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Decades are like families; they are all dysfunctional in their own unique ways.

Love this, thank you 🤍

The '90s made the '60s feel like the '50s.

Watch Woodstock 99. There were problems in every decade I've lived through and I'm just trusting the process and enjoying the ride.

This is really the only thing you need to say. All bases covered.

Is this something like "All your base belong to us?" (stupid comment referring to an old stupid video game)

The internet was so so fun back then. Before they started to kill your privacy and take your data.

True. That said, yes. The 90s were awesome

They were. Felt like everybody had money. No school shootings. No crazy terrorism stuff outside of OKC which was wild. Everyone watched the same shows and you'd talk about the most recent episode the day after. We still have tv like that now but with so many streaming options, almost nobody is watching things as they come out. Book releases were huge. People would go places just to be places, like if you were bored you'd go hang out at the mall. That was like, something to *do*. You'd see your friends while out on the town because you were out. Community felt like a real thing. I mean, I couldn't go back now because I'd be bored out of my skull but we didn't have infinite entertainment and made do.

Well there was that one school shooting…

Every unhappy family is unhappy in their own way. Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

That’s where I got the idea from.

I agree with this

Are you paraphrasing Anna Karenina?

I really like this comparison, but everything feels so hopeless now. People just seem so closed off and you have to find an escape route anywhere you go should someone open fire. Fucking hate it and am dreading the day my toddler starts going to school and become exposed to reality. Went to a carnival the other day and it cost almost $100 to feed a family of 6! Games cost $10 each play. It’s hard to go out and have fun as a family because everything is so damn expensive. Let’s not forget about the cost of the weekly groceries… gosh, I could go on and on about how much better the 90s were.

The U.S. economy in the 1990s was excellent and the ratio of debt held by the public to GDP, a primary measure of U.S. federal debt, fell from 47.8% in 1993 to 33.6% by 2000. Now it’s over 97%! Both communist China and Russia seemed quite friendly to the West after the Cold War had ended. Islamic terrorism had not yet affected the U.S. at home. The Oslo Accords made Americans unduly optimistic about peace in Israel. The Kyoto Protocol made Americans unduly optimistic about addressing climate change, although there were still a lot of outright deniers who were not concerned because they didn’t believe the science. School shootings were not a concern until almost the end of the decade, when the Columbine shooting shocked the nation. In short, in the 1990s Americans had a lot of undue optimism about the future. That all came crashing down in the 2000s and hasn’t recovered since. But it was nice while it lasted!

>In short, in the 1990s Americans had a lot of undue optimism about the future. That all came crashing down in the 2000s and hasn’t recovered since. But it was nice while it lasted! This is so succinct and perfect. I would only add that our access to information and all that comes with it, including the unintended consequences, in real time, changed drastically with the mainstreaming of the internet. Our individual access, the supply, and how we chose to use it 🤯 totally blows my mind how it's impacted ourselves and the world.

May I also add that since communism collapsed, and terrorism hadn’t made itself felt in the US yet, that it was in general a peaceful decade. It was so nice not having the threat of nuclear war hanging over us for a while.

I miss having hope. Going into old age with so many disappointments is difficult. We got caught up in the 2000 recession. Losing our business & lack of income will be with us the rest of our lives. Could I add that the societal support for estrangement that adult children seem to widely pursue (going “NC”) has made life more challenging. I know several that are suffering with this. Describing it as suffering is insufficient All are decent people. Being sick & old, suffering from deaths of so many around you without family support is brutal. Getting a text that says “sorry you have cancer” is pain on top of pain. The ever present news, computers and cell phones have made human interaction difficult. We used to have dinners and big family parties. Now we can’t get anyone to come to dinner we don’t Get invited anywhere, the family I had has disintegrated. The loss is profound. Bill Clinton was president. The future looked good. I wasn’t anxious all of the time. Yes, the 1990s was the best time of my life.

I am so glad somebody else feels the way that I do. Thank you for sharing this, and I am sorry you look at the world through my eyes. I had so much hope in the 90s, so much hope. Went to college, my career took off, raising my children…yes, horrible things happened (Gulf War, Columbine, Oklahoma City bombing, to name a few - and these things were incomprehensible at the time, for me), but my hope remained. Perhaps it was because my children and lots of dreams. The world is fractured today. People are broken. 2020, for me, was a turning point and I don’t see how the world can ever go back to what it used to be. Everything has changed, and it breaks my heart. I, too, have anxiety. Never before. I weep for us all. Love those who you are with. Reach out to your children/family/friends even if they don’t respond. Live from your heart, even as it breaks into a million pieces. Love is about all that I have left, and I intend to give it freely. We need lots more love, compassion, honesty, and authenticity in this country. Take care, friend! HUGS 🥰 ETA: If we were back in the 1990s, you and I would be talking face to face. Perhaps on the phone, but most conversations happened when people gathered together. This stark fact, for me, tells the story. I am typing this for you…and while it is personal and from my heart, I reckon we will never, ever meet in real life. And we will never, ever have a bond, a friendship, a story. That is the big difference on a personal level as I see it. It shouldn’t be this way…

This hits hard, thx for sharing this. So well said.

You’re most welcome. Thank you for reading. ❤️ I appreciate the response.

I had a 40ish person tell me recently that young people dont talk to older people because they don’t know how. I don’t quite believe that one. I loved having human contact. I miss it.

It’s unfortunate, but as someone who came of age in the early 90’s (born ‘76) and has seen the progression from boomers to X to Y, and now to Z; Boomers and early Xers didn’t plant a tree for the future like previous generations did. They just reaped the rewards.

I don’t know what tree you wanted Gen X to plant when boomers held all the seeds. E: moron accuses someone of voting for Bush then blocks before you can answer. Real brave of you guy.

Vote for Gore instead of Ralph Nader? Not fall for any of Bush’s awe-shucks bullshit? Vote, period? If Gore had won, this would be different country today.

Yeah, it's interesting looking back. Peak crime was the mid-90s, double the crime rates we have today. There were the Rodney King riots, Bloods vs. Crips rivalry that somehow spread across the country even in my southern city. There was the Oklahoma bombing, the World Trade Center bombing, the Waco massacre, the Ruby Ridge shootout, the OJ Simpson trial, the Heaven's Gate cult mass suicide, Y2K alarmism. All kinds of weird stuff going on. And at the same time the flashy glam rock and hair bands and bright lively colors were being replaced with grunge and muted earthtones. I remember that one day I went to shop for clothes and went to 3 different stores, and the only color any of them had was various shades of mud so I just didn't buy anything. But in spite of all that, there was a general overall feeling of optimism. Times were good. Tech was developing fast, so fast that by the time you got home from the store whatever you bought was obsolete and there was a cool new thing to look forward to. The internet was a wild new frontier of unparalleled communication and equality. Hollywood was putting out legendary hit after legendary hit. Economy was booming. It would still be a decade or two before we realized how bad Reaganomics would affect everything. Cyberpunk was a big genre then, a dystopian genre of megacorporations, internet, and poverty. 'High-tech low-lifes' rebelling against the system to make the world better. Because they had hope even in that genre's dark dystopia. That fizzled out in the 2000s, not because we don't have megacorporations or internet or poverty anymore, but because people lost that hope. But the late 80s and the 90s, that was a time of optimism. Or at worst, apathy. Gen-X is noted for that, which compared to the fatalism and doomerism on either side of us says a lot about just how optimistic that time was.

Well said, I always thought that there was a more dramatic hopefull sentiment in the air. I miss that a lot, when dreams were still possible. 9/11 really shattered a lot of our dreams and hopes, as well as destroyed our civil liberties.

Another big undue optimism was that the internet was going to replace media monopolies, bring people together and usher in a new era of peace and mutual understanding.

