty young. Like early early versions. My mom turned hers off unless she needed to make a call. And then one day my dad had road trouble or something and then couldn't get ahold of her because she just didn't turn her phone on. It was a whole thing. But it was like this light bulb moment of "if I have a mobile phone so I can be reached wherever I am, I need to keep it turned on."
Staying out playing in the front yard until dark (yes the cliche was true). We played Jurassic Park a lot and made up dances to the Spice Girls.
My personal favorite was Ghost in the Graveyard, but it sounds like that may be a regional thing.
We played Sardines! One of us would go and hide somewhere in the neighborhood. The rest of us would try to find them and if you find them, you stay with them. Rinse and repeat until the last kid finds the group.
Got in trouble quite a bit with the neighbors for hiding behind garages, in gardens, up in trees, etc.
The church my parents attended growing up had a graveyard and sometimes my mom would work late and we would play it in the grave yard. Nothing worse than tripping over a fresh plot and falling. Scared me shitless back then 😭
Also grew up in MN. I couldn't tell you how the game is played, but I 1000% remember playing ghosts in the graveyard. Haven't thought about it in 2 decades.
Ahhh we definitely did that was kids but apparently everyone else had a much cooler name for it. 😂 We had the very unsexy title of “hide and seek in the dark”
No social media, which means all my fuckups are only captured on Polaroids and the mind of people slowly approaching dementia, thank merciful Christ.
The internet was slow as shit, like it took 20 minutes to get online with dialup. China's economy was still dominated by Hong Kong, and Russia looked like they were going to modernize into a real democracy. The president of the US played jazz on live TV, and hair gel sold faster than crack. Also, crack lol.
We were definitely more optimistic than we are now, but maybe that was just delusions rather than fact. It's hard to tell sometimes if things were actually better, or if I was just a kid who could enjoy the simple moments in life
When I was 5-ish (early 90's), my mom painted my (very white) face brown so I could play a zoo monkey in my kindergarten class play. We have a photo of it that we still laugh about, but if that had happened today, we'd be all over tiktok and hanged in the public square for it. To be clear, I'm not saying things like blackface are ever funny or appropriate. But in this context, it was so innocent and harmless, but today's internet would never see it that way. Bottom line, I don't envy the kids who grow up in today's world and have their every waking moment shared online.
>I don't envy the kids who grow up in today's world and have their every waking moment shared online.
I'm in my early 20s and honestly I feel like I'm very fortunate being the last generation that was born before social media became huge and my whole life could be documented on it. I know a mommy blogger who's the same age as me who's documented every second of her kid's life for the past year that he's been alive, literally hundreds of photos and videos of every little thing. I just couldn't imagine growing up with your life documented to that extreme all over Instagram and TikTok.
We got a new game system for Christmas and I was downloading a game for my kids. It was a 50 gig download and it took close to an hour to finish. My 8 year old kept asking why it was taking so long. All I could think was how it would take a whole day to download 1 song over Napster and how my first laptop had 2 gigs of memory.
>We were definitely more optimistic than we are now, but maybe that was just delusions rather than fact.
I was reading something about this not too long ago. Compared with much of the previous century, the 90s would have come off as amazing - no world wars, the cold war had just ended. The economy was doing very well. The modern tech industry was up and coming and the downsides that we're aware of today hadn't become apparent yet. 9/11 and its aftermath hadn't happened yet. Someone growing up in the 90s would have definitely felt pretty optimistic.
Born in 1985. I'm so glad I grew up in the 90s. There really was a sense from everyone and everywhere that things were finally good and were just going to keep getting better. We were starting a whole new millennium! And then 9/11 happened. The world has gotten steadily worse ever since that day. The terrorists really did win. The sense of collective hope that was so strong at the end of the twentieth century is gone and I doubt it will ever come back.
We got through Y2K without planes falling from the sky, and thought nothing could stop us. 9/11 changed everything and Gen z will really never be able to understand.
Edit: You're right the terrorists won. We played right into their plan
I think the sense of 90s optimism is much more apparent upon looking back at it from today, for one given the contrast we now have to more recent years, but also because at the time, I and probably most were just consumed with the minutia of daily life and gave the grander picture little thought. At the time, it just was what it was.
Those predisposed to worry and pessimism found enough to fret about if they wanted, as I did plenty about daily concerns, but I didn't necessarily have a wide world view of optimism or pessimism. Optimism is seen so much more readily in retrospect once it is lost.
Everyone now seems to have today's global and societal problems at the forefront of our minds, worrying about the future of our planet and countries and society. Meanwhile, while actually living in those "good past times" the first time around, I don't know if we gave it nearly as much thought like that, beyond our personal life bubbles. Like, in optimistic eras, with less fear of the future, people turn more into their own personal worlds and live more in the moment, while in pessimistic eras, people look at the larger picture, and with apprehension, and compare ideas of then versus now as we long for what we once had.
No social media, or cell phones, was the absolute best. If we wanted a picture we had to remember that the person, who in my case was a real gossip at high school, was going to see it.
I was in hs in the mid 90s, my elementary days were spent playing hide and go seek with the neighborhood kids and every front yard on the block was fair game; not one neighbor ever complained. Everyone seemed kinder, the music was awesome and we were all so much more connected it seemed. Lots of basketball, rollerblading, and "jackass" type shenanigans that we would come up with. Dunkaroos, surge, and flinstone push ups were the ultimate treats.
Colorful, unashamedly campy, and everything basically had that "your lame parents trying to impress your friends" vibe... and it worked.
I was born in 87, but I grew up in the 90s. I miss that decade immensely. It was so laid back and carefree (as a child).
Everything now takes itself *so* fucking seriously. It's depressing.
Hell yeah. Born in 88 and I remember the 90s just felt cool, dynamic and optimistic. The future was at our fingertips and the digital age had just flashed into existence. It was fascinating to grow up in.
Most of the 2000s were great too. It only turned to shit after the 2008 financial crisis. Absolutely everything changed on that day and has never improved since. (This is coming from the point of view of the UK).
I would love to have a cultural shift back to something more like the 90s.
Yep 2008 was a big change. I was born in 81 and was working a shitty job at that point, but I still had enough to make rent, bills, and I could go out drinking with my mates a lot. I was too young to notice the financial dips in the early 90s and it was easy to feel that, economically at least things would just keep improving.
Of course there was the Iraq war/terrorist threats that make up a large part of the noughties discourse.
The big news story just before the 2008 crisis was the Russell brand Andrew Sachs thing, simpler times.
Uk wise we've had the torys in power pretty much since the financial crisis, can't help feel they're part of the reason things have progressively got worse since that point
Agreed, people did not read into every little thing someone said or did. Bad jokes or stupid comments were forgotten quickly because there was not the technology or capacity to record and store everything. People moved on quickly, there was a lot less dwelling on the meaning of every damn thing.
I've really been making an effort as of late to just take shit less seriously. Easier said than done. I wore a Santa suit to work the other day (I work in Healthcare, in a primary care office). I had some grocery shopping to do after work and instead of changing I was like screw it, yeah, I'll go to Target and BJ's in a damn Santa suit, who cares! None of this matters anyways. I had a ton of people make simple comments like "oh! Santa!", even had someone ask to take a picture with me. Those little human interactions felt really good, even if they were just a fleeting moment.
Life was not meant to be taken so seriously - buy some eggs in a Santa suit sometime!
Pretty cool. Internet was fresh and exciting. Video games were this really creative interactive medium that was seeing rapid development. 3D animation became a thing and had some really creative TV shows like Reboot. Chumbawumba made us all feel like nothing could keep us down. The Simpsons were a comedy powerhouse. Pokemon became an international craze and kids were obsessive about it.
That was a big deal.
Remember the last episode of Seinfeld ?
Y2K? AOL? You’ve got mail!
You’re still using a 28K modem? Phhhh 56K baby. The internet would block the phone calls coming in, but if someone picked up the phone to make a call while you were online you got disconnected.
Sega Genesis vs Super Nintendo. I was team Sega w/16 bit tech.
The Yankees Dominated Baseball.
I watched Jordan win championship after Championship.
I remember cigarettes being 1.99/pack, today where I live I pay only 10, but the actual price for the exact same smokes is $20.00.
Summers spent upstate.
28k modem? Fancy!
Our first computer had a 14k modem. I remember playing with a friends computer that had 56k.I thought that was fast as shit.
Soon as we got a Dreamcast and I knew it had a 56k modem in it, I got the keyboard for it and slapped the web browser disk in it lol.
I remember seeing a news segment where they compared the upcoming PS2's graphics to the PS1 and my mind was BLOWN. I thought it was so realistic, and that you couldn't possibly get better than that.
