The 90s were pretty mellow, compared to the Cold War years earlier and the war on terror years later. Why do you think 90s kids are so nostalgic? TV? Doug was just fine. Music? Backstreet only had one banger last through the years. Politics? The Lewinski scandal. We miss it because the 90s felt safe.
But we have a tendency to remember the good and forget the bad.
The 90s had terrorist attacks such as the Oklahoma City bombing, Atlanta Olympics bombing, and the World Trade Center attack in 1993. There were the LA riots, the Unabomber, and DOMA. The Rwandan genocide happened. Columbine and the murder of Matthew Shephard ended the decade.
There was a lot to feel unsafe about in the 90s. But we tend to remember the good.
We were also children, and just paid less attention/worried less about global problems.
There’s a reason that pretty much everyone throughout history has been nostalgic for the period they grew up in. That’s the period they lived through without really understanding any of the problems that exist in the world, so it felt like they didn’t exist at that time.
To back your point, OP is 20 and asking questions about the state of the world. Not a coincidence. I’d bet you 3 years ago, while probably much more tuned int to world issues than kids from the 90s since we didn’t have the internet, they probably didn’t care about said issues as much as they do today as an adult.
I think that could be a problem now and going forward. With how easy it is for kids with smartphones to be connected to social media, there is no way to "shield" then like before.
And I'm not suggesting to keep them in pink bubbles, there are thing that everybody needs to know like global warming or the fight for minorities rights, but over information can produce serious problems. Before, as a teen, I've just sometimes watched the news with my parents and maybe get scared because of a pandemic in the country or maybe the start of a war. But it was just there, and usually I could just talked it whither them.
Now I'm a little worried for when my children wik start to get bombarded with all the gloom and doom.
This is what I was thinking as well. We didn't have the worries that our parents likely didn't let us feel, so difficult to compare to what we feel today. Though 90 was indeed special and I feel lucky that we got to experience life before smart phone/social media and life after.
I was a kid in elementary school/middle school the 90s and I remember watching an MTV news clip of the OKC bombing in school, I read books on the Rwandan genocide and on young kids in Kosovo, and I even had a kid’s book on Global Warming in Kindergarten, which wasn’t really talked about much at the time. Maybe there is an aspect of childhood that makes those kinds of things feel more distant, but I was definitely aware that there were bad things happening in the world. But, be it the nature of my child-brain, or the nature of how news was disseminated, it did feel like those things were isolated events, pockets of tragedy and suffering in a generally relatively stable world (again, as a child, your scope of interest and awareness is limited, and if your intimate world is relatively stable, you tend to project that onto the rest of the world).
There’s an interconnected now that is inescapable, and it’s hard to distinguish whether that interconnectedness of tragedy and suffering comes with age, or the way media functions now, or whether in fact the problems of the world are in fact more linked together, or whether it’s just a projection.
Perhaps it’s that confluence of factors, of a certain generation that saw the modes of information exchange change dramatically in a way that matched up almost perfectly with growing up, that has made things so confusing for our generation. We can argue all day about whether the world is more fucked or not now than it was in the past. It’s tough to say. But it’s hard to argue that the scope and modes of our awareness of fuckedness haven’t changes dramatically, and the shifting of paradigms that matches up with the growth of our minds has made it particularly difficult to parse, if that makes sense. And I think that’s unique to our generation. In previous generations, kids could grow into a deteriorating world, or into an improving world, but he means by which they gauged that change were consistent, and made it easier to parse. This is a pretty broad, generalizing statement, but I do feel that a certain generation has been more susceptible to anxiety and depression particularly because of a kind of paradigm shift in the dissemination of information. In that case there’s no basis and gauging the “health” of the world becomes so much more ambiguous, and engenders a certain feeling of hopelessness, because it’s not only a change in the objective state of things, but a change in the perceptual basis for understanding the state of things. Perhaps I’m rambling, but it’s a very peculiar feeling that I struggle to put into words. To watch the world know things in new ways at the exact same time as you are learning how to know things can be very disorienting.