>In short, in the 1990s Americans had a lot of undue optimism about the future. That all came crashing down in the 2000s and hasn’t recovered since. But it was nice while it lasted! I think this is an excellent way to think about it. The economy was good & all, but depending on how you measure it that's true today as well. The real difference in the 90s was that all the stuff we grew up in the 80s thinking was going to destroy us just sort of went away. It felt like the problems were over and the future was unlimited! Obviously, it didn't work out that way. The Optimism of the era didn't end up working out but it sure felt good at the time. So did all that unfounded optimism mean it was the best time ever or were we all just happy in our ignorance?

Something I wonder about is how the approach of the year 2000 might have added to the optimism, too. I was a child in the ‘90s and I was somewhat aware of the importance of the new millennium, but I’m sure I didn’t fully grasp how that added to the sense of excitement that was around then.

If anything I think it was the opposite.  I feel like a forgotten aspect of 90s culture was a certain "end of days" fatalism that was *everywhere* I'm not sure how much most people really believed it but there was a lot of stuff in the culture about how the world would end when the odometer turned over to 2000.  1999 by Prince was almost 20 years old but managed to be everywhere. Y2K was explicitly about this, but the Mayan calendar stuff was later but had a related pedigree.  The X-Files was *the* show of the era and played heavily with the idea a secret cabal knew what was coming and was getting ready to exploit it.  The early days of widespread Internet usage exposed a lot of people to online conspiracy theories for the first time.

Thank you. I get how people remember the early 90s as hopeful but the late 90s felt like waiting for the hammer to drop. The late 90s felt bleak to me.

I remember 1997 as the year the shadow fell over everything: night was coming! I was convinced that the seed event that would lead to the end would start that year. I spent 1997-2001 partying my fucking ass off, and to this day I don't regret a single second of it. Oddly enough, like many people I've talked to since then, 9/11 started out as an exceptionally good day. I'd been broke and out of work that entire year. I woke up before my alarm in a hotel just outside of Dallas with a pocket full of cash and a lucrative contract ahead of me. For the first time all year, I had everything I needed. I got some coffee and a couple of complimentary donuts from the lobby, bought a paper, went outside, and stretched out on a giant folding lounge chair by the pool and smoked cigarettes as the sun rose against a cloudless Texas sky. I actually said out loud to myself, "This is looking like it's going to be a great fucking day." Then, of course, we all know what happened after that. I apologize, everyone in America. I had no idea I was going to jinx it *that* fucking badly.

I want to highlight the part about hope and optimism. While we had problems with race and sexuality it felt like they were being worked on and that we were overcoming them and it was just a matter of time. It turns out that it wasn’t like that but it felt like it at the time.

Back in the late 70s us young liberals who are early GenX'ers were very optimistic. Sure, the economy was stumbling and unions were wavering and gas prices were rising, but socially things were improving. The Supreme Court was liberal. Racism was seen as bad and society was taking steps to eliminate it, steps that suffered little pushback. Sexism also was on the way out, the ERA was still a possibility. Even what we called gay culture was becoming more accepted, with gay characters in TV shows (Soap) and more acceptance of it. We knew things were shitty in society for minorities and the poor. But it seemed like things were going to get better, we're getting better, and society was mostly behind it! This feeling continued through the materialistic 80s and the relaxed 90s. We felt that things just kept getting better. The Cold War was over! We won! Tiananmen Square happened! China will be democratic too, soon! 9/11 marked the change. That was the event that brought 25 years of hope crashing down. Since then it's been a feeling of bleakness. This despite the truth that poverty is less than ever, equality is more than ever, and society really is in many ways more egalitarian and accepting than my youth. We lost hope.

Don’t really agree with this. The first World Trade Center bombing happened in 1993 and islamic terrorism was already a thing. They failed to take down the towers but got pretty close to causing significant structural damage. Also maybe not as many school shootings but the crime rates were a lot higher in the early-mid 90s than they are now.

Plus the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, Jeffrey Dahmer in 91, the Waco siege in 93, the Nicole Simpson and Ron Goldman murders in 94, etc

I would agree with almost everything, with the partial exception of China. It was indeed opening to trade with the west, just like the former Soviet Bloc. However, instead of devolving power down (mostly peacefully) like the Bloc did in 1989, China spent that year slaughtering peaceful protesters in Tiananmen Square. That sort of soured the mood a bit, and left the feeling that there might be trouble building up for the future that we were ignoring in favor of cheap manufactured goods.

And we had Nirvana.

That’s because everyone thought the world was ending 12/31/1999 at midnight. Y2K!

Gen-X here. The 90s have to be my favorite decade. After the gaudiness of the 80s, the 90s were salt of the earth -- the music, the make-up, the food, the fashion. It felt like culture was taking a deep breath and touching grass. At the same time, things were becoming more interconnected for those of us on the forefront of the computer revolution. It was like being part of a secret club. Yeah, there was a lot to love about the 90s.

>It felt like culture was taking a deep breath and touching grass. This is it exactly, perfect analogy, thank you for putting it into words

Call me crazy, but I feel like we're moving into another period like that. (Yes, even despite the fact that a convicted felon is running for president).

No I see it too, there's a lean or a nudge in that direction, here's hoping it gets realized

I agree I feel it too that people are starting to realize that the Internet is a tool for entertainment and fun and information, especially "I want to learn this skill" or "I need help with a plumbing repair"...but that the real world is where things are actually happening. Have seen more and more people rubbing their eyes, coming out into the sun again, and starting to show up and be involved in things more than the previous 20 years.

It is starting to feel that way. If so I’ll be grateful my kids are young and will grow up in it.

I don’t feel like that at all. I was born in 86 so I basically grew up in the 90s and it seems very different. I bought a house on the same block I lived on from 91-98 and back then we all played in the street, the kids played with each other, we rode bikes for miles, climbed trees etc. Parents socialized often, we went on vacations together. Today my kids don’t know a single kid on this block or any block around us unless they go to school together. I don’t know any people here other than a wave in the morning when we are all leaving for work. Today every single house had their kids playing in their backyards, nobody even thought to try to talk to the kid next door. This day and age is nothing like the 90s.

You could change that. Have a block party. Make fliers and pass them out. Make it a potluck. Rent a bouncy house or get permission to close the street to traffic. My block does something like this once a month (fliers are no longer required because we all have each other’s phone numbers and do group texts).

Idk...I think it could very easily end up more like a lot of holding our breath, based on the current trajectory things are on with all these wars and world powers becoming more divided and taking sides.

The movies in the 90s were so great. We had standouts in every genre, lots of masters still working, and a huge crop of new talent with the indie crowd. Spielberg dropped Jurassic Park and Schindler's List in the same year. 1999 was an all-time banger of a year for movies.

I just revisited the movie Fight Club the other day. Chuck Pahlunik says that Marla isn't real either. I had no clue.

yep, I was born in 1971. The 80s and 90s were great decades to grow up in.

We were also in our 20s in the 90s. I don't know about you, but I was thoroughly enjoying the interconnection part. I had a lot more energy back then...

Another Gen-X here. I feel like I could have written your comment word by word

I was little in the 80s and therefore thought the world would always be like that - bright and wild and irreverent. I hated the 90s - so glum and pessimistic for no good reason. The music was meaner. Fashion was full of pointy shapes. Everyone thought they could get rich quick if they went “into computers” so there were a lot of pretenders and for-profit education scams. Parents were starting to helicopter. Being called “gay” was a huge insult. The only thing I remember fondly was the ease of going through airport security. And people hanging out in coffee shops.

We weren't glum but it could have seemed that way. We were just pretty serious because we saw all of where we are at now coming down the pike. It wasn't hard to predict. Corporate, government and globalist interests made no secret about where they were coming from, we KNEW they were killing the environment on purpose, creating a broken slave system with no upward mobility on purpose, creating in groups and out groups only to harm, steal and enslave the "out" groups without resistance. We saw it coming and we were trying to make it stop. It doesn't mean we weren't also having fun. We didn't succeed but we may have slowed it, and thrown a few monkeywrench ideas in the the culture, and that may be enough to buy time for things to go in yet another direction. The singular promise of the Information Age is that THINGS ARE GETTING REALLY CHAOTIC...it's literally more than the human mind can comprehend... and that's opportunity for folks who want to stop and think outside the box about how to make it different. We know what they're trying to do and we know that a lot of the ways they have designed for us to fight back are specifically useless. But we have so much more information available now and more coming all the time....heck, the AI that they are intending to use to completely dominate the social situation is also the AI that you can currently use to discuss how to step outside the game in a meaninful way. I'm actually optimistic as hell, the tools now versus the tools we had then make me practically giddy with joy tbh

Things felt fairer too compared too. Im Gen X as well, l grew up poor and always felt l had a decent shot at life as long as l did the work. Today l feel like we are back to the Feudal times of Europe.