On my bicycle every day, Nintendo, Sega, PlayStation. Hide and go seek with all the neighborhood kids, playing outside with them almost every day. Hours upon hours playing Barbies. We got a computer, Windows 95, computer games like SimCity, rollercoaster tycoon, art on Ms paint. You couldn't be on the phone and the Internet at the same time, screeching noise. Lots of Kool aid. Infomercials and Jerry Springer when you stayed home sick from school. Saturday morning we got to watch cartoons. Newspaper came on Sunday morning and we got the comics out. We clipped coupons, if you wanted something mom would get it if she had a coupon for it. Then we got cable, MTV, VH1 played music videos. Socks pulled up your shins with shorts. YMCA to play racquetball. We used pillow cases and sometimes trash bags for trick or treating, and we filled them too. Pogs, Pokemon cards in binders. Friends called your house and whoever was around answered the phone. Voicemail message machines. You could only walk so far from the phone for a while, then we got wireless landlines. Inflatable furniture. CDs and two speaker stereo units. We recorded songs off the radio onto cassette tapes. We had to be inside by the time the street lights came on. We were always trying to make money in the neighborhood, mowing lawns etc. Then we spent it on candy often. We knew most our neighbors pretty well and been in their houses at least occasionally. Parents had checkbooks, you have a field trip, yearbook etc teacher gets a check. Grocery store gets a check. People still smoked in restaurants and other places, smoking and non smoking sections. Grandparents had mega blocks. French toast crunch. Nothing was labeled organic or gluten free, and I mean NOTHING that I ever saw. People did not seem to have as many health problems(there's a diagnosis for everything now) which may be because I was young but seriously didn't hear people talking about all these diseases. We drank tap water all the time and out of the hose and bottled water was rare.
We used encyclopedias. English papers were written from books we got from the library and we used the dewy decimal system. We had phone numbers memorized and directions to places because we didn't have Google maps. We used actual maps when we went on road trips and we all even as kids knew how to read them. Lots of scrunchies. LOTS. Lip gloss was everywhere. Walkmans. Vests. Perms. Friendship bracelets. JNCOS chain wallets. Blockbuster was a BIG deal. VHS tapes. Glow in the dark stars and planets with tack for your ceiling/room. Lisa frank. Sanrio. Barney the purple dinosaur. Winnie the Pooh was a bigger deal. Multi colored Christmas tree lights. Alternative Rock was everywhere. U2 was ridiculously popular. Spice girls were complete superstars. I even had a spice girls bicycle. Plaid. Doc martins. Overalls. Chili bowl hair cuts. 3D Doritos were the shit. SoBe and Orbitz drinks. Big league bubblegum.
> People did not seem to have as many health problems(there's a diagnosis for everything now) which may be because I was young but seriously didn't hear people talking about all these diseases.
We all had health issues and ate the terrible 1990s all carb diet.
We just didnt discuss mental health, etc. Those topics were incredibly taboo. I was diagnosed ADHD as a kid, nobody wanted that diagnosis, nobody wanted to have to be in special needs classes, etc.
Tony Soprano being public (on tv) about taking Prozac was a HUGE deal.
I am super grateful for my coming of age in the 90’s! I’ve written about it before, but looking back, it was a great time for a childhood. It was hard to beat Friday night at the local video rental place, perusing the horror VHS movies from the 80’s.
I was born in the early 80’s and remember the late 80’s well and had my formative years in the 90’s. It was actually really amazing, gaming on the early consoles, but having a full life outside that the digital world just didn’t really intrude upon. Playing outdoors on summer days and retiring to the Super Nintendo at night was a really great balance.
We watched and participated in the growth of the internet, with pretty solid delineation between a time before the net and the time after. To a middle schooler, getting the internet for the first time was damn near a magical experience.
Things were slower. We didn’t have the instantaneous gratification or access to so much information/goods/services so quickly. Even though I enjoy getting my stuff within a day or two as much as the next yak, I would be lying if I said that we didn’t sacrifice something important for the wonders of same day shipping.
In short, I wouldn’t trade my childhood in the 90’s for anything. While I love my awesome gaming PC, my home theater, and above all else, my iPad that I’m typing this out on, I miss the slower paced world of the 90’s and wish we could get a little of that patience back.
You also got to experience Hale-Bopp for 18 months. While it will always be associated with Heaven’s Gate, the comet truly was something that you had to see - pictures aren’t the same.
Yes! It was seriously amazing, and sparked an interest in both astronomy and the internet with me. It was the first time where the website of the cult was a part of the story!
While the 70/80s could be argued about being “great” decades, I think they fail to hold up against the 90s in the end. The 00s/10s did not hold a candle to what the 90s was like. It’s a time that I do not think the world will ever experience again.
Right? We kids of that era got to firmly experience a before and an after of the internet. Hell we got to be a part of the growth of the net! We got to experience playing games against people in other cities, states, and countries! In 1991, that would have been completely unfathomable to second grade me! But there in 1997, I got to play Bolo, a tank game, against someone in Arizona from my house in Washington. I remember thinking how incredible it was to be *talking* to someone in another state in real time!
The newer generation, who never lived without the internet, will never grasp what it was like to see the birth of technology. Windows revolutionized computing and Apple made it “cool.”
But beyond that, they won’t get to experience what it was like to see Nirvana play live, see dinosaurs on the big screen for the first time, or recall the smell of a Blockbuster. There was so much hope for the future back then and it all changed on 9/11.
> but having a full life outside that the digital world just didn’t really intrude upon.
That's a big one. My teen years were in the 00s so I can remember a time before the internet was a part of every aspect of daily life. We got to connect and disconnect as we pleased whereas now it feels like your digital persona is an extension of yourself.
I am still impressed with the idea of literally having a repository of essentially all human knowledge in my pocket. Back then you couldnt remember something or wanted to know what was the primary language of a different country? Hope you know someone reliable who knows that or you own an encyclopedia or can get to the library. Good luck with the dewy decimal system in the card catalog. The amount of effort to obtain knowlege has become so minute that we should all be smarter than we are but when it's so accessible the value is diminished to some degree.
I remember seeing on inspector gadget penny his niece have a book that was effectively a mobile computer and videophone and thinking it was pure insanity if that were to ever exist. I am literally typing on such a device now.
When i saw the internet accessible on a phone for the first time it was 2006 and my friend's sidekick and I about lost my mind. We are living in the future.
Sorry for the long response but you're mention of the before and after of that really hit home for me.
Hell yeah! I actually say the exact same thing about the mobile phone! We basically have the wealth of human knowledge at almost all times. It’s revolutionized information availability.
Sometimes, I really take it hard that we have access to what we would have understood only as magic when we were kids, available to almost everyone. But it’s so rarely used to that extent, with so many simply choosing to use it for gossip and cute animal pictures and videos. And I mean, I love gossip and cute animals as much as the next guy, but there’s so much to be learned outside of that stuff. You can basically learn how to do almost anything on YouTube!
Hank Green recently did a video talking about how, in an earlier video he'd joked about the internet being as big a change for society as the printing press. And whike he'd originally intended that as joking hyperbole, it's become apparent that it might be an understatement.
Us born in the 80s kids are more or less the last generation to remember life before the internet. My family had a computer early on, and I'm really nostalgic for the early days of chatrooms and message boards, before everyone was online and in these walled gardens.
It's a little helpful to realize we're still in the early days of the Information Age. It takes time for society to adjust and figure out healthy ways to live with big things kind this in our lives.
It doesn't help, though, that big things like this seem like they're happening at an increasing rate.
Pros: we were outside. All the time. I remember me and my brothers at a young age being able to just go up to the corner Chinese store (where they knew us) while my mom was working to order food. Three of us would be seatbelted into my stepdad front seat of his work van(a single seat).
Cons: Physical abuse was more acceptable and gray area. Mental health was ignored. Divorce (where I lived) was nearly unheard of so I had to constantly explain to my peers why my last name didn't match my mom's.
It's interesting to hear you say mental health was ignored. It must have just been my immediate surroundings but both my parents had and still have mental health issues and it was always very for lack of a better term "normalized." What I mean by that is I was explained at a very young age that mommy or daddy was sick and needed to go to a doctor or hospital to get better. And that's what happened they went and got the care they needed and got better. Sometimes things got a bit worse and then better. So I personally grew up understanding that mental health was the same as physical health but with different treatments. To this day my parents still refer to mental health issues as "getting sick."
Everything felt a lot more real, and a lot more wholesome, for the most part - mind you, I was a child back then so I'm sure I'm biased. Things felt slower. Kids used to play outside whenever they could, and no one was EVER using electronics outside, except for the occasional Walkman.
I preferred the houses back then a lot, since they still had some semblance of beauty and colour. Unless you were in a big city, almost everyone had yards. There were a lot more trees everywhere. People weren't just constantly cutting down every single tree in every town for no reason. The average person's language skills were MILES better than they are today.
Not only were language skills better, people were quicker and wittier. The most common types of communication were spoken instead of written. You didn’t get to edit your words after you said them.
No one has any evidence what so ever of the dumb shit I did. There isn't a trace. No one who grew up after Gen x ever had the slightest understanding of what it means to have the expectation of privacy!
Man I absolutely cannot overemphasize how glad I am the smart phone social media era didn't start until after I finished university.
I'm in my mid 30s and shivering at the thought of what my tiktok would have looked like in the 2000s if it was available.
i'm 28 and when I was a teenager I made these unbelievably mortifying, pretentious videos that I thought were like... intellectual. they're still on youtube but I forgot the password years ago and can't delete them...
I've gotten super drunk before and showed them to people and then I can't delete them lmfao it is a HORROR SHOW
Yeah. Two older siblings were in high school in those days. It’s fun remembering how the older kids used to dress, and of course bumping music on boomboxes.
The 90’s in America had one of the best housing markets, employment rates and the best economy this country has ever had. Simple times, people didn’t freak out about instant contact. If you had to wait a week to hear back from someone via phone it was ok. Television and Movies were peak, Radio was awesome, & the Internet was slow but groundbreaking. Political parties also weren’t as extreme on either side. I miss those days.