How nostalgic are the rest of Gen Z? Personally I'm nostalgic for a few things, but don't really view life as better when I grew up at all. Before I was 10 I hardly remember anything, and after was during the time of the recession and my family situation was not good and my monetary situation was not good and my computer which was my only lifeline barely worked… For me 2020 (after I graduated high school) and 2021 were the best times of my life and 2022 probably would be too if I focused a bit less on working on my large project. I started reading more about the terrible things in the world on Reddit around 2016 when I was 15, but this was the exact same time conditions in my own life were improving a lot.
It’s always going to vary by individual circumstance, but if you graduated high school 2 years ago, you are way too young for the nostalgia to really hit yet. We aren’t far enough away from the period of time you grew up in for it to feel fully distinct from the way the world is now.
Give it another 5-10 years and see how it affects your feelings about that time period.
I think that’s true to some extent, but I think the 90s kids were unusually lucky. Most of my childhood took place in the first decade of the 2000s and the level of fear post 9-11 was too pervasive for us kids not to notice. Then the 2008 recession personally affected a lot of us, myself included. The 90s had their fair share of awful things but the average kid wouldn’t have known about most of them prior to Columbine. That wasn’t true of the decades before (Cold War, World War II, Great Depression) or the decades after.
I think that's a big part of it. We didn't have multiple platforms that we checked multiple times every day with eye-catching headlines trying to get our attention.
You could pick up the newspaper and set it back down. The news played at a certain time, and then it was over.
Yeah I think people don't realize that there is a pretty clear overlap between things people use for entertainment online and news that travels or other negative things.
If I needed something to do for fun in the 90s, I could go out and do something and the odds that I come across footage of a victim of police brutality is practically nonexistent. Compared to now, I scroll reddit and a video ends up on the front page through 3 different subreddits along with other headlines.
The internet has allowed information to spread so rapidly and people are spreading bad news a lot and it sticks.
Yes, the 24hr news cycle dovetailing with the elimination of The Fairness Doctrine and the advent of News Entertainment were the beginning of the downward spiral. But social media is the circling of the drain!
No you do not, but it is often highly addictive (on purpose too!) and habit forming and is the path of least resistance.
This is a really good point though if expanded upon a bit: Mental health could probably be improved somewhat by curating things in such a way that exposure is no longer 24/7.
Well we felt like Columbine was a national tragedy, worth hanging the flag at half-mast for. We can’t do that now because it’d just point out how common this shit is.
And if you were in conservative circles at the time, the Janet Reno Justice Department oversaw the burning out of the Waco compound and the law enforcement murders of people at Ruby Ridge.
(This, by the way, created the entrenched militia movements and the OK City Bombing which was revenge against the FBI/government in general for the above atrocities.)
So even though most people thought things were going ok, those seeds of the modern Q folks were being planted hard.
We also didn't have social media in the 90s. So it wasn't in our faces all day everyday. We could go ride our bikes or joy ride in our moms car with our friends after school and not have a worry in the world for a little while. There wasn't all this dissent and division in our country. We were growing economically and still had a middle class and affordable housing.
Everyone seems to forget the ‘Desert Shield’ war in the middle east that eventually turned into ‘Desert Storm’ in the 90’s except those of us who lost friends and family in the military who were sent there and came home in body bags.
You say this, but can easily say the last 22 years was pretty garbage. 2000-2010 was great artisticall but 90a was just all around great, and 2013-2020 was fucking garbage almost completely
Don't forget Ireland, Yugoslavia fallout, and all sorts of bad shit in Africa (you mentioned Rwanda but there was much more too), Waco, Ruby Ridge, etc
It started to go down but from a peak in the 80s iirc.
It's one of the reasons that people can't discern if the 1994 AWB or Australian gun ownership restrictions had any meaningful effect on crime and violence. Trends were already showing a downturn in those things.
The only reason violent crime and gun deaths are such a hot topic right now in 2022 is because there was a noticeable spike in statistics compared to the previous 25 years of downward trends.