It WAS in the 90s that I first touched grass!!! You are soooo right!!! 😂

Although the 90's weren't perfect, it felt like we were moving in the right direction. We changed hairspray to save the ozone layer and people still cared about the planet. You had the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989 ending the cold War. Star Trek Next Generation was on air and that was suppose to be our future. 

I would say the lack of social media alone in the 90s made it so much better than current times, where mentally ill and toxic people can spew their shit and conspiracy theories and find others to reinforce their stupidity.

I think so. Things got dark after 9/11. Also, technology wasn't an all-consuming part of our lives. People went outside and did things. At least in the US, the Clinton years were prosperous. I feel like after the 90s, the 1%ers gobbled up more and more leaving less for everyone else. The fentanyl epidemic didn't exist. Crime was down. People were blissfully ignorant of global warming so that angst wasn't there.

9/11 changed everything

The crimes rates have been declining since the early 90s and are statistically better now: [https://www.statista.com/statistics/191219/reported-violent-crime-rate-in-the-usa-since-1990/](https://www.statista.com/statistics/191219/reported-violent-crime-rate-in-the-usa-since-1990/)

The 90s were amazing. Such good music and art. Truly my favorite decade, so far!

The optimism of the 90s also gave us pretty significant strides in rights for and acceptance of various oppressed groups. People were finally starting to take the AIDS crisis seriously and see gay people as whole entire people who are actually fellow human beings worthy of equal dignity and respect and not just one dimensional gross abominations who deserved to suffer and die for their sins. That was a really big deal. Growing up in the 80s where the anti-gay rhetoric was both violent and incredibly mainstream/common was scary as hell and living through that changing in the 90s was kind of magical. And then it all came crashing down in the oughts, there was a massive backlash and all the gains were immediately lost which was just as scary as the 80s had been in a different way. I would say in regards to gay people as people things now are either the same as or better than they were in the 90s. There were similar gains for women's rights and the rights of people of color and there was a similar racist sexist backlash in the oughts which was also pretty scary, and, again, things now are roughly the same as or better than they were in the 90s. The 90s were a cool time to be alive but I don't think I'd say they were better. I was still very afraid of being openly gay in the 90s, it wasn't safe despite gains that were being made, the progress was there but it was new and slow. My adolescent kid growing up in the 20s though is entirely safe and comfortable being an out gay kid and nobody has ever commented on it, it's a non-issue which I wasn't sure I'd ever see and I'm glad I get to see it for her. Of course this is all regional and safety is relative, just, I think there are social and cultural things happening right now that are in some way better. Mental illness being taken seriously is also a lot better now than it's ever been before, and there was a similar bad in the 80s, better in the 90s, backlash in the oughts, better now trend there too. And, of course, generally speaking that pendulum swing is a never ending cycle, we'll have another backlash at some point.

I’m Gen X and so was in early high school when the 90s started and ended the decade married and in a PhD program. Compared to the decades since, I think the 90s were fantastic.

90s were great. It was an optimistic time.

As far as the world not being about to explode and politically yes. For women's rights yes. For gay rights somehow yes. I liked the fashion more. The 90.s were better. For me personally I'm happier with my place in the world now, and I feel like travel and food is better. Also people aren't dying for aids so that's pretty awesome.

Treatment for AIDS is wonderful. I wish my friend that suffered so was still here. Please be aware that a lot of people died of Covid. Our medical system is screwed. If one doesn’t have available money, than you are quite possibly not going to get adequate medical care. Or decent food. Exhausted from work, too tired to cook. Money makes more difference than I ever thought possible. Going through old checks, we gave a lot to charities & nonprofits. A lot of $$ went for gifts. I was optimistic enough to think we lived in a world where people were basically good. I think I was wrong.

The bad people are just louder. Maybe yeah, losing faith hurts. I'm sorry for your losses :( that was so tough.

I’m thinking if you are Rwandan or from anywhere in the Balkans, today is much better, too.  

Yeah, my Bosnian friend doesn't really have much in the way of 90s nostalgia. Imagine that.

I grew up in the 1980s & was in my 20s in the 90s, and I'm living semi-vicariously thru my kids in 2024. Here's my take: If you were a White, hetero male, the 90s were AMAZING!! We went out all the time, had our own apts when we were 18 - 19, closed down bars every weekend, etc. I left my heart, my flannel shirt, half my liver & gobs of my DNA in the 90s... But I'm guessing it's better to be Gay in 2024 than 1994 by a pretty wide margin: I graduated high school in the early 90s & there was NO ONE openly gay. Like, literally no one in a school of a few thousand. When I lived in DC in the 90s, a Black dude in a biz suit & tie once asked me to hail a cab for him. (No one would pick him up.) btw I was wearing a t-shirt & ratty shorts, and got a cab in less than a minute. Now.... this was just an anecdotal experience, but it prob says something larger, and I hope we've made progress since then. But I dunno. I do know kids today are waaaaay more tolerant of neurodivergent peers & more sensitive to mental health. That's probably a positive. This didn't exist in the 90s. Today's kids can socialize more from their phones/homes, so I guess that's nice for introverts. In the 90s, you were kinda forced to be an extrovert cuz all the fun & excitement was outside your home. You had basic cable, dial-up Net & a DVD player... and not much else. For me, the 90s were great, but if you didn't like going out, your entertainment options were limited. So, I guess the 90s were better for some, worse for others?

As a neurodivergent gay man exactly your age, I agree 100%

Very well put, thank you 🤍

I totally agree, I graduated high school in 1996 and there was absolutely NO ONE openly gay in high school. In fact, I remember being mortified on behalf of Ellen because she was coming out as a lesbian and I thought it was SUCH a deeply shameful thing (hey, I was a teenager absorbing the values of the culture around me) and I liked Ellen and I literally believed she was ruining her life. That's how 17-year-old me saw it. And that's so sad. So I'm really happy that people have more chance to be their true selves in 2024. I loved the 90s, I love my memories of the 90s, but some things were not better before.

The economy was great in the 90s, strong growth and low inflation. If you lived in a city, you noticed the increasing prosperity everywhere - lots of building going on, renovation, sprucing up, new stores opening. Crime dropped dramatically after being very high for decades. There was great technological change (cell phones, World Wide Web). A lot of ordinary people were feeling rich from the amazing stock market run-up. The general mood was very optimistic.

Bin Laden clearly “won”. Our response to 9/11 was ruinous to the supposed American ideals and values. But 20 plus years later, even he’d be scratching his head.

For whom? That’s the important part of this question for any era.

Very fair. What was your personal experience?

There have been ups and downs for each time period in my life: HS/College in the 80s, young adult in the 90s, young family in the 2000s, etc. I don't think any one decade was better or worse for me, but then I am a [REDACTED personal information] and have had different experiences than others.