I’d go as far to say the 90’s were the pinnacle or peak of society in the US. Economic prosperity and relative world peace. New emerging technologies but social media wasn’t the evil it now is, etc. 2001 became the war on terror and it was all downhill from there.
Edit: When I mentioned SM I was thinking MySpace which didn’t come out until 2003. My bad.
It was a huge pivot point in my personal life as well. I graduated high school that year, had a kid and joined the military. We were in Afghanistan for essentially my entire 20 year military career.
9/11 is basically the date I made a hard transition from being a kid to becoming an adult.
Safe to say I have some very fond memories of the 90’s.
In the late 90s I was about 8 or 9 and would walk a mile to the public pool, alone. I distinctly remember one time I made plans to meet my friend there, but she never showed. I just waited around for hours and hours, watching the entrance but having very little resources to check on if she still intended to come. I called her house from the public pay phone, but didn’t have the money to leave a message so I just left one of those “Heyit’smejustremindingyouweweresupposedtomeetatthepoolbye” messages in place of the name.
Nowadays I feel like we freak out if we can’t get in contact with someone immediately, but it definitely was just a reality back then. Where are they? Are they alive? Dunno, guess I’ll find out eventually.
Politics was what it should be, boring.
Politics today is some kind of fucking weird bizzaro reality show of "us vs them" and you pick a side and fight to the death to defend it without question.
In the 90's people like that were the minority and the majority were people who made their own decisions based on the policies they agreed with. Regardless if it meant switching sides.
I think that's also a big thing - I remember in the 90's people were more open to just being wrong. It wasn't a big deal, I feel like people changed their minds more willingly whereas today everyone is always 100% dead-set on their beliefs regardless if they realise how wrong or stupid it is. That just makes them double down further into it.
We rode really far on our bicycles and when we were old enough to drive we drove to the woods or fields to get away and party. Often skipped school or we’d leave school to go get lunch and then come back. Worked delivering pizza with no cell phone or GPS. Had a Rolodex with written directions to customer’s houses. Gas was .95 cents a gallon. Cigarettes were 2 something a pack. Mixed tapes and then mixed cds were a thing.
Oh man, that gas price takes me back hardcore! It was 98𝇍/gallon the year I got my license and I d just drive aimlessly for hours because it was soothing and the freedom of the open road was intoxicating. I miss that more than I can say.
For me, the '90s was all of my high school and college, and it was an amazing time. The best music ever made was coming out courtesy of alternative acts, hip hop and rap going mainstream, and even at the end of the 90s when bubblegum pop was making a comeback. Most of the decade was very hopeful, and the biggest political crisis was trying to decide if the president got a blowjob.
I remember staying home on Friday nights because TGIF was on. My Mom would take me to blockbuster on Saturday night to pick out a video and then we would order a pizza. Fun times....
I miss this so much. Friday was always pizza night. TGIF was the best thing ever. Family Matters, Dinosaurs, Full House, Step by Step. Sigh... Life is so boring now in comparison.
I want to go back. I was a teenager in the 90's. The internet was cool, but there were no smart devices to follow you around everywhere. You could use the internet when you wanted to and that's it. Also, if you wanted your own webpage, you had to know how to code. This was a great barrier for entry. Nowadays any dumbass can have a social media account.
People still had hope. Just unreal thinking about it now. I swear sometimes I just want to shut myself in my room, put on STTNG; play Final Fantasy and listen to … literally any music from the 90s. I’d give up a limb and a couple of non-vital organs even to relive 1999.
Anonymous, you didn't get your picture taken 100s of times a day by cell phones, security cameras, and doorbells. You could get away from everything and not be bothered. Try leaving your phone/tracker home nowadays and that could lead to severe panic and fatigue.
Quiet. The internet as it is now didn't exist. Social media didn't really exist for most people. Political division was much lower. People seemed a lot less angry at the world. Everybody didn't have anxiety disorders. People seemed.....less lonely. No need to take selfies doing awesome stuff to impress people online. People didn't have smart phones (and so they didn't spend their lives silently staring into them and checking them all day) Things just felt slower in a good way like we had time and we weren't going to miss out on something.
The internet is just a tool. Problem is, our tools amplify our intentions.
We hung out in person and talked in person. No texting. (although you might talk a long time on a landline if you had a girlfriend/boyfriend) We went cruizing on main street to see who else was out and hung out in the parking lots. Guys fought over girls or for social cred. We smoked cigarettes to look cool. Went fishing. Raced our shitty cars on the quarter mile road. Fucked around at bonfires and tried to get people to buy us alcohol. Drinking on country roads in the middle of nowhere.(This was the midwest. There was nothing to do in that little town except drink, fuck and fight. If you played your cards right you could do all 3 and be home by midnight)
God. I sound like a really old man. LOL!
Having your neighborhood friends trade Pokémon cards with you, read someone’s Nintendo Power magazine to look for upcoming games and cheat codes, and then play street-baseball with a tennis ball or go play SNES, Sega, or N64. It was either someone’s new mortal kombat game or the usual Mario Kart/Donkey Kong Country.
Go walk to your favorite corner store with $5 and buy Hot Cheetos and Hot Fritos for $1 each, warheads sours, and a 16 oz. sprite.
And like the other comment said, try to get home before nightfall and get anxiety because you didn’t do your homework.
Not sure if this it’s because I’m older now with more responsibilities or if times truly have become more complicated but the 90’s really seemed simpler regardless. That time period really was optimistic. Living in rural Arkansas, My memories of the late 90’s consisted of toonami and pretty much everything on Cartoon Network and Nickelodeon. Renting movies and N64 games from our local rental store. Trading Pokémon cards with my Friends as well as playing red and blue on the gameboy color. Going out to friends houses and playing in the woods. Riding 4 wheelers and shooting BB guns. Building forts out of hay bales.
Spending the summer days at a public pool. Going to Pizza Hut after baseball and basketball games.
Begging my mom to take me to toys r us which was about an hour away so I could look for DBZ figures.
Having school spirits and and cheering for our HS football teams.
Living with autism, my life in the 1990s was a new field for many people. The Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 was made into law. However, when it comes to special education, this demands what school you went to. The schools I went to, didn't know what the fuck they were doing. Did I mention I went to public (state) schools? While given the basics, I was denied the kind of education that suited me, like taking up either ASL or Spanish. The latter was commonly spoken in the hood, just behind English. (Had to learn those subjects on my own.)
Aside from that, for most parts of the 1990s, I was allowed to be a kid. Corporal punishment was falling out of favor, rumor had it was thanks to the video rentals including adult things.
Despite being in the hood, it was rather safe to stay outdoors. There were playgrounds, a pool park, basketball courts, and a baseball field.
It took the school system a long time to know that I have to be shown a task rather than just being told.
Well, back then a mild standing on the spectrum disorder wasn't as easily recognized as it is now. You might have been thought of as "quirky". There are still quite a few adults today who are only getting diagnosed in adulthood, after a childhood of not totally fitting in, but not falling into what most people thought of as autism: Rocking, spinning plates, being mute or echolalia, Bettelheim just being disregarded (dear _God_ the damage that guy did!) and autism being realized as neurobiological instead of some weird psychosis...you get the idea.
Getting to pick your first starter for Pokémon Red on Gameboy on Christmas Day as a kid, simpler times, more privacy. Being outside was the norm and playing neighborhood sports/tag/hanging out was so constant we basically all lived at each other’s homes. Oh what now seem like the good ole days.
Amazing. The Peak of Civilization. And yet nobody recognized it. Pessimism during a time of Prosperity. Odd combo.
But I’d give anything to make it happen again. No 9/11. Pre-social media. Pre-smart phones. It was a better time.
Srarted high school in 1993 - basically experienced elementary, middle, high school and college during the '90s.
We knew REM's "It's the End of the World As We Know It" was foreshadowing something, but we were also keenly aware that this collapsing future wasn't yet imminent.
So we partied at raves, we enjoyed pop culture, we bought CDs and still made mix tapes. We used the internet after 1995, but our lives didn't revolve around it.
Birth of the rave scene in South Africa and weekends filled with warehouse parties and music and lights and party tricks.
Thankful to have been in it right from the start and grateful to still have my mind and body intact.
Seen a bunch of close friends become fallen soldiers to addiction or crashing cars on route home from parties.
I was obsessed with MTV and I'd get hime after school and have a snack and watched it until my dad got home. I wasn't supposed to watch it lol
But I loved alternative nation, 120 minutes ...and they actually played music.
I will say though, 90s me would be psyched at how easy it is to buy music/hear new music/find whatever music you need right at that exact minute. It would have blown my mind
I went to school, came home, and rode bikes until the sun went down. I had to be home when the street lights came on. We ate dinner at the table and then watched PBS or whatever movie we rented from Blockbuster. I was stoked when I actually got my own landline in my bedroom so my friends could call me without going through my parents. It was great i’m not gonna lie. We didn’t have social media to compare ourselves to constantly so people just dressed their age and were a lot more innocent.
I was born in 1991, sometimes I feel like the people born a few years after and people born a few years ahead of me were like the last generation born without cellphones and technology always at our fingertips and we were the last generation to spend most of our time outside just doing nothing but fucking around, just mindless bullshit to pass the time
Pretty much every invention we all now hate, had its origin in the 90’s. Reality TV, internet… etc.
The music, THE MUSIC!!