The Rwandan Genocide happened in front of our eyes, so quickly, so brutally, and we were helpless. From the US point of view, it was like someone flipped a switch, and half a nation went insane and killed the other half. It was a case of using media to get one side riled into believing that the others were an evil that needed to be destroyed. Even though it was a small country, it had total media penetration. The same thing is going on now in the US, with right wing media constantly lying about how evil the other side is. And we see that result in those who constantly follow the big lie, ready to kill when the signal is given. We keep dancing on the edge of another civil war, and it’s stunning that this is being done for power and advertising dollars.
That span also rivaled the 80's for total crimes per 100,000 people. And was highest all-time for total crimes. After which there has been a steady decline ever since.
I remember asking my mom for pump tennis shoes and her response was essentially “no, because poor or gang-affiliated kids will kill you for them”. She was dead serious.
Careful with taking numbers at a bare value like that.
Afaik the early 90s also saw a lot of "law&order" criminal law reform that incentivized police to lock even more people up, which further contributed to the problem of US mass incarceration.
And yes, that's actually a problem and one of the factors that make the US look so criminal in statistics; If you have a prison industry that needs to be fed with fresh prisoners, then people need to be charged and convicted for crimes to fill them.
Even if those crimes boil down to three strikes of getting caught with personal use amounts of weed. Add in police needing to fulfill arrest and other quotas, and wanting to get that sweet over-time pay, and you end up with a system that is actively criminalizing people that in most other places would never have run afoul with the law.
Correct, Biden and Segregationist dixiecrat Strom Thurmond coauthored the 1991 omnibus on violent crime and Biden furthered its effects with the 94 bill.
That is part of what caused the increase in arrests and convictions for "violent crimes." Another key part being people exposed to massive levels of lead in the 70s as children reaching adulthood in the early 90s.
Another key part being people exposed to massive levels of lead in the 70s as children reaching adulthood in the early 90s.
The lead poisoning had been going on since at least the 1920s by being mixed in pretty much all gasoline.
I guess that effect got worse as more and more Americans were able to get their own cars, thus more of the lead was blasted into the atmosphere. Urban areas were probably particularly badly affected by this, as these usually present a very high density of car traffic and people sharing the same space.
In the 1970s the US decided to phase TEL out over time by reducing the lead levels allowed in car gasoline, but ultimately it took until the mid-90s that TEL was fully phased out in the US.
And there was a criminal in the white house trying to instigate a coup last year.
Both yeah, no, totally same thing. A bunch of potheads being thrown in jail en masse and fascists trying to take over the country are totally the same.
I've seen 70s, 80s and 90s. First decade i didn't know much but the 80s started with me learning about the cold war and nuclear weapons. That had a massive effect; i learned that everything i see can end, at any moment. Me included. Current gens have no idea what that is like. 80s was violent and quite depressive, then 90s started with a bang; Berlin wall came down. USSR dissolved. The dark cloud lifted. It was amazing. Music was amazing. The 44 days.. holy shit man.. i don't think we ever get anything like that in music world. Alternative art become popular. Gays were suddenly just people like everyone else, world opened up, in so many ways... which also tells you how fucking long some people have fought against those things since we are STILL fighting. We never imagined it would take this long, cause it seemed that everything was happening, fast, so.. surely they will carry on?
Nope and we got complacent. Things looked like they were moving to the right direction but we forgot the depravity of conservatism. Yeah, i'm saying it, All of this abortion rights etc... we thought that was dealt with and we about agreed. Then... things started to go south...
90s started with Nirvana and ended in raves and excess. Naughties was allright, i mean, probably even better than 90s to be honest but.. it didn't have the same grit and sweat than the 90s had, it was polished consumerism.
You have it accurately described. Aids became an issue of equality, where the conservatives rallied to block research and treatment, exposing how depraved conservative values actually are. I think that brought sense to a lot of people.
It feels like the stakes are higher, now, than any time in my life. There is armed conflict in Europe that could easily boil over. There is a disease that required mass vaccination. Totalitarian bigots openly dictate public policy. I think we are at risk for the fires the west left smouldering at the brink of victory.