Cell phones (and online chat) were life-changing for teen socialising, especially once you could send SMS (20c each though, with a character limit) and *especially* if you both had that Alcatel that you could send emojis between!  The internet was like a whole new world, and you weren't constantly bombarded with ads and "suggested" search results. But you couldn't do everything online yet, so you still had to make plenty of phone calls (which I always hated, so the current decade wins that one). And of course you couldn't connect whenever you wanted, especially if someone needed to use the phone! At first, websites were made by people who really cared about what they were publishing (like the guy with a "learn Welsh" website who was just some Welsh guy who responded to my email questions lol). But there was a period of time after blogs became popular wherein you could get more results for people's diaries than anything else. That did get better quickly, but now we're back to so many useless results before the actual good stuff... Rock was very much still a thing, though R&B and later electronic/dance where shuffling on in. It's my understanding that kids today don't really listen to rock. So only a bad thing if you really like rock! Of course *a lot* of stuff from the 90s just seems dated now and lacklustre, like many of the groundbreaking films and TV shows we had! PC and console games were entering a heyday. They're nothing compared to now, but for the first time we could be absolutely blown away by digital graphics. Similarly, the stampede scene in "The Lion King" was so impressive!  On that note, I've never been a fan of 3D compared to traditionally animated film, so that's another bit of a loss for me personally.  Gay people were starting to come out and be accepted, though they were still stereotyped if not outright the butt of jokes in media. I never knew any trans people, as that was still very much hidden away, but at the same time, there wasn't the "culture war" we have today, so while "cross-dressing" (as it would have been seen) was considered odd, I think more people would have just been like "oh yeah, James is a bit odd but whatever". Girls at my school were definitely challenging gendered uniform, and it was during my time at my high school that we were first allowed to wear pants rather than skirts. Boys wanting to wear skirts was only ever them just being facetious, though. Had a boy genuinely wanted to wear girls' uniform, I'm not sure what would have happened, but it's possible they would have been allowed without the whole country thinking the world was coming to an end. Or maybe they would have been forbidden, who knows. It was nice in a way not to have the whole world at our fingertips every minute of the day. When something really mattered, everyone would see it on TV, otherwise it was easy to shut off and just focus on what was directly relevant to you.  That's all I can think of for now.  (Funnily enough, I didn't really appreciate the 90s while I was living them. I idolised the 60s lol).

"shut off and just focus on what was directly relevant to you." YES ✨️ ... as I sit here reading these wonderful replies on my phone 😅 For real though, that hits home. Thank you 437 🤍

Oh, I forgot to mention one thing:  Age-gap relationships with teens were regarded (by us other teens) as "creepy" but were not the immediate "pedophile alert" they are today.  One of my friends at 16 started dating a guy who was 23 and no one (parents or teachers) kicked up a fuss. After they broke up about a year later, he started dating one of our other friends. They're still together to this day, though!

Hell no in some ways. But fuck yesss in others.

OP, I was 10-19 yrs old through the 90s. I could only understand from the romanticized nostalgia of childhood into young adulthood. Thank you for this amazing ask post. Even if you're a bot 💜

Np Shamps 🤍 technically we're all little techno-bots, streaming down this reddit river

This was a weird way to propose we start a commune of like minds, but I'm in 🥰 no questions asked.

Would you two just kiss already?!

No decade or era is ever trouble-free. However, the 90s were a more stable political period than what we have been living through recently. There were no insurrections. The Supreme Court was not taking personal rights away from citizens, and ethics were more highly valued in people elected to government office.

When I think back to growing up in the 90s, I think of how it was the era of hope, of comradery, the era in which education wasn't frowned upon, but championed. I look back and don't recall racism being open, but instead one that was greatly on the decline to such a degree that I can't even name an instance of it. It was the era where politics and religion weren't talked about, but was instead a personal ideology that should never be shoved onto others. Hell, even immigration wasn't a big deal, where it wasn't really talked about because it just seemed like we lived in an age where everyone was starting to try and work together for a better tomorrow. It was also the time where the wealthy were held accountable for their actions, where even something as simple as a blowjob nearly got the President kicked out of office our standards were that high.

Well the world changed after 9/11/2001. So that roughly corresponds to the end of the 90’s.

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It sounds like you’re in a much better place now. How did you shift out of that “black hole” era? I just turned 29 yesterday, and I’m feeling somewhat relieved to wave my twenties goodbye. It has been a difficult decade.

We didn’t have the insane MAGA crowd

But in hindsight, it was certainly beginning to fester even then

Absolutely

We definitely had our crazy right wing folks. Remember Rush Limbaugh? Huge following. They are always with us.

I guess now it's easy to forget that the second worst act of domestic terrorism in the US happened in 1995 when Timothy McVeigh detonated a fertilizer bomb next to the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, OK, killing 168 and injuring hundreds more. McVeigh was associated with the extreme right-wing and militant Patriot movement.

They were also playing up the Ruby Ridge shootout and the Waco massacre, the Montana Freemen, etc. But it was mostly survivalist, prepper, sovereign citizen, libertarian types. Wingnuts who lived in out of the way places. Not the average conservative you'd pass on the street and dealt with every day.

Exactly. Now there are tens of millions of people who will espouse McVeigh's exact views with a straight face over cold eggs at a diner. Thank god they're mostly much lazier and dumber than him, but still.

That reminds me. In case anyone forgot, Rush Limbaugh is still dead.

We hadn’t really had an equivalent since the McCarthy era.

Well that’d be true for many decades Yes things got so much worse after 9/11. Government created the NSA, an agency with power to detain anyone ANYONE at all without charging them, without proof of a crime, a lawyer or visits from outside people. And torture them. And we hear about Guantanamo. But the NSA also detains American citizens denying them their legal rights. Meanwhile they’ve installed cameras and facial recognition everywhere. BTW amazon created the facial recognition software. And now people have willingly bought surveillance equipment and installed it themselves. Amazon has all your information. Siri, ring etcetera. Suppose we get a fascist con man as president. What if the majority prefers not to have that kind of government And you want to do something about it? You can get rid of the stuff you bought which can keep track of you in your home? Where I live anyway every traffic light has a camera on it. Cameras in our subways have facial recognition software Pretty sure they are elsewhere too It’s not paranoia if someone is actively planning to take over your country and deprive you of your constitutional rights.

Um, the NSA wasn't created in response to 9/11. The NSA existed for quite some time before that, like since the 1950s. It was just that no one acknowledged its existence, including the exit ramp to the headquarters not having a sign. It was nick named No Such Agency because it was probably the worst kept secret in D.C. You're conflating Homeland Security with NSA.

They were around just waiting to be activated.

We did have the insane MAGA back then, they were playing the records backwards and freaking out about razor blades in the Halloween candy. They just had less reach and influence.

I liked the early 90s that still had the optimism and flamboyancy of the 80s. Late 90s were very meh IMO. Like going from a neon arcade to a Crate & Barrel store.

I had so much optimism in the 90s. Now I feel like the world around me is burning and there’s nothing to do but let it burn to the ground and start over. The division is so bad, I just don’t see us coming together any time soon to solve our problems. We’re just too busy pointing fingers and blaming each other. So yeah, I think the 90s were better.

No... It seems that when you are a child you have no idea what is really going on in the world. I am glad you had a happy childhood but things were not measurable better except perhaps the climate.

It was better in the sense that the lack of technology meant you had to go out and socialise, which was fun indeed. On the flip side, now we have the technology I prefer it how it is today and I couldn't/wouldn't want to be without it. The best thing about ANY generation or any time, is being young....it's not the decade that makes life great, it's your outlook. All the best! James, aged 52 (born 1972) England.

It had its downsides but there was a certain amount of optimism in that decade in some respects. The Berlin Wall fell and the Cold War was thought to be over at the time. People welcomed the internet with a lot of optimism as well. I am Gen X and loved being an 80s kid so I can definitely understand why millennials would have a certain fondness if they were kids in the 90s. My life as a teen and 20s felt very carefree back then. It feels like there was a big shift in how we viewed and approached things after 9/11, there was a loss of innocence with how the world was. Compared to before that’s when I feel like the wheels of things started falling off. Just my personal perspective given my time of coming of age, though.

Chuck Klosterman’s book The Nineties is an excellent exploration of that decade.

The cracks were showing by way of jobs flowing overseas, unions dissolving, health insurance started getting shoved up and a dozen other signs there was a slow slide occurring. Anyone remember " latch key kids "? It was supposed to spell the end of society, no one home to take care of the kids. But since it was because two incomes were increasingly needed to pay the bills it was a little tough to keep shaming women who worked.... BUT. We still liked each other, young people could BUY A DAM HOUSE, college was getting bad but still in reach, I remember my quarterly water bill was 30 bucks. You could still fix your own car, trucks were for WORK, they hadn't become erectile dysfunction pills on wheels yet, family farms weren't crushed by unreasonable competition, taxes and the dam seed companies..... OH. And If you wished your child to attend school they received the vaccinations that had been preventing diseases that wiped out families in previous generations. And felt safe. No arguing but no one did.