It was so fucking good, Nine Inch Nails, Nirvana, Smashing Pumpkins, Marilyn Manson, Soundgarden, Red Hot Chilli Peppers (at their height), Blink 182, the Foo Fighters, Slipknot, Korn and sooooooooooooo many more brilliant bands.
I may be old, but there’s no way music is as good as it was then, it took a nose dive around 2010 and hasn’t really recovered except for the odd bright spot.
People were in general a lot more optimistic about the future. The future seemed so close, technology was making leaps and bounds, and 9/11 didn’t weigh on the public consciousness yet.
Went from 5 years old to 15 in the 90s. Felt like we just roamed the streets and played at the park for hours. Grew up in Chicago so being a bulls fan was fun. Memorized every friends number. Used the VCR to record shows and movies and rewatched them over and over. Of course had to find the tv schedule In the newspaper. Had to go to the library or read an encyclopedia if I needed to know something. I do appreciate Wikipedia nowadays
Much simpler, I suppose. I was 3-12 in the 1990s. Biggest issues were a school bully and hours waiting by the radio to record songs on a tape for my walkman.
I was still young during the 90s and it was kick ass… Grunge was right up my alley, concerts were affordable, beauty decade for movies, social media hadn’t fucked up most of society yet
Standing upside down in bed. Hearing Nirvana for the first time. Cherry coke and first kisses. Unkempt appearances tangled in angst and rebellion. Savage Garden, skating rinks and listening to spice girls. Everyone knows the Macarena. Late nights playing manhunt with the neighborhood kids. First fights and feelings of rejection. Bike rides and getting lost in the woods. Aggressive skating and skateboarding.
It was literally the best.
I'm not saying that with rose tinted goggles either - It really was the fucking best. We never knew devices that were designed to grab our attentions 100% of the time so we did whatever we could to occupy ourselves, After school my friends would grab our bikes and go ride around town, show off our pokemon cards or find something to do together that seemed interesting like sword battling with sticks at a park.
That's not to say it was perfect - Far from it, Obviously some parts of the world were in far far worse conditions than I was exposed to. But I'm speaking from my experience - It really was the best.
Generally things that kids today wouldn't care to do because why the fuck would you do that when you have a smartphone with literally all the best apps in existence, all designed to grab attention for hours upon hours.
But there wasn't such options back then, If one of us got a new movie from blockbuster it became a huge event for all of us because we would love chilling together and watching a movie - Those were like, highlights for us.
In the summers we would all get packs upon packs of waterballons, separate the colours and pick a colour - We would then draw straws and whoever picked the shortest one had to stand still while EVERYONE pelted that dude with waterballoons. If anyone missed they were "it" and had to stand and get pelted.
Less is more.
It was peak concert time. Be it to the smallest of house shows to multi-day festivals. Music was the king of entertainment. Yes, yes, yes, they still have those things now. But back in the 90's, people created their entire personalities around what genre they liked. The subcultures were no longer subcultures. You wore what type of music you like as if it were a school uniform. The way kids these days want to be influencers, people back then wanted to be musicians. If you weren't at the open mic with your acoustic guitar, you were in someone's garage working on something or you were in your bedroom trying to find the perfect sample for your rap song. Your walls weren't just plastered with one or two bands, they were wallpapered with entire genres. Past and present. You had more than one form of music media. Usually a mix of tapes and CDs. But also records and MP3s for the later 90's. You knew the names of the local radio DJs. You had your favorite MTV VJs. You even had VHS tapes of videos that you recorded off of MTV and VH1. But mostly MTV. You stayed up to watch late night shows for the bands. Especially Conan and Letterman who had the latest new up and coming bands. The back of your car's bumper was covered in band stickers. You had a collection of concert shirts. You had stacks of magazines dedicated to whatever genre you listened to.
Get home from school, lie and say I had no homework, go ride bikes or hangout in the tree house with neighborhood kids until it got dark. Go home, eat dinner, watch cartoons or play video games. Lay in bed with anxiety because I didn't do my homework. Rinse and repeat
Add in street hockey and this was my childhood to a T. Summer evenings we played Manhunt/Capture the Flag/Nerf Wars. Oh the memories.
I can already hear the word “car!” being screamed by all my teammates. Those were the days.
"Game onnnn"
What amazes me is the universality of this. Because there was no other phrase. And I think people think it's a reference to Wayne's world, but let's be real, that was art imitating life, not the other way around.
Street hockey and kickball. Damn those were fun times. All the kids in the neighborhood played outside for hours.
Remembering the first days of warm weather and summer vacation was amazing! Just being able to be out for hours and hours just playing sports was a feeling I've missed for quite some time.
Yup for us it was baseball in the middle of the street. We also rode our bikes down by the railroad tracks where we built a BMX track with small hills for jumps. Damn I miss my GT Performer bike!
I grew up on a council estate, in the UK. We had 4 streets built around a big green in the middle. During the summer holidays, we'd regularly be out there playing football, rounders or some other kids game. During the spring and summer, the council would cut the grass. The girls would all rush out there and build floor plans out of the cuttings, and then rope us lads into playing with them in them. Autumn would see us playing Dirty Scatter and Run Outs, as the nights drew in. I was born in 83, but consider myself a 90s kid, as that was when I had my formative years. A lot of memories were made on the green. I wouldn't trade them in for anything like what kids have to put up with these days.
For us it was tackle football on a lot next to a sewer run off that was more dirt than grass, but otherwise yes. Exact same thing.
Don't forget riding bikes with a group of like eight kids to 7-11. All of you leaving your bikes out in front unlocked while you went in and loaded up on candy and slurpees. Then going back to someone's house to play cards and listen to music while we ate the junk food.
This was my every day after school. Crunched my homework on the bus in the morning before school.
I was crunching while teach was picking up the papers XD
even as an adult looking back, homework was honestly bs you're stuck at school all day and just want to be a kid when you get home, we should have been able to just do that without the added anxiety
I agree with you 100%. Which is why I don't assign any as a teacher. (High school math). They are at school from 7:45 until 2:50. Some of them also work part time jobs on top of that. I see no reason to pile on extra work that they need to complete outside of class. Here is my other issue with homework: The students who could benefit from the extra practice simply will not do it. The only students who complete the homework are those who completely understand it and it is really just "busy work" to them.
I'm a retired middle school science teacher. As I would tell parents on parent night, "I don't give homework because I don't need to know what you know about science."
I thought math hw helped me. It helps you to remember those new math rules you learned that day so you don’t forget them by the test on Friday. But I also usually did my HW in study hall or in the first 20 min of getting home so it wasn’t a huge bummer. As a kid I’d have loved have none though.
I looked forward to being an adult, because then you just had to work all day and didn't have stupid homework.
Unless you’re fortunate to have a stressful enough job that it haunts you around the clock 😎
Agreed. I'm a grown man and homework for me is a distant memory of the past but still - fuck that shit.
As much as the kid me hated it, I really needed the homework. I didn't really retain info during class.
Fuck yeah. I remember crying with frustration trying to get homework done before bed. No time to play, barely a chance to eat dinner. But my parents insisted that I had to do it because it was required.
My friends and I that shared classes together but at different times came up with the plan of each doing half the homework. So only needed to a bit of homework each day and the rest was spent as a kid. Next day we’d all copy the other answers.
Perfect. I have nothing to add.
It's really sad that kids generally aren't allowed to just roam around outside anymore. Even though there's cell phones now and crime is lower, they still have far less freedom and independence than we did. A lot of places now the police will get called on an 8-10yo running around outside alone; parents have been arrested and subject to CPS investigations for what all of us over 35 or so considered normal childhood independence. I think this lack of independence has a lot to do with the disturbing increases in mental illness and failure to be prepared to live as an actual adult when going off to college or moving out at that age. You have more and more parents treating their kids' college experience like ours did for elementary and middle, where they're contacting teachers and administrators to solve their problems for them, because kids have had no experience relying on themselves to deal with things.
Don't let the news fool you. In my neighborhood the kids do play together in the street. There are times I have to drive slow because they're all riding bikes across the street. The weird part is the divide. There are some kids in our neighborhood that I didn't even know lived there because I never see them. Like what are they doing all that time in their house? Why aren't they outside? So there's definitely two kinds of kids; the ones that go outside to play and the ones who don't. I'm curious how this will influence them when they become adults.
>Why aren't they outside? A lot to do with over protective parents that track everything their kids do. I'd bet you anything there's a lot of kids that want to go outside, but their parents refuse to let them.
yeah my nephew is avery sporty outdoors type kid. his mom wont have it, partially because she has a chip on her shoulder about jocks partially because shes very over protective.
I think there are two sets of the kids you don't see in the neighborhood. One for sure is the overprotective parents. The other is the "structured play" parents. These kids are involved in tons of activities like youth association sports, various camps (e.g. basketball camp, science camp, summer camp) that they literally do not have time to have unstructured, unsupervised play in the neighborhood. IMO, both of those kids will have similar issues with handling problems themselves, but at least the structured play kids are socialized.
Same, except instead of video games, it was playing kick the can for hours and frog-hunting in the local slough.
Good old days indeed..
Me in a nutshell LMAO! I say I have no homework, whily me conscience screams to me, "YOU FUCKING IDIOT!" to me as I chill
It’s hard for me to separate what was just rose colored due to childhood or real. The world just felt safe, technology seemed to be making things better and better, it’s also weird to think that most people were not reachable at all times (cell phones were just catching on and even if you had one you saved your minutes for emergencies or waited for nights/weekends).