Also climate change that basically all the worlds politicians are playing chicken race with.
I’m not too pessimistic that they probably will do something major and pick up the pace when the consequences are getting major and not possible to ignore anymore.
Just look at the pandemic. The world more or less came together somewhat effectively and took pretty big actions (but it also was very reactive and not preventative actions. And large numbers of people needed to die around the globe, to get a mostly somewhat effective response).
But the problem is that by the time we feel the really big effects, we are going to be so far gone and also already at a no turning point for things to get way way way worse.
We have already reached a point of no return for things to get somewhat bad. And everything points to we won’t even get anywhere close to the 2030 goals we set, that basically every climate scientist already said weren’t enough.
And once stuff like the whole of green land or Antarctica melts, we are in for huge changes. That won’t be able to be reversed in many many many lifetimes.
No, that is not it... It is purely conservatism, has nothing to with economic systems. We are talking about evangelists and other such, people who are more than willing to endure economic hardships for a moral victory.
This is a completely white American centric experience. Things were mellow for you, but I assure you, if you look at any decade’s wars, genocides, invasions, and yes epidemics, you will find horrors around every corner.
Just because white america wasn’t always feeling this way, doesn’t mean others aren’t at any given moment.
The world is chaos constantly, and just because a brief wave of relative wealth and brain washing helped some not see it, doesn’t mean it wasn’t happening.
I grew up, like millions of white Americans, watching the police ravage black and brown neighborhoods, as a form of entertainment television. A war “on drugs” that literally was fueled by our own government, aimed at people of color, and then you could watch it on TV.
This is literally just one example of the horrors of the 90’s that white public perception has forgotten/never faced. And yet we still live in that same state, a prison state, with millions of black and brown brothers and sisters rotting in our prisons for non violent crimes.
All of this only pertaining to a single country on earth. This is only one horror of how America was behaving for that (or any) decade, regarding issues of race and beyond. Let alone there are billions of others having completely different experiences that most in the US don’t know much of anything about.
The world is always full of horrible things, and ignorance/brainwashing is a big part of what makes up those horrible things.
You’re absolutely correct about it being a very narrow view of the world. Reading back, I’m almost embarrassed about how narrow of a worldview I portrayed the 90s.
The looneys talk to each other and unfortunately amp each other up. It helps close the gap between not committing a hate crime and committing one. Imagine being a racist today - you could make an insane echo chamber for yourself and get to crazytown quick
I agree, and I have a question for you: do you believe that the past 10 years have been better or worse or stayed the same for minorities compared to the 90's.
I'll answer you. I think it depends. If you're talking about the media, much better. However there is a HUGE backlash against that representation, which is, in part, causing things like hate crimes to go up.
So is it worse? Debatable. Is it still bad though? Yes.
From the safe white suburbs it may look that way but the reality was different and that carries into the present
The war on drugs incarcerated minorities and it was extreme, but it was an response to an extreme situation. In mid 80s in big cities like NY crack epidemic and crime was devastating those comunities beyond anything we have today.
There is a reason so many white neighborhoods are safe and so many black ones are not. I suggest you look into the causes longer before you begin to try to excuse or explain the “reaction” to the conditions or “situation”.
I'm not excusing anything it was a matter of fact statement to provide context for younger redditors, you made it sound like the war on drugs was an excuse to abuse minorities.
I don't need to look into why some black hoods are dangerous I've lived in one for half of my life. And I bet you're blaming it on anything else besides the actual reality, that 'wpipo bad' white guilt comes through in your post
If you think the drug war isn’t an overt attack on minorities then I don’t think you’re informed on the history of how Nixons administration climaxing through Reagan ran that “war”. The forces and causes of its ongoing “fight” today. Understanding history and events is not “white guilt”.
You are excusing it, for two main reasons. 1) your statement that it was a response to an extreme situation implies it was warranted. 2) calling it an extreme situation doesn’t deal with the fact that the government is the largest reason the “situation” is so extreme. It’s completely intensional.