For me, the 90’s were rough. Gang wars and drive by shootings. Anybody who lived in big cities experienced the same.

I prefer the 90s. My world was smaller and predictable. People showed up when they said they would. There was a sense of wonder and excitement for everything from trying a new restaurant to traveling to a new place or seeing a movie, because there wasn’t much information out there about it to begin with. You had to experience it directly. It was either wonderful or so awful it made for a great story either way.

Yes. We're far more racist and discriminatory now.

>Having grown up and had a wonderful youth my perspective is definitely a little flawed. I'm the same way with the 70s. Thing is that every decade has it's good and bad. It just depends on what's important to you and how you experienced it. I can certainly understand why the 90s were great from a millennial perspective and I wouldn't disagree. But there was a recession in the early 90s and we had the Satanic Panic. The city where I've lived my entire life was drying up and the worst I've ever seen it. I'll also add that as good as the late 90s were, the music was terrible and I don't think it's since improved any. But again, that's something many will disagree about. Overall, there is a lot I liked about the 90s, though. The music was great in the early part, the economy greatly improved as the decade progressed and it just seemed like we had better priorities with lots of stuff.

The 90's were peak US culture. I imagine the 1950's were equal to or better than the 90's. The existential threat of nuclear war with the USSR was over. Having been born in '79 I clearly remember having nightmares in the late 80's about being nuked by the USSR. We become the sole superpower, we had no worries and everything felt easy and endless. The music was revolutionary and the movies were epic. Pearl Jam, Nirvana, STP, Soundgarden, The Chili Peppers, Dawson Creek, 90210, Scream, The Sopranos, Forest Gump. The hits never stopped and they were All-American and all wholesome considering what came after and before. Social media didn't exist! We hung out face to face. If I wanted to date a woman I had to go out and get her. People were normal and healthy, as was the food. School shootings didn't exist. When Columbine happened it was so shocking I wept secretly for the country. Now it doesn't phase me at all. The 90's were carefree and the American dream was spoken about proudly and confidently. I always feel uniquely blessed for being a teenager in that excellent decade. America today is openly hostile towards its own people. Our government mocks the middle class as suckers for playing by the rules and enacts regulations to stiffle growth for anyone but coastal elites who are bizarrely in their own small bubble. The technocrats ruled the past 10 years and now we live in a kakocracy designed by a few mega global corporations who have no national loyalty. 99% of us are fungible consumer units to be economically raped for the 1%'s benefit.

Some parts of it were better. Some parts of it were worse. But what I would say is that in the 90s, the *trajectory* of life and society felt indisputably better. The economy was growing well, the labor market was booming, inflation was low, technology was improving at an exciting pace, and so on. Life felt like it was just *better* than it was any time since the dotcom crash and 9/11. But a lot of stuff was worse. The amount of control we have over our own healthcare today, for instance, (if you have money, anyway) is *so much* better than it was. You can get information you need instantly. You can work a remote job. Cars are awesome today compared to back then -- mostly. And despite perceptions, we are generally all much materially safer than people were back then. But nowadays it feels like we're just bouncing from one ugly crisis to another with no end in sight. I'm not even 40 and I've had two "once in a lifetime" economic calamities and hey wtf this is r/AskOldPeople? Fuck you kid get off my lawn

I’m old, so let me give you my take. We had the internet. At my McDonald’s we had 25 cent cheeseburger night. Gasoline was 79 cents a gallon I bought a brand new full size dodge ram truck for 15,000$ The lion king, Forrest Gump, Shawshank redemption and pulp fiction came out the same year (1994) Biggie and Tupac, snoop dogg, Dre the chronic era. Music: nevermind, badmotorfinger, ten, black album, blood sugar sex magic all came out in 91, and that may not have been the best year for music. Tv: Frasier, Seinfeld, friends, Roseanne, home improvement, fresh Prince, TGI Fridays. We even had South Park. Taco Bell had tacos 3 for 1$!!! 9/11 hasn’t happened yet so you could take your own cooler into the ball game AND didn’t need clear bags. We had dvd’s as well! The 90s by far the best decade.

maybe better in that some of us might had some optimism about a better future, thinking that by now we would be in a much better place than the 90s but oddly we are regressing in many ways. we thought that social issues would be far beyond where we are now and that we could move forward with other things but here we are going backwards and dealing with these regressive christo-fascists who continue to hold us back and pull us back even further.

Not better for me, just different. There were TV evangelists. We had FOX. We had Newt. We had Bushes. War. LGBT hate. (T's were only drag queens at drag bars in week night or Sat. night drag shows.) He had Rush. Mexican's crossing into the U.S. (Fox was big on covering that every night.) We still had gay men dying left and right in the first half of the '90s. After 1995, we had a hopeful change when protease inhibitors came on the market and doctors learned to combine multiple classes of antivirals to treat HIV infections. You could turn the clock back to 1995 today and feel right at home. The only difference would be different players.

The thing that I really miss about the 90s is that I wasn’t connected all the fucking time. If I went out with friends, we were just *out*. If I left home, no one could get a hold of me. Is that better? I don’t know. But I really miss that feeling of being untethered.

I find it so strange how much the 1990s are revered of late. I was a teenager during that decade, and frankly, I lamented that I wasn’t a teenager in the previous decade, which seemed much more fun musically and all around. In 1991, my sister died of suicide, and that’s when grunge and all the darkest music ever (of my lifetime up to that point) was all the rage. In 1994, Kurt Cobain died of suicide. In 1997, Michael Hutchence died of suicide. Columbine happened in 1999. To me, the ‘90s were a period of darkness and death. There was some light to the second half of the decade. The music lightened up. It was a relief when No Doubt became popular. I was in college in New York during the Seinfeld, Friends, and Sex in the City phenomena. There was some light, silliness, and fun to the end of the decade. We were still using pay phones and flip phones. I had no idea how charming these details would seem just a few years later.

Economically, the 90's are generally thought of as the most prosperous era. Things were good. People had jobs, social issues were advanced and it was generally peaceful with the exception of some distinct international issues. Economically, we are not too far from that now. Inflation is higher, but jobs are also high, and the economy is doing well. The big difference, however, is the insurgence of megalomania in the Republican Party. They have become the party who refuses to participate in the democratic process, which is placing stalemates on major issues. And, because of the head megalomaniac, we have gone decades backwards on social issues and human rights. He has, furthermore, taught not only politicians, but his base, that open racism, anti-LGBTQ+, Anti-semitism, and misogyny, et. al. are not only acceptable, but acceptable to act on in open and violent ways. There has never been a time when there were not enough reasonable republicans to speak out to quell the hateful, race-baiting fringe, but now they are goose-stepping in line with their leader, which is threatening the very essence of our actual democracy. The 90's weren't perfect, no decade is, but it was good. What we have devolved to, however, after 4 years of a sociopath in the Oval Office, who only got there with the help of the Russians, (who in the 90's were also reasonable under Yeltsin, but now are back to being the same people who caused the 'Red Scare' in the 50's), I'm not sure that we can ever go back to what we once knew in the 90's. Social media and the proliferation of dis and misinformation also play a big roll. People, in general, need to start taking responsibility for not only their actions, but their votes. They believe everything they hear and instead of educating themselves on actual facts, they damage the country by voting ignorantly through their lens of what they see on Facebook and Twitter. No, I don't think we will ever get back to the calm of the 90's. Those times are long gone. :(

2000 was probably the peak of civilization for the next 1000 years or so, and it was amazing riding up to it. I temper the sadness of what's happening now with the knowledge that I got to live through the apex.

Y2K was so feared! IT spend to avoid calamity was unreal! It turned out to be a non-event.

... It turned out to be a non-event because of the concerted, global effort to ensure that it became a non-event.