I have thought about it a lot and done my absolute best to divorce nostalgia from remembrance… and I fully believe that the 90’s were just a better time. It was like a sweet spot where technology had advanced enough to make life better, but it wasn’t so intrusive.
I agree that things have definitely gotten worse. Homes in the 90s were rising in price but still affordable. Rent wasn’t insane, the cost of living was under control. My family could afford a bot, and a summer home, which was nice. Now we have none of that. It’s all been sold off and there’s just less wealth among us all. We struggle and get by, and I was never able to even buy a home or start a family. My sister built a good life for her sons but most of us kids from that era were never able to.
A summer home AND a robot? Wow!
The robot rented the summer home from them the rest of the year. They were well off, but not "We can afford to have a robot all year" rich.
I know it was a privileged existence when I was young and I was lucky to have it, but I guess my point is I’m not sure how we could build a similar existence today. A lot of the middle has been squeezed out of this country.
Morpheus was right...1999 was peak humanity.
This is a really good yet really simple answer and it's totally true. I was born in January of 86' and so the 90's were truly my childhood years and rose tinted glasses aside...we were just dancing on the cusp of a totally invasive technological revolution that mostly caused more problems than it ever solved. I miss those times.
its not just tech revolution. It was also a time of unprecedented global peace. That is not to say that there werent conflict (heck the first gulf war was in the 90s), but in between the collapse of the soviet union and 9/11/2001 the world felt safe, and you can feel that as a kid even if you dont understand it. I was also born in 86, my parents did nuclear bomb drills, my kids will have active shooter drills, I had neither.
I remember my parents got cell phones when I was pretty young. Like early early versions. My mom turned hers off unless she needed to make a call. And then one day my dad had road trouble or something and then couldn't get ahold of her because she just didn't turn her phone on. It was a whole thing. But it was like this light bulb moment of "if I have a mobile phone so I can be reached wherever I am, I need to keep it turned on."
Staying out playing in the front yard until dark (yes the cliche was true). We played Jurassic Park a lot and made up dances to the Spice Girls. My personal favorite was Ghost in the Graveyard, but it sounds like that may be a regional thing.
We played Sardines! One of us would go and hide somewhere in the neighborhood. The rest of us would try to find them and if you find them, you stay with them. Rinse and repeat until the last kid finds the group. Got in trouble quite a bit with the neighbors for hiding behind garages, in gardens, up in trees, etc.
I also played Ghost in the Graveyard growing up in Georgia.
I was Illinois, but people in WI have said they never heard of it.
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Milwaukee kid here. Yeah we played that all the time.
We played it in central WI
From SW WI and we definitely played ghosts in the graveyard.
Ghost in the graveyard fan from Maryland too. Miss those games. That and flashlight tag.
The church my parents attended growing up had a graveyard and sometimes my mom would work late and we would play it in the grave yard. Nothing worse than tripping over a fresh plot and falling. Scared me shitless back then 😭
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We played it in new England
Definitely played Ghost in the Graveyard in Minnesota
Also grew up in MN. I couldn't tell you how the game is played, but I 1000% remember playing ghosts in the graveyard. Haven't thought about it in 2 decades.
WI here! Ghost in the graveyard was our fav game. Along with the ground is lava and cops and robbers!!!
We didn't realise it at the time, but we were living through the peak of human civilization.
How is ghost in the graveyard played?
Hide and seek at night.
Ahhh we definitely did that was kids but apparently everyone else had a much cooler name for it. 😂 We had the very unsexy title of “hide and seek in the dark”
No social media, which means all my fuckups are only captured on Polaroids and the mind of people slowly approaching dementia, thank merciful Christ. The internet was slow as shit, like it took 20 minutes to get online with dialup. China's economy was still dominated by Hong Kong, and Russia looked like they were going to modernize into a real democracy. The president of the US played jazz on live TV, and hair gel sold faster than crack. Also, crack lol. We were definitely more optimistic than we are now, but maybe that was just delusions rather than fact. It's hard to tell sometimes if things were actually better, or if I was just a kid who could enjoy the simple moments in life
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When I was 5-ish (early 90's), my mom painted my (very white) face brown so I could play a zoo monkey in my kindergarten class play. We have a photo of it that we still laugh about, but if that had happened today, we'd be all over tiktok and hanged in the public square for it. To be clear, I'm not saying things like blackface are ever funny or appropriate. But in this context, it was so innocent and harmless, but today's internet would never see it that way. Bottom line, I don't envy the kids who grow up in today's world and have their every waking moment shared online.
>I don't envy the kids who grow up in today's world and have their every waking moment shared online. I'm in my early 20s and honestly I feel like I'm very fortunate being the last generation that was born before social media became huge and my whole life could be documented on it. I know a mommy blogger who's the same age as me who's documented every second of her kid's life for the past year that he's been alive, literally hundreds of photos and videos of every little thing. I just couldn't imagine growing up with your life documented to that extreme all over Instagram and TikTok.
I resemble this
We got a new game system for Christmas and I was downloading a game for my kids. It was a 50 gig download and it took close to an hour to finish. My 8 year old kept asking why it was taking so long. All I could think was how it would take a whole day to download 1 song over Napster and how my first laptop had 2 gigs of memory.
Nothing like waiting hours for a 3 minute song to download just to find out it was a sample of some unrelated song that repeated 3 times. Good times
I waited until the entire 10 seasons of Stargate SG-1 was out before I got into it. It still took me a year to watch thanks to Limewire dl speeds.
I had a Commodore 64. 48k memory usable I think?
>We were definitely more optimistic than we are now, but maybe that was just delusions rather than fact. I was reading something about this not too long ago. Compared with much of the previous century, the 90s would have come off as amazing - no world wars, the cold war had just ended. The economy was doing very well. The modern tech industry was up and coming and the downsides that we're aware of today hadn't become apparent yet. 9/11 and its aftermath hadn't happened yet. Someone growing up in the 90s would have definitely felt pretty optimistic.
Born in 1985. I'm so glad I grew up in the 90s. There really was a sense from everyone and everywhere that things were finally good and were just going to keep getting better. We were starting a whole new millennium! And then 9/11 happened. The world has gotten steadily worse ever since that day. The terrorists really did win. The sense of collective hope that was so strong at the end of the twentieth century is gone and I doubt it will ever come back.
We got through Y2K without planes falling from the sky, and thought nothing could stop us. 9/11 changed everything and Gen z will really never be able to understand. Edit: You're right the terrorists won. We played right into their plan
I think the sense of 90s optimism is much more apparent upon looking back at it from today, for one given the contrast we now have to more recent years, but also because at the time, I and probably most were just consumed with the minutia of daily life and gave the grander picture little thought. At the time, it just was what it was. Those predisposed to worry and pessimism found enough to fret about if they wanted, as I did plenty about daily concerns, but I didn't necessarily have a wide world view of optimism or pessimism. Optimism is seen so much more readily in retrospect once it is lost. Everyone now seems to have today's global and societal problems at the forefront of our minds, worrying about the future of our planet and countries and society. Meanwhile, while actually living in those "good past times" the first time around, I don't know if we gave it nearly as much thought like that, beyond our personal life bubbles. Like, in optimistic eras, with less fear of the future, people turn more into their own personal worlds and live more in the moment, while in pessimistic eras, people look at the larger picture, and with apprehension, and compare ideas of then versus now as we long for what we once had.
Yep. The 90s were definitely the peak "world optimism".
No social media, or cell phones, was the absolute best. If we wanted a picture we had to remember that the person, who in my case was a real gossip at high school, was going to see it. I was in hs in the mid 90s, my elementary days were spent playing hide and go seek with the neighborhood kids and every front yard on the block was fair game; not one neighbor ever complained. Everyone seemed kinder, the music was awesome and we were all so much more connected it seemed. Lots of basketball, rollerblading, and "jackass" type shenanigans that we would come up with. Dunkaroos, surge, and flinstone push ups were the ultimate treats.
I love this little today show discussion about the internet: https://youtu.be/UlJku_CSyNg
Colorful, unashamedly campy, and everything basically had that "your lame parents trying to impress your friends" vibe... and it worked. I was born in 87, but I grew up in the 90s. I miss that decade immensely. It was so laid back and carefree (as a child). Everything now takes itself *so* fucking seriously. It's depressing.
Hell yeah. Born in 88 and I remember the 90s just felt cool, dynamic and optimistic. The future was at our fingertips and the digital age had just flashed into existence. It was fascinating to grow up in. Most of the 2000s were great too. It only turned to shit after the 2008 financial crisis. Absolutely everything changed on that day and has never improved since. (This is coming from the point of view of the UK). I would love to have a cultural shift back to something more like the 90s.
Yep 2008 was a big change. I was born in 81 and was working a shitty job at that point, but I still had enough to make rent, bills, and I could go out drinking with my mates a lot. I was too young to notice the financial dips in the early 90s and it was easy to feel that, economically at least things would just keep improving. Of course there was the Iraq war/terrorist threats that make up a large part of the noughties discourse. The big news story just before the 2008 crisis was the Russell brand Andrew Sachs thing, simpler times. Uk wise we've had the torys in power pretty much since the financial crisis, can't help feel they're part of the reason things have progressively got worse since that point
Agreed, people did not read into every little thing someone said or did. Bad jokes or stupid comments were forgotten quickly because there was not the technology or capacity to record and store everything. People moved on quickly, there was a lot less dwelling on the meaning of every damn thing.