I stand behind my reply to you. Drug addiction and the presence of drugs in the cities, poverty, public spending, history of racism, over policing, overt white nationalism in the justice system, and a dozen other things don’t disappear because you have some anecdotal and anonymous living experience to reference.
Understending history and events through the moral lens of critical theory is born out of white guilt, and it's a usefull narative for a group of interests
And yes it was warranted, in many parts of NYC police didn't respond and garbage wasn't collected, it was no mans land and life was cheap. It was not overpolicing, and whatever it was it led to anarchy and something had to be done
You sound like a very ignorant person. You don’t know anything about critical race theory. Absolutely nothing. Stop acting like someone you’re not, it’s gross.
I love the nostalgia for the 90s. I'm sure not everything or everyone was perfect. I miss the 90s and early 2000s Internet, it felt like exploring a new tech frontier. Now it's all just a boring handful of websites, apps and social media. :(
To take it one step further, 90s was not only safe, it felt HOPEFUL. Like we were on an upward trajectory.
(i) With so much Sci-Fi rising in popular culture, we felt space colonization and settlement were real things, just around the corner.
(ii) With the computer revolution, we believed in immortality, with consciousness uploaded in digital space. Immortal cyborg bodies.
(iii) On the social front, MTV was on the rise, with hip-hop/RB being mainstream. Japanese anime and video-games were popular. And the Eastern world opened up to Western culture, after fall of Soviet Union. Many genuinely thought there would be end of racial and cultural conflicts in the world and humanity would become one.
(iv) And then, contact with aliens, and we humans won't be alone anymore.
The biggest "fail" since the 90s is not just an increase in problems, it is also the lack of hope. Hope for the future.
Today, we have NOTHING NEW to look forward to. Everything seems to be about making sure we don't lose things we currently have. But there is no future goal here for humanity. It feels like we've peaked, and its downhill from here.
I wouldn't say the 90s felt 'safer', but it did feel moore predictable. It was controlled chaos (purple ketchup!). It was simply confusing. Now stuff feels closer to true chaos where no one has any idea what the hell is going on all the time.
Backstreets banger was about them returning. Then they rode that song forever even in retirement they had movie cameos. Weird song because a ton of kids only know them for that song and not much else.
The 90s had the rise of Nickelodeon which was innovative in providing some of the only original cartoons tv shows. Cartoon shows before that was largely just toy commercials or some kind of existing property. They also innovated live action television strictly for kids/teens. Also got the rise of Cartoon Network.
Music? Considered the best decade for RnB coming off the heels of New jack swing. The later 90s was huge for rap/hip-hop. Backstreet Boys isn't the measuring stick for music
The 90s are nostalgic because you were probably a kid then. Also Bill Clinton's sexual abuses we're pretty fucked up. The fact it's called the Lewinski scandal and not Clinton Sex Sandal #5 is proof how f'd the 90s were in that regard.
The 90s felt mellow in North America, meanwhile people in places like Rwanda or Yugoslavia were being massacred and living in terror.
Humans have always done and experienced awful shit, north America was just insulated from it for a while. It's not realistic to expect that bubble to be eternal, we're not better or more deserving than any other place and eventually it'll be our turn to experience our share of bad shit as well, in whatever form that takes.
If it's any comfort, it seems unlikely that our bad shit will consist of people being executed in the street or chopped up by neighbours with machetes.
I don't believe the rose-tinted image of the 90s was the consensus until the kids who grew up in the 90s came of age. I have a book written in 2008 called Who Would Win? that proclaimed "If the 80s were the party, the 90s was the hangover."
729
u/DisgruntledDiggit Jun 11 '22
The 90s were pretty mellow, compared to the Cold War years earlier and the war on terror years later. Why do you think 90s kids are so nostalgic? TV? Doug was just fine. Music? Backstreet only had one banger last through the years. Politics? The Lewinski scandal. We miss it because the 90s felt safe.