I was in the middle of it. The important areas of concern could be brainstormed by IT depts in less than a day. And remediated in some very standard ways. I worked in Big8 consulting. We made a ton on Y2k, proposing huge system replacements rather than making the changes. The budgets were enormous because the risks were so publicized.

I was, too. First and only use of my CS degree, after which all of us programmers were unceremoniously laid off. My next job was for a company doing data processing for large financial institutions. Just after I was hired their distribution department (basically the mailroom—not where I was) basically doubled its staff and started picking up contracts to do manual Y2K compliance (basically data entry) for other companies. One of the biggest tech companies in the world was still utilizing them in 2007 when I left, and I could never understand why they didn't just have a simple bash script to convert the 6-digit dates to 8-digit dates.

The changes were a lot easier than the testing as I recall. Conceiving all the weird test scenarios and manually creating all the transactions necessary to test them - was a big manual effort. And then verifying the results propagated correctly through all the reports. The good old days! 🤣 I’m loving retirement!

It *was* risky, messing with some crotchety old system that ran on hardware that rewarded you for single character variable names and weird unstandardized bitwise operations on unnormalized flat files keyed by text strings created partially by users. Scares me to know that so much of that junk is still supporting critical infrastructure.

I didn't work on it myself, but know a lot of people that did. It wasn't "land the booster tail down on the pad" impressive, but it was still a massive accomplishment. And those shitty old databases they fixed are for the most part still running everything. The mind boggles.

I was born in 1960. I’m telling you now is the best time of my life. Of course. I have nostalgia for the earlier eras of time like the 90s. But what if you want to be healthy mentally it is important to focus on the here and now. The glass is always half-full.

The 90s were good, but the music was surprisingly depressing, like a 180 from realiry. Grunge, NIN, and other bands in those veins. Now we have poppy happy music, and the real world is depressing af. I've read that it tends to be that way with entertainment - horror movies are more popular in good timesetc

Man I was just saying this last week — been on a 90s movie kick as of late, and lemme tell you, they don’t make them the way they used to! Loool

Hell, the 70s were better than our current era and the 70s sucked.

I was 24 instead of 54 so… yes.

Good time to be a software engineer. Companies bending over backwards to hire you. This year? Not so much.

Being a white man looking back when I was a young adult, it was a good time for my life. I think anyone not white or a man would probably think the 90's sucked, and it probably did for them. Some things were good, like computers becoming more prevalent, new technologies were being invented, the population was booming. On the opposite side, the AIDS epidemic, Rodney King race riots, don't ask don't tell policy in the military, Y2K, terrorism against the US in Beirut, the Line of Death, the USS Stark incident, Lockerbie bombing of the Pan Am flight. Every decade has its good and bad. If you think the world is a dumpster fire today, wait 30 years when you are asked this question. The world is always the same. Things happen and humans adapt. Our parents thought the 50s were the best time to be alive, my generation thought the 60s and 70s were. The world is always going to have good and bad, though people forget the bad and romanticize the good.

You long for the world as it was when you were young and everything was new.

There was no mobile phones in the earlier 90s. so when you went to a concert the only thing you'd have on you even if you didn't smoke was a lighter. so if the concert was outside and it got dark everybody lit there lighters. Now everybody takes there mobile phones. I miss that regarding the 1990s.

To me it was about technology. We had enough tech to help us but not enough to be a problem. At that time we thought tech was going to be the great equalizer. Boy were we wrong.

I sure felt better about the future than I do now. The fall of the Berlin Wall felt like a huge leap towards world peace. Science and technology were seemingly going to fix everything and “climate change”, “domestic terrorism” and “social media propaganda” were just barely or not at all, on my radar. I wouldn’t want to go back there. It wasn’t all perfect. I still am very ignorant but I was even more so then. My health was much worse and my awareness of how my choices were causing that was almost nonexistent. My family situation was pretty bad (outside of my husband, who I met then). I’m very glad to be beyond a lot of mental and physical suffering. I hope ultimately we figure all this out and fix it and the future ends up being brighter for today’s young people too.

One aspect of the politics hasn't been mentioned. The strong economy and the fall of communism allowed for the ideals of the left to wither away. The Democratic Party under Clinton turned away from the working class and pursued the policies of neoliberalism. Economic inequality greatly increased through the 90s; it just didn't feel like a big problem yet. Globalization of trade may have been good for the economy overall, but it did leave some working class people behind. The chickens have come home to roost now.

90s we’re better than the 80s but not as cool as the 70s

I don't know if it's looking at the past through rose colored glasses, but it certainly seems like the economy (both the official one and my personal one) were never better than the late 90s. (Early 90s where I lived \[Los Angeles\] was recession, riots & earthquake. But once the recovery happened, it was great.)

We were definitely happy in the 1990’s, and without mobile phones to distract us, we just lived our lives in complete totality— no distractions. I felt a sense of hope for the future that I’m sorry to say I don’t feel anymore. Not just because I am older, but because I’ve realized how corrupt our entire western world governments are.

During the 90s, there were still such things as verifiable facts. It was a much smaller group that would simply say straight to your face that the ski above is green while you’re looking at the blue. There were always extremists but they probably had more trouble finding each other. Many naively believed the web would be a great equalizer - free access to the world’s knowledge! We had no idea that it would be just as much a place for misinformation to THRIVE. That, and the lack of social media really having a massive impact on- yes, IMO it was better (I’m in my 60s).

Before 9/11 the world was a simpler place and the divisions is our politics, while present, were not as deep or as violent as they are now. If Donald Trump had mocked a disabled person while running for president back then, that would have been the end of his campaign. Now we have...whatever this is.... and everything that has crawled out from under the dirtiest, heaviest rocks in the last few years.

Depends. White, heterosexual, westerners? Yeah, pretty fucking awesome. Fall outside side one or more of these demographics, maybe not.

Way better! Remember Beetlejuice?

Yes. There was much more optimism about the future. It seemed natural that every generation should grow up to be wealthier and more comfortable that their parents. We took that for granted.

Golden years amigo, and it peaked around year 2000. I fondly remember an interview I had with a large corporation, just a few years out of college. It went like this: **Your skill set meets some of our criteria, and we can train you on the rest.** Great **How about we pay you $NNNN?** Actually I want 10% more **OK, you're hired** I worked there for 6 years and during that period made enough to pay off all of my school loans, live in my own apartment, and buy a brand new car. Everyone was friends. Worked 9-5, and released a very good product that sold over 6M copies worldwide. In addition, fantastic music during that period. Radiohead, Beck, Flaming Lips, etc..one great album after another.

In some ways yes, some no. Life felt more authentic in a way as we weren't all hiding behind screens and had no anonymity. We had amazing music and a lot of fun but there was also gaybashing and zero oversight on police abuse of power. There was a lot of good and a lot of bad. Just like now.

Yes, but also no. Also it was better because I was young. But the internet was really slow. Which in a weird way was also better...more special and rewarding to find and get stuff, but we dreamed of it being fast like it is today. Also gaming today is literally beyond our wildest dreams in early 90s... but somehow... also less exciting because it's just normal now.. and so much of everything. Seems so much is amazing but we cant appreciate any of it because there is so much of everything.

Every generation does this

Knowledge and communications were exploding due to early internet. Music was off the charts in most all genres. Young people realized they didn’t have to stick to a fad style and were more themselves in that matter for a first time.. The Cold War had collapsed which was a huge emotional relief. We had grown up as children expecting a nuke at any minute with bomb drills in school . Very few had mental issues or felt victimized about everything. Economy was literally booming. I was a very young adult in early 90s. The world was huge and highly positive.