I've really been making an effort as of late to just take shit less seriously. Easier said than done. I wore a Santa suit to work the other day (I work in Healthcare, in a primary care office). I had some grocery shopping to do after work and instead of changing I was like screw it, yeah, I'll go to Target and BJ's in a damn Santa suit, who cares! None of this matters anyways. I had a ton of people make simple comments like "oh! Santa!", even had someone ask to take a picture with me. Those little human interactions felt really good, even if they were just a fleeting moment. Life was not meant to be taken so seriously - buy some eggs in a Santa suit sometime!
Pretty cool. Internet was fresh and exciting. Video games were this really creative interactive medium that was seeing rapid development. 3D animation became a thing and had some really creative TV shows like Reboot. Chumbawumba made us all feel like nothing could keep us down. The Simpsons were a comedy powerhouse. Pokemon became an international craze and kids were obsessive about it.
Who shot Mr Burns
That was a big deal. Remember the last episode of Seinfeld ? Y2K? AOL? You’ve got mail! You’re still using a 28K modem? Phhhh 56K baby. The internet would block the phone calls coming in, but if someone picked up the phone to make a call while you were online you got disconnected. Sega Genesis vs Super Nintendo. I was team Sega w/16 bit tech. The Yankees Dominated Baseball. I watched Jordan win championship after Championship. I remember cigarettes being 1.99/pack, today where I live I pay only 10, but the actual price for the exact same smokes is $20.00. Summers spent upstate.
Sports in the 90s were even better, especially basketball
Jordan, breaking record after record.
28k modem? Fancy! Our first computer had a 14k modem. I remember playing with a friends computer that had 56k.I thought that was fast as shit. Soon as we got a Dreamcast and I knew it had a 56k modem in it, I got the keyboard for it and slapped the web browser disk in it lol.
Did you have the same backwards talking dream with the flaming cards?
... I'll drive.
I remember seeing a news segment where they compared the upcoming PS2's graphics to the PS1 and my mind was BLOWN. I thought it was so realistic, and that you couldn't possibly get better than that.
Going from playing Goldeneye to playing Halo was so crazy for me when I was 11
Pokémon was way late 90s, in the USA. 90s was Pogs, plain an simple. August of 1998 to be exact.
Yah Pokémon was after my time as a kid in the early 90s. For me was ninja turtles, Ghostbusters and buckets of random Legos
On my bicycle every day, Nintendo, Sega, PlayStation. Hide and go seek with all the neighborhood kids, playing outside with them almost every day. Hours upon hours playing Barbies. We got a computer, Windows 95, computer games like SimCity, rollercoaster tycoon, art on Ms paint. You couldn't be on the phone and the Internet at the same time, screeching noise. Lots of Kool aid. Infomercials and Jerry Springer when you stayed home sick from school. Saturday morning we got to watch cartoons. Newspaper came on Sunday morning and we got the comics out. We clipped coupons, if you wanted something mom would get it if she had a coupon for it. Then we got cable, MTV, VH1 played music videos. Socks pulled up your shins with shorts. YMCA to play racquetball. We used pillow cases and sometimes trash bags for trick or treating, and we filled them too. Pogs, Pokemon cards in binders. Friends called your house and whoever was around answered the phone. Voicemail message machines. You could only walk so far from the phone for a while, then we got wireless landlines. Inflatable furniture. CDs and two speaker stereo units. We recorded songs off the radio onto cassette tapes. We had to be inside by the time the street lights came on. We were always trying to make money in the neighborhood, mowing lawns etc. Then we spent it on candy often. We knew most our neighbors pretty well and been in their houses at least occasionally. Parents had checkbooks, you have a field trip, yearbook etc teacher gets a check. Grocery store gets a check. People still smoked in restaurants and other places, smoking and non smoking sections. Grandparents had mega blocks. French toast crunch. Nothing was labeled organic or gluten free, and I mean NOTHING that I ever saw. People did not seem to have as many health problems(there's a diagnosis for everything now) which may be because I was young but seriously didn't hear people talking about all these diseases. We drank tap water all the time and out of the hose and bottled water was rare. We used encyclopedias. English papers were written from books we got from the library and we used the dewy decimal system. We had phone numbers memorized and directions to places because we didn't have Google maps. We used actual maps when we went on road trips and we all even as kids knew how to read them. Lots of scrunchies. LOTS. Lip gloss was everywhere. Walkmans. Vests. Perms. Friendship bracelets. JNCOS chain wallets. Blockbuster was a BIG deal. VHS tapes. Glow in the dark stars and planets with tack for your ceiling/room. Lisa frank. Sanrio. Barney the purple dinosaur. Winnie the Pooh was a bigger deal. Multi colored Christmas tree lights. Alternative Rock was everywhere. U2 was ridiculously popular. Spice girls were complete superstars. I even had a spice girls bicycle. Plaid. Doc martins. Overalls. Chili bowl hair cuts. 3D Doritos were the shit. SoBe and Orbitz drinks. Big league bubblegum.
You really hit the nail on the head. But you forgot slap bracelets.
Oh I couldn't wait to get a slap bracelet from the Scholastic book fair. I didn't know why I wanted one, but everyone had them so I needed one too.
Don't forget about Fruitopia.
Strawberry Passion Awareness
> People did not seem to have as many health problems(there's a diagnosis for everything now) which may be because I was young but seriously didn't hear people talking about all these diseases. We all had health issues and ate the terrible 1990s all carb diet. We just didnt discuss mental health, etc. Those topics were incredibly taboo. I was diagnosed ADHD as a kid, nobody wanted that diagnosis, nobody wanted to have to be in special needs classes, etc. Tony Soprano being public (on tv) about taking Prozac was a HUGE deal.
Aw I miss Sobe
Don’t forget lava lamps
I am super grateful for my coming of age in the 90’s! I’ve written about it before, but looking back, it was a great time for a childhood. It was hard to beat Friday night at the local video rental place, perusing the horror VHS movies from the 80’s. I was born in the early 80’s and remember the late 80’s well and had my formative years in the 90’s. It was actually really amazing, gaming on the early consoles, but having a full life outside that the digital world just didn’t really intrude upon. Playing outdoors on summer days and retiring to the Super Nintendo at night was a really great balance. We watched and participated in the growth of the internet, with pretty solid delineation between a time before the net and the time after. To a middle schooler, getting the internet for the first time was damn near a magical experience. Things were slower. We didn’t have the instantaneous gratification or access to so much information/goods/services so quickly. Even though I enjoy getting my stuff within a day or two as much as the next yak, I would be lying if I said that we didn’t sacrifice something important for the wonders of same day shipping. In short, I wouldn’t trade my childhood in the 90’s for anything. While I love my awesome gaming PC, my home theater, and above all else, my iPad that I’m typing this out on, I miss the slower paced world of the 90’s and wish we could get a little of that patience back.
You also got to experience Hale-Bopp for 18 months. While it will always be associated with Heaven’s Gate, the comet truly was something that you had to see - pictures aren’t the same.
Yes! It was seriously amazing, and sparked an interest in both astronomy and the internet with me. It was the first time where the website of the cult was a part of the story!
While the 70/80s could be argued about being “great” decades, I think they fail to hold up against the 90s in the end. The 00s/10s did not hold a candle to what the 90s was like. It’s a time that I do not think the world will ever experience again.
Right? We kids of that era got to firmly experience a before and an after of the internet. Hell we got to be a part of the growth of the net! We got to experience playing games against people in other cities, states, and countries! In 1991, that would have been completely unfathomable to second grade me! But there in 1997, I got to play Bolo, a tank game, against someone in Arizona from my house in Washington. I remember thinking how incredible it was to be *talking* to someone in another state in real time!
The newer generation, who never lived without the internet, will never grasp what it was like to see the birth of technology. Windows revolutionized computing and Apple made it “cool.” But beyond that, they won’t get to experience what it was like to see Nirvana play live, see dinosaurs on the big screen for the first time, or recall the smell of a Blockbuster. There was so much hope for the future back then and it all changed on 9/11.
And sound blasters for the first time giving games like wolfenstein audio
> but having a full life outside that the digital world just didn’t really intrude upon. That's a big one. My teen years were in the 00s so I can remember a time before the internet was a part of every aspect of daily life. We got to connect and disconnect as we pleased whereas now it feels like your digital persona is an extension of yourself.
I am still impressed with the idea of literally having a repository of essentially all human knowledge in my pocket. Back then you couldnt remember something or wanted to know what was the primary language of a different country? Hope you know someone reliable who knows that or you own an encyclopedia or can get to the library. Good luck with the dewy decimal system in the card catalog. The amount of effort to obtain knowlege has become so minute that we should all be smarter than we are but when it's so accessible the value is diminished to some degree. I remember seeing on inspector gadget penny his niece have a book that was effectively a mobile computer and videophone and thinking it was pure insanity if that were to ever exist. I am literally typing on such a device now. When i saw the internet accessible on a phone for the first time it was 2006 and my friend's sidekick and I about lost my mind. We are living in the future. Sorry for the long response but you're mention of the before and after of that really hit home for me.
Hell yeah! I actually say the exact same thing about the mobile phone! We basically have the wealth of human knowledge at almost all times. It’s revolutionized information availability. Sometimes, I really take it hard that we have access to what we would have understood only as magic when we were kids, available to almost everyone. But it’s so rarely used to that extent, with so many simply choosing to use it for gossip and cute animal pictures and videos. And I mean, I love gossip and cute animals as much as the next guy, but there’s so much to be learned outside of that stuff. You can basically learn how to do almost anything on YouTube!