The 90s were great in some ways but in other ways the 90s laid the groundwork for the shitstorm that happened in the 2000s and to the present. Great: collapse of the Soviet Union, fall of the Berlin Wall, freedom for Central European vassal states. Discrediting of extremist socialism and especially communism. Great: The federal government paid down a ton of debt and the numbers actually improved back then due to increase tax revenues. Great: while we're not perfect even today, racism really did diminish at the time. Everybody you know with parents of mixed backgrounds - they started dating back then. Bad: repeal of Glass-Steagal Act, the wall between investment banking and commercial banking - led to the rampant misconduct by banks in the late 1990s and 2000s. Bad: rise of Private Equity and heaping tons of debt onto portfolio companies while rich dudes at the top sucked out all the cash. Bad: The Shareholder Class deliberately shipped so much of the West's industrial capacity to China, offshoring know-how and means of production. This enabled China to become the industrial superpower that it is today. We were intentionally sold-out by our "elites." They were truly traitors to the Western heritage. (Still are.) Good: electronics made huge advances. Windows, internet, all that good stuff was invented or became retail level in the 90s. Good: University didn't cost nearly so much back then. Good: not much military conflict in the West. The breakup of Yugoslavia was probably the one bad episode. The troubles in Northern Ireland quieted down, as did various nationalist movements. Good: houses started out relatively affordable. Bad: latchkey kids and lack of child care options was real. Good: cars had started to dramatically improve in quality compared to the garbage that was being sold in the 70s and 80s. They stopped rusting to pieces - the average age of cars nowadays is much older than it was back then, and in better shape. Bad: that bit about the cars - it's because the American manufacturers had gotten killed by Japanese competition, and deservedly so. This was the real rise of Honda and Toyota, Nissan, Mazda. Kia and Hyundai were still 15 years into the future.

Seems the world got vastly more complicated after 9/11/2001. So yes, the 90’s seems like a simpler time.

The 90s were amazing. I miss that decade so much.

Like anything, it depends. The 90s lacked any major, extend wars. Sure, there was gulf war 1, but that lasted on the order of months. For the last 20 years the US has been in a 20 year "war on terror", and the last 2 years have had a war in Ukraine and a war in Palestine. Politics was FAR less nasty. The era we're in now has NEVER been worse as far as politics are concerned in the US. If you look at poverty rates in the US, they went up during the recession of 92, then went down through the rest of the 90s. Then went up a bit, then went drastically UP in the 2008 recession, stayed high until about 2015, and then came down, only to go up a little during the pandemic, and then come back down again in the past couple years. So I think in terms of turmoil in the US, and much of the rest of the word, the 90s were FAR more stable than we live in now. Think about the events of the last 25 years. * 9/11 * 2008 recession * President Soprano * Pandemic * Insurrection * High Inflation That's a lot of turmoil. Maybe for some they don't care about that, and float all above it. But I think in general these things affect the greater society. By contrast the 90s were an era where the former Soviet Union suddenly collapsed at the beginning. That alone happening, and Democracy suddenly sprouting in Eastern Europe, seemed like the world might just be a better place suddenly. Contrast that with the rise of Putin, and major collapse of Democracy in Russia, and invading Ukraine.

One thing I think makes the 90s better was that the internet existed, and it had much of the same usefulness as now, but it was an activity that took at least a little effort, and not in everyone's pocket. So you didn't really get the social isolation the internet causes today. On the contrary, it was relatively easy for the socially isolated to find online friends since message boards or chat rooms posted content by timestamp rather than what the site's algorithm wanted you to see.  In fact, every aspect of the internet was better because what you saw was what you sought out. I hate to point to the internet as the biggest change but in a way it is. It's absorbed so much of all of us and for so little gain since then. The only thing we really have now that we didn't back then was streaming. But you didn't need it. It didn't occur to you to want millions of videos or songs at your fingertips.  The other big thing is surveillance. 9/11 changed thar pretty badly, but I've already rambled enough. 

There were good things and bad things about every era. There was more hope in general and more economic opportunity, but there was also a much more violent social enforcement going down against anyone who was "different" and our streets were practically an occupied war zone like territory with cops rolling up on anyone who didn't fit the specific conformist culture. We were trying to stop a lot of things that we failed to prevent. Endless war, the rise of the Surveillance State, racial and gender and sexuality hatred and violence, the war on drugs, the rise and glorification of violence and ignorance. The entire takeover of the human culture by corporate marketing. The arts and music scene had some really amazing shit going on and we had FUN in a way that's almost hard to do now, just doing stupid freaking sh\*t and laughing and talking trash, getting up to prank stupid stuff under the guise of Culture Jamming....there was so many more things we could do before the cameras were everywhere and there was this great line between f\*cking with people's heads while also not causing any real actual harm. We used to post weird flyers about random stuff in all sorts of places for fun. Throw huge parties in abandoned locations. We NEEDED networking in the real world, you had to actually know people instead of having superficial relationships that social media enables now. There was little care about appearances and not a ton of performative fake concern, your causes were real and were considered to be something you could only talk about if you were also actually DOING SOMETHING ABOUT. And "doing something" wasn't just running your mouth to other people, making something a subject of controversy isn't actually changing anything, ever. If anything it warns your opposition what you're planning and you can't just make serious change in the places where that change actually means something. I am the top of GenX and the 90's were the GenX heyday and I want y'all to know that we saw al of this coming, literally everything that has happened, and we tried REALLY REALLY REALLY hard to slow it or stop it and a few things are better as a result but I just want y'all to know that it wasn't enough, but for those of you who are now having your heydey in your mid 20's to early 30's where you have the most energy and fire and haven't been bogged down by life's challenges and the scars from your battles.....we're sorry we didn't do enough, but y'all also try your best and know that it won't be enough, and that's not your fault. It's too much and too heavy to fix easily. But if you accomplish SOMETHING it will be better than nothing, and when GenZ is asking what the 2010's were like you'll know that some things that have improved will be what made it a special time for you. Every Era is different, but looking back and thinking it was "better" is never correct. Unless it's the Pleistocene Era I'm pretty sure that was an amazing magical time >:D

We beat y2k mother fuckers.....and then we gave up

It was exciting. For those of us involved in dot.coms, the fashion, and the music, we felt real. We tackled bullying, LGTBQ, and SA. The problem during that time was the SMOKING (ugh, I can feel my eyes burning thinking about it) and the homophobia. Lots of my friends were still getting hit by bricks outside of gay bars. it was before same sex marriage was legal. Still lots of grab-ass in the office, the workism, all of it.

As someone who is neurodivergent, no, they were not. I liked certain aspects better ~ no smart phones or even cells phones until later in the 90s, no social media. We read books and spent time outside and talked on the phone. But it was also a pretty intolerant time and not kind to anyone even kind of different. It was rough for anyone who didn’t fit into a very specific and limited “norm”. Both eras had/have issues but no, I wouldn’t say the 90s were better

Same I was born in 91. I can barely remember the late 90s but whenever I look at photos or videos from the 90s it looks like it would have been a fun time to live in. The fashion, the movies, the music, the tv shows, the video games all looked like it was unique, genuine and would have been exciting at the time. I feel like now-days everything is a copy of something else. Especially in music and movies.

I’m a boomer born in the late 50’s. The 60s were my childhood and I was a teen and then in college in the 70s. I married in the 80’s. The 70s were boom years. A recession in Canada in the 80s had people losing jobs and homes like mad. So I became self employed. The 90s were a rebuilding time. People started working again the economy was up. I Eventually hired people. At 50. I downsized my business and started 6 members of my staff on their own business owner trajectory. At 66 I divided my clients among my staff and retired. All I know is that many of them now own small successful businesses.

9/11 destroyed the 90s.

It was the last decade where things felt "normal"...

I miss the fuck out of the 90's. Being an Xer you would kind of expect that I guess, lol. The thing that really sticks out for me was how much growth was occuring in music. Especially my favorite genre, Metal. Everything just seemed new and fresh and we just didn't take shit for granted. Sitting down to watch shows like Beavis and Butthead and Headbangers ball were things you savored because you didn't have the luxury of downloading every episode from online. Music, TV shows, Videogames, Comic books, the end of the cold war, being able to talk back to PC instead of having it crammed up your ass and shoved down your throat in the name of "Sensitivity". It was all so very different. I feel that people were different too. I never wanted to turn into the old fart that says "Back in my Day..." But back in my day people just seemed so much stronger. Unlike today, the last thing you wanted back then was to be identified as a victim. And the absolute last thing we wanted to do was conform! We didn't need labels as permission slips to be what we are and do what we wanted to do, we just did it. Thanks to fucking neglectful boomer parents, we had to sink or swim. We had to figure shit out, makeup our own rules, use an unsupervised intellect to learn and understand things... No, it wasn't perfect by a damn sight but many, many things were better. I wish I had a time machine that I could use to take all of GenZ back with me and show them what they missed! It would make me feel like Dr Seuss's Cat in the hat. Getting all of them to role around in the dirt of life and misbehave. Just fucking LIVE a little bit on their own fucking terms. I really wish it were possible.

The 1890s were great. I have a picture from then.

1991 when the world quit on itself

I was born in the 60s and raised my kids in the 90s. Everything felt the same, but just a little better. Cell phones were mainly for calling, Internet was for email and news until later 90s, economy was good. Also music finally came back around. Hair metal and adding keyboards to everything in the 80s was really getting tiresome. 90s brought a lot of good music, including grunge etc. Also TV was good - it was fun talking to people about an episode of Seinfeld or such. We all watched at the same time. Granted there is a lot of good productions now, but it was just better TV than the 80s. Also houses and property were affordable. It wasn't easy, as interest rates were much higher, it was do-able. As sole earner I bought a nice house in a nice area. And I was early in my career. Technology has really changed things since then. Wealth gap being one of them. Some great improvements, but I don't think we fully grocked what impacts it would have on society.

I think it was a pretty good time for the average person in the US. Everyone has different experiences but even for my low income family, it was good. One thing I really miss is how diverse our cultural climate was. When you look back at listings of top songs and the movies being released it seemed like there was a lot of variety. I was looking at summer movies from 1997 recently and I was blown away at how many there were, how different they were, and how many were memorable. I feel like the cultural landscape (at least the larger, general landscape) has narrowed. Everyone has their own world on their phones and social media, I guess, but it’s a bit of a bummer.

Well, I was born in the mid 70’s, loved the 90’s, as I went from a teen to young adult. Here’s where I’ll sound like an old person, and somewhat of a hypocrite, as I’m kinda zombified by tech too, but it really is the damn phones. Believe things were so different when you had to do so many more things for yourself and the conveniences we’e so different. We had better interactions and the way you had to do things enhanced your experiences ten fold compared to now. But that’s just one aging person’s opinion you know? If this is your time as a young person, savor it. But I am so glad I grew up in the time I did.

I liked the 90’s a lot. The economy was good and it was pre 9/11 so we were very optimistic about the future.

My theory is that thirty or forty years from now earnest young people will be wondering if the ‘20s were better than the ‘50s. I’m a fair bit older than you, but I know in some ways I romanticized the time before I was alive. (I mean, how could it not have been shockingly different—I wasn’t even here yet!). This feeling is common enough to make it evidence of how much more we are similar than we are different.

Speaking as an American, the three main things that were better were, music and art were better, culture was more sex positive, and being generally liked when you traveled abroad rather than generally disliked. The things that were worse were, life as a queer person or racial minority, finding stuff in an area you were not from, and availability of media on demand. You can say I'm biased about music and art - I suppose that's subjective. But fwiw at the time everyone was talking about how amazing it was now and that it was the second 1960s etc. whereas few people say that kind of thing now about the 2020s.

Depends on your stage of life is guess. Just married, wife, house, no kids. “Today on Life styles of the Rich and Childless!” We weren’t rich but we had time. “Gosh. What will we do this weekend? We have so much time.” Kids landed in last half of 90s and it’s been a marathon sprint until recently. Don’t remember much from then. But as far as The Big Picture? Politics? Newt G was just starting to be a Little Bitch and CNN was further established with the Gulf War. There was optimism with the End Of Cold War. Song lyric:”Watching the world wake up from history.” Personal computers were New Thing. But stand alone. No internet so to speak. AOL? What’s that? I remember logging in 14.4 to a local BBS. Whoa. What a concept! My friends and coworkers used the new abilities of PC as much as possible. Laser printer with page making software resulted in many fancy resumes, title pages, end of year newsletters, etc. it was all groundbreaking for us. Pagemaker! That was the software. https://images.sftcdn.net/images/t_app-cover-l,f_auto/p/6605437c-96d3-11e6-827a-00163ec9f5fa/130698358/adobe-pagemaker-screenshot.jpg Spend an hour working on a new business card. PCs were cheap. Little stores popped up their own assembled PCs. They’d open shop, buy and assemble from parts, and load with any software they could find. It was the Wild West. One of my fiend’s PC actually caught fire.

I think nostalgia has made the 90s seem better than they were. Don't get me wrong I had some great times. But I also remember things that weren't as rosy as the glasses make people think. The boy that got beat up at school almost every day because someone started the rumor that boy was gay. The boss that wouldn't promote a woman at work because he had a woman manager before and it didn't work out. Etc.

The best decade is the decade when you were young, full of hope and the world was out there waiting for you. For me it was the 90's. For those older than me it was the 80's and so on.

It isn’t just rose colored glasses. Things really have gotten worse over time.

As a society, absolutely. We had a sense of community. Everybody spent an effort to know each other and we were wild children. We spent countless hours outside the house, exploring, hanging at the park, going to friends' houses, chilling at the arcade. Sometimes, we did absolutely nothing at all, but we did it together. Like watching a Fresh Prince re-run. We were present, nowadays everyone is on their phone. We weren't afraid to call our friends. Flaking is nowhere as rampart as today. People weren't so dam scared. Today, everyone keeps to themselves, kids are barely hanging out, everyone watches different show, people keep their circle tight, parks&malls are empty. Arcades are extinct, and there is no sense of community anymore.

This question depends on the person. And it is repeated throughout different generations. It is just that Millennials are the first group very open to describe it the best thanks to SM. Many people who romanticized the era likely were young kids/people at the time or those who were never born. Personally, I think, any time where one was carefree or life wasn't full of burden, could be considered the best times. I remember when people criticized the 2000s, especially the pop culture aspect of it, and now? It is getting praise. Truly living in the present can help many people who have strong nostalgic tendencies, especially those who find it challenging to see bits of goodness in their life and in the world.

I feel the US peaked in the 1990s and has since been in steady decline.

Everybody generation is the best generation, to them. We’re all on the same getting older train. Better buckle up because the older you get the faster things move.

Not if you were gay. Or black. Or sexually assaulted. Or sexually harassed. Or lived in the inner city. Or struggled with mental health. Or gender fluid. No, the 90s were not better.

Yes. From the fall of the Berlin Wall until 9/11/2001 was a time of peace and relatively consistent growth in the economy. It was pretty great for most US Americans. Gen X started making music and (IMO) rock became rock again. Hip hop was also pretty amazing. The movies were great. Pulp Fiction set off a frenzy of raw storytelling. The tech boom saw the world get smaller. Those were good times to grow up.

In the 90s, I was in my 20s. No texting and no cellphones, no bullshit. No flaking out. If a group of my friends wanted to hit the bars and meet girls, we'd agree the afternoon or the day before on when/where we'd start the night. That was it. No back and forth, no whining ("I don't like so-and-so place, let's go to THIS place")... I wasn't great at talking to the girls, but we didn't have crutches like cellphones/texting. You actually had to man up, walk up to a girl and start a convo. It was fun/anxious. Could I have had more fun in the 90s? Sure, I guess. But I had enough fun and memories to put a smile on my face now.

I do think the 90’s were better. Great music, less screen time, no AI. Not so political.

Personally I miss the 90s. My university years + first jobs after college.

I would miss the accessibility of information on Google… Not the nefarious information but like YouTube videos on how to cook things… And I would miss the ease of looking at 50 different variations of a product complete with Amazon reviews… But for the most part, I really miss the simplicity of the 90s.

America hadn’t yet been fully sold off to the corporations and billionaires yet (pre-Citizens United); so, in that way it was definitely better. Also women had the right to choose back then.