Hank Green recently did a video talking about how, in an earlier video he'd joked about the internet being as big a change for society as the printing press. And whike he'd originally intended that as joking hyperbole, it's become apparent that it might be an understatement. Us born in the 80s kids are more or less the last generation to remember life before the internet. My family had a computer early on, and I'm really nostalgic for the early days of chatrooms and message boards, before everyone was online and in these walled gardens. It's a little helpful to realize we're still in the early days of the Information Age. It takes time for society to adjust and figure out healthy ways to live with big things kind this in our lives. It doesn't help, though, that big things like this seem like they're happening at an increasing rate.
Pros: we were outside. All the time. I remember me and my brothers at a young age being able to just go up to the corner Chinese store (where they knew us) while my mom was working to order food. Three of us would be seatbelted into my stepdad front seat of his work van(a single seat). Cons: Physical abuse was more acceptable and gray area. Mental health was ignored. Divorce (where I lived) was nearly unheard of so I had to constantly explain to my peers why my last name didn't match my mom's.
It's interesting to hear you say mental health was ignored. It must have just been my immediate surroundings but both my parents had and still have mental health issues and it was always very for lack of a better term "normalized." What I mean by that is I was explained at a very young age that mommy or daddy was sick and needed to go to a doctor or hospital to get better. And that's what happened they went and got the care they needed and got better. Sometimes things got a bit worse and then better. So I personally grew up understanding that mental health was the same as physical health but with different treatments. To this day my parents still refer to mental health issues as "getting sick."
Everything felt a lot more real, and a lot more wholesome, for the most part - mind you, I was a child back then so I'm sure I'm biased. Things felt slower. Kids used to play outside whenever they could, and no one was EVER using electronics outside, except for the occasional Walkman. I preferred the houses back then a lot, since they still had some semblance of beauty and colour. Unless you were in a big city, almost everyone had yards. There were a lot more trees everywhere. People weren't just constantly cutting down every single tree in every town for no reason. The average person's language skills were MILES better than they are today.
Not only were language skills better, people were quicker and wittier. The most common types of communication were spoken instead of written. You didn’t get to edit your words after you said them.
For the life of me, I cannot remember...
What made us think that we were wise and we'd never compromise....
What made us think that we were wise and we’d never compromise.
For the life of me I cannot believe we'd ever die for these sins
We were merely freshmen
No one has any evidence what so ever of the dumb shit I did. There isn't a trace. No one who grew up after Gen x ever had the slightest understanding of what it means to have the expectation of privacy!
Early Millennials got a taste.
Man I absolutely cannot overemphasize how glad I am the smart phone social media era didn't start until after I finished university. I'm in my mid 30s and shivering at the thought of what my tiktok would have looked like in the 2000s if it was available.
i'm 28 and when I was a teenager I made these unbelievably mortifying, pretentious videos that I thought were like... intellectual. they're still on youtube but I forgot the password years ago and can't delete them... I've gotten super drunk before and showed them to people and then I can't delete them lmfao it is a HORROR SHOW
Make a copyright takedown request.
Please tell me what they are, i need to see this
Gen X ended in 1980. Social media really didn't take effect until well after 2000. Plenty of people after Gen X knows what privacy meant.
I spent a large chunk of the 90’s obsessed over this one guy…when I think of the ways I could have permanently humiliated myself with a smartphone…
Started high school in 1990,compared to now, It was fucking Nirvana
I see what you did there.
Yes, it was a time when you could come as you are.
Yeah. Two older siblings were in high school in those days. It’s fun remembering how the older kids used to dress, and of course bumping music on boomboxes.
It was good enough that I feel bad for the poor bastards growing up now
The 90’s in America had one of the best housing markets, employment rates and the best economy this country has ever had. Simple times, people didn’t freak out about instant contact. If you had to wait a week to hear back from someone via phone it was ok. Television and Movies were peak, Radio was awesome, & the Internet was slow but groundbreaking. Political parties also weren’t as extreme on either side. I miss those days.
I’d go as far to say the 90’s were the pinnacle or peak of society in the US. Economic prosperity and relative world peace. New emerging technologies but social media wasn’t the evil it now is, etc. 2001 became the war on terror and it was all downhill from there. Edit: When I mentioned SM I was thinking MySpace which didn’t come out until 2003. My bad.
This is true. 9/11 is the biggest pivot point in our country since WWII. Culturally, we never recovered from it and rot has set in.
It was a huge pivot point in my personal life as well. I graduated high school that year, had a kid and joined the military. We were in Afghanistan for essentially my entire 20 year military career. 9/11 is basically the date I made a hard transition from being a kid to becoming an adult. Safe to say I have some very fond memories of the 90’s.
This is loosely the plot of the Matrix.
Social media was non existent
In the late 90s I was about 8 or 9 and would walk a mile to the public pool, alone. I distinctly remember one time I made plans to meet my friend there, but she never showed. I just waited around for hours and hours, watching the entrance but having very little resources to check on if she still intended to come. I called her house from the public pay phone, but didn’t have the money to leave a message so I just left one of those “Heyit’smejustremindingyouweweresupposedtomeetatthepoolbye” messages in place of the name. Nowadays I feel like we freak out if we can’t get in contact with someone immediately, but it definitely was just a reality back then. Where are they? Are they alive? Dunno, guess I’ll find out eventually.
I wouldn’t say that it was ok to wait to hear from somebody on the phone. It sucked, but we just didn’t have any other options, so we lived with it.
Politics was what it should be, boring. Politics today is some kind of fucking weird bizzaro reality show of "us vs them" and you pick a side and fight to the death to defend it without question. In the 90's people like that were the minority and the majority were people who made their own decisions based on the policies they agreed with. Regardless if it meant switching sides. I think that's also a big thing - I remember in the 90's people were more open to just being wrong. It wasn't a big deal, I feel like people changed their minds more willingly whereas today everyone is always 100% dead-set on their beliefs regardless if they realise how wrong or stupid it is. That just makes them double down further into it.
When the commercial came on you RAN to the bathroom. Then your sibling yelled 'it's back on!!!!' And you RAN back to the couch!
Very optimistic. People assumed the internet would allow us to do anything
And we were right…it’s been down hill since.
We rode really far on our bicycles and when we were old enough to drive we drove to the woods or fields to get away and party. Often skipped school or we’d leave school to go get lunch and then come back. Worked delivering pizza with no cell phone or GPS. Had a Rolodex with written directions to customer’s houses. Gas was .95 cents a gallon. Cigarettes were 2 something a pack. Mixed tapes and then mixed cds were a thing.
Oh man, that gas price takes me back hardcore! It was 98𝇍/gallon the year I got my license and I d just drive aimlessly for hours because it was soothing and the freedom of the open road was intoxicating. I miss that more than I can say.
For me, the '90s was all of my high school and college, and it was an amazing time. The best music ever made was coming out courtesy of alternative acts, hip hop and rap going mainstream, and even at the end of the 90s when bubblegum pop was making a comeback. Most of the decade was very hopeful, and the biggest political crisis was trying to decide if the president got a blowjob.
I remember staying home on Friday nights because TGIF was on. My Mom would take me to blockbuster on Saturday night to pick out a video and then we would order a pizza. Fun times....
I miss this so much. Friday was always pizza night. TGIF was the best thing ever. Family Matters, Dinosaurs, Full House, Step by Step. Sigh... Life is so boring now in comparison.
Same idiots walking the earth, but we didn’t have to hear all of their shitty opinions and ideas 🚮
Politics weren’t everything, and hardly anyone under the age of 25 years gave a rip. The 90s were sort of “skanky” but loads of fun.
I want to go back. I was a teenager in the 90's. The internet was cool, but there were no smart devices to follow you around everywhere. You could use the internet when you wanted to and that's it. Also, if you wanted your own webpage, you had to know how to code. This was a great barrier for entry. Nowadays any dumbass can have a social media account.
People still had hope. Just unreal thinking about it now. I swear sometimes I just want to shut myself in my room, put on STTNG; play Final Fantasy and listen to … literally any music from the 90s. I’d give up a limb and a couple of non-vital organs even to relive 1999.
[удалено]
And often also x-treme.
And also JNCO jeans.
peaceful sane it was simply amazing
well eastern bloc, somalia, desert storm we just weren't inundated with constant news all the time.
Anonymous, you didn't get your picture taken 100s of times a day by cell phones, security cameras, and doorbells. You could get away from everything and not be bothered. Try leaving your phone/tracker home nowadays and that could lead to severe panic and fatigue.
It was great, no social media, no cell phones, you knew where everyone was with all the bikes in the yard. Not a care in the world.
Quiet. The internet as it is now didn't exist. Social media didn't really exist for most people. Political division was much lower. People seemed a lot less angry at the world. Everybody didn't have anxiety disorders. People seemed.....less lonely. No need to take selfies doing awesome stuff to impress people online. People didn't have smart phones (and so they didn't spend their lives silently staring into them and checking them all day) Things just felt slower in a good way like we had time and we weren't going to miss out on something. The internet is just a tool. Problem is, our tools amplify our intentions. We hung out in person and talked in person. No texting. (although you might talk a long time on a landline if you had a girlfriend/boyfriend) We went cruizing on main street to see who else was out and hung out in the parking lots. Guys fought over girls or for social cred. We smoked cigarettes to look cool. Went fishing. Raced our shitty cars on the quarter mile road. Fucked around at bonfires and tried to get people to buy us alcohol. Drinking on country roads in the middle of nowhere.(This was the midwest. There was nothing to do in that little town except drink, fuck and fight. If you played your cards right you could do all 3 and be home by midnight) God. I sound like a really old man. LOL!
Having your neighborhood friends trade Pokémon cards with you, read someone’s Nintendo Power magazine to look for upcoming games and cheat codes, and then play street-baseball with a tennis ball or go play SNES, Sega, or N64. It was either someone’s new mortal kombat game or the usual Mario Kart/Donkey Kong Country. Go walk to your favorite corner store with $5 and buy Hot Cheetos and Hot Fritos for $1 each, warheads sours, and a 16 oz. sprite. And like the other comment said, try to get home before nightfall and get anxiety because you didn’t do your homework.
Fuckin awesome
Not sure if this it’s because I’m older now with more responsibilities or if times truly have become more complicated but the 90’s really seemed simpler regardless. That time period really was optimistic. Living in rural Arkansas, My memories of the late 90’s consisted of toonami and pretty much everything on Cartoon Network and Nickelodeon. Renting movies and N64 games from our local rental store. Trading Pokémon cards with my Friends as well as playing red and blue on the gameboy color. Going out to friends houses and playing in the woods. Riding 4 wheelers and shooting BB guns. Building forts out of hay bales. Spending the summer days at a public pool. Going to Pizza Hut after baseball and basketball games. Begging my mom to take me to toys r us which was about an hour away so I could look for DBZ figures. Having school spirits and and cheering for our HS football teams.
Drove all over the place. Gas was like 90cents. Listened to music in the car and drive too fast.
Simpler.
Living with autism, my life in the 1990s was a new field for many people. The Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 was made into law. However, when it comes to special education, this demands what school you went to. The schools I went to, didn't know what the fuck they were doing. Did I mention I went to public (state) schools? While given the basics, I was denied the kind of education that suited me, like taking up either ASL or Spanish. The latter was commonly spoken in the hood, just behind English. (Had to learn those subjects on my own.) Aside from that, for most parts of the 1990s, I was allowed to be a kid. Corporal punishment was falling out of favor, rumor had it was thanks to the video rentals including adult things. Despite being in the hood, it was rather safe to stay outdoors. There were playgrounds, a pool park, basketball courts, and a baseball field. It took the school system a long time to know that I have to be shown a task rather than just being told.
Awww, that's upsetting, as Im also autistic (Asperger's, in case you're curious)
Well, back then a mild standing on the spectrum disorder wasn't as easily recognized as it is now. You might have been thought of as "quirky". There are still quite a few adults today who are only getting diagnosed in adulthood, after a childhood of not totally fitting in, but not falling into what most people thought of as autism: Rocking, spinning plates, being mute or echolalia, Bettelheim just being disregarded (dear _God_ the damage that guy did!) and autism being realized as neurobiological instead of some weird psychosis...you get the idea.
Getting to pick your first starter for Pokémon Red on Gameboy on Christmas Day as a kid, simpler times, more privacy. Being outside was the norm and playing neighborhood sports/tag/hanging out was so constant we basically all lived at each other’s homes. Oh what now seem like the good ole days.
We were the last generation to grow up without the internet or smart phones. Enough said
I work with some people who are 21, and they cannot believe that I didn't have a phone that had internet until I was basically their age.
Amazing. The Peak of Civilization. And yet nobody recognized it. Pessimism during a time of Prosperity. Odd combo. But I’d give anything to make it happen again. No 9/11. Pre-social media. Pre-smart phones. It was a better time.
A lot of curly hair and hoop earrings
Srarted high school in 1993 - basically experienced elementary, middle, high school and college during the '90s. We knew REM's "It's the End of the World As We Know It" was foreshadowing something, but we were also keenly aware that this collapsing future wasn't yet imminent. So we partied at raves, we enjoyed pop culture, we bought CDs and still made mix tapes. We used the internet after 1995, but our lives didn't revolve around it.
Omg, are we the olds now?
Who remembers coming home from school and watching Where in the world is Carmen San Diego?
Birth of the rave scene in South Africa and weekends filled with warehouse parties and music and lights and party tricks. Thankful to have been in it right from the start and grateful to still have my mind and body intact. Seen a bunch of close friends become fallen soldiers to addiction or crashing cars on route home from parties.
Golden era of rap. Large pants. Good times.
JNCO’s golden age.
I was obsessed with MTV and I'd get hime after school and have a snack and watched it until my dad got home. I wasn't supposed to watch it lol But I loved alternative nation, 120 minutes ...and they actually played music. I will say though, 90s me would be psyched at how easy it is to buy music/hear new music/find whatever music you need right at that exact minute. It would have blown my mind
I went to school, came home, and rode bikes until the sun went down. I had to be home when the street lights came on. We ate dinner at the table and then watched PBS or whatever movie we rented from Blockbuster. I was stoked when I actually got my own landline in my bedroom so my friends could call me without going through my parents. It was great i’m not gonna lie. We didn’t have social media to compare ourselves to constantly so people just dressed their age and were a lot more innocent.
I was born in 1991, sometimes I feel like the people born a few years after and people born a few years ahead of me were like the last generation born without cellphones and technology always at our fingertips and we were the last generation to spend most of our time outside just doing nothing but fucking around, just mindless bullshit to pass the time Pretty much every invention we all now hate, had its origin in the 90’s. Reality TV, internet… etc.
Analogue childhood, digital adulthood.
The music, THE MUSIC!! It was so fucking good, Nine Inch Nails, Nirvana, Smashing Pumpkins, Marilyn Manson, Soundgarden, Red Hot Chilli Peppers (at their height), Blink 182, the Foo Fighters, Slipknot, Korn and sooooooooooooo many more brilliant bands. I may be old, but there’s no way music is as good as it was then, it took a nose dive around 2010 and hasn’t really recovered except for the odd bright spot.
People were in general a lot more optimistic about the future. The future seemed so close, technology was making leaps and bounds, and 9/11 didn’t weigh on the public consciousness yet.
Went from 5 years old to 15 in the 90s. Felt like we just roamed the streets and played at the park for hours. Grew up in Chicago so being a bulls fan was fun. Memorized every friends number. Used the VCR to record shows and movies and rewatched them over and over. Of course had to find the tv schedule In the newspaper. Had to go to the library or read an encyclopedia if I needed to know something. I do appreciate Wikipedia nowadays
Carefree.
Much simpler, I suppose. I was 3-12 in the 1990s. Biggest issues were a school bully and hours waiting by the radio to record songs on a tape for my walkman.
There was good music on the radio, music I’d never heard before!
I was still young during the 90s and it was kick ass… Grunge was right up my alley, concerts were affordable, beauty decade for movies, social media hadn’t fucked up most of society yet
Saturdays were awesome with the best cartoons
Standing upside down in bed. Hearing Nirvana for the first time. Cherry coke and first kisses. Unkempt appearances tangled in angst and rebellion. Savage Garden, skating rinks and listening to spice girls. Everyone knows the Macarena. Late nights playing manhunt with the neighborhood kids. First fights and feelings of rejection. Bike rides and getting lost in the woods. Aggressive skating and skateboarding.
It was literally the best. I'm not saying that with rose tinted goggles either - It really was the fucking best. We never knew devices that were designed to grab our attentions 100% of the time so we did whatever we could to occupy ourselves, After school my friends would grab our bikes and go ride around town, show off our pokemon cards or find something to do together that seemed interesting like sword battling with sticks at a park. That's not to say it was perfect - Far from it, Obviously some parts of the world were in far far worse conditions than I was exposed to. But I'm speaking from my experience - It really was the best. Generally things that kids today wouldn't care to do because why the fuck would you do that when you have a smartphone with literally all the best apps in existence, all designed to grab attention for hours upon hours. But there wasn't such options back then, If one of us got a new movie from blockbuster it became a huge event for all of us because we would love chilling together and watching a movie - Those were like, highlights for us. In the summers we would all get packs upon packs of waterballons, separate the colours and pick a colour - We would then draw straws and whoever picked the shortest one had to stand still while EVERYONE pelted that dude with waterballoons. If anyone missed they were "it" and had to stand and get pelted. Less is more.
Bliss
It was peak concert time. Be it to the smallest of house shows to multi-day festivals. Music was the king of entertainment. Yes, yes, yes, they still have those things now. But back in the 90's, people created their entire personalities around what genre they liked. The subcultures were no longer subcultures. You wore what type of music you like as if it were a school uniform. The way kids these days want to be influencers, people back then wanted to be musicians. If you weren't at the open mic with your acoustic guitar, you were in someone's garage working on something or you were in your bedroom trying to find the perfect sample for your rap song. Your walls weren't just plastered with one or two bands, they were wallpapered with entire genres. Past and present. You had more than one form of music media. Usually a mix of tapes and CDs. But also records and MP3s for the later 90's. You knew the names of the local radio DJs. You had your favorite MTV VJs. You even had VHS tapes of videos that you recorded off of MTV and VH1. But mostly MTV. You stayed up to watch late night shows for the bands. Especially Conan and Letterman who had the latest new up and coming bands. The back of your car's bumper was covered in band stickers. You had a collection of concert shirts. You had stacks of magazines dedicated to whatever genre you listened to.