The 90s Were Objectively the Best Time to Be Alive

[AlpineTR]

Here is a thoughtful article on life today versus life 25 years ago.

If you haven't read him before, Freddie Deboer a far-left intellectual. While I disagree with his politics, I appreciate his attempt to be objective, which I think puts him ahead of 99% of today's "thinkers."

I thought this group would 1) enjoy the perspective the article brings (particularly for anyone age ~40-50 who came of age during the 1990s) and 2) glean some motivation to live a simpler life without the discordant technologies that we adopted (perhaps thoughtlessly) in the last 25 years.

https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/it ... omanticize

I'm a big fan of "secret projects" - perhaps a good project would be to strip away anything that has been invented in the last 25 years and see if life is any better or worse? Except Google Maps, of course!

[zbigi]

I'm pretty much the same age as the author, and 80% of the article seems to be just nostalgia and yearning for a lost youth. Pretty sure people 30 older than us could write the same article about how nineties suck and sixties was peak living.

Although, I do like this part:

Extinguishing mystery is, in general, an assault against the young, and what is the internet if not a giant machine for eliminating mystery? All of life is a spoiler, and today’s kids get to experience nothing with virgin eyes.

It does seem true. If I learn and read about a particular thing, I can pretty much burn out on it before I even start doing it
When I start reading about anything, I quickly learn that there's just a mountain of pre-existing knowledge to absorb, and not much left to play with on my own (unless I devote years to get to the frontier of current human capacity). Which means that cutting off Internet and knowledge in general, and relying on natural discovery only, could make life more interesting (if uber-inefficient).

[unemployable]

nInteresting take. A lot of it reads like missing high school without considering all the downsides of being 18. I did a lot of that stuff in the late 80s too, as I'm sure lots of adolescents and post-adolescents did too into the 2000s, so his set of memories isn't at all unique to one decade. But he alludes to there being just too much culture now, something I certainly feel. Too many memes, too many things on Netflix, too many cinematic universes when in that decade even Star Wars was taking a break, then you try to catch up only to have everything move on. We certainly had more shared experiences back then. I'm with him on that. Nancy vs. Tonya. Sosa vs McGwire. OJ. Bill and Monica.

I think when people go hagiographic over the 90s they really mean the late 90s. We were in a sort of economic malaise until around 1995-6 while the stock market went nowhere. I've linked to this magazine cover before, which ran in 1993. GHW Bush went back on "no new taxes" and mailed his re-election campaign in, only for Clinton to bumble through his first two years in office — not a proud era for either party. We had the Rodney King riots, Operation Desert Storm, the first World Trade Center bombing and Waco. That all pails in comparison to 9/11 and "pre-emptive wars" and BLM but those Overton windows hadn't moved yet. We were all terrified of getting AIDS, especially after Magic Johnson's press conference.

Then everyone got the Internet, the stock market mooned and baseball players took steroids and broke home run records. And now no one cares about baseball.

Everyone made fun of Generation X for graduating into a recession — sound familiar? — but somehow we sucked it up. The boomers needed people to do their grunt work and it helped we were the only ones who knew HTML.

I miss record stores too, but I've coped. I like to make fun of millennials as much as anyone but they nailed it with the "OK Boomer" meme. In this case though, OK, GenXer.

[AlpineTR]

Yeah, it's an interesting take. Not one I necessarily agree with either. Given the title, I think it's meant to be a tongue-in-cheek nostalgia-laden effort to get a few good points across. The interesting thing to me is the extent to which one could replicate a 1990's lifestyle very cheaply. If life was "better" back then, then why not strip away all the costly and unnecessary stuff that came about in the intervening years? For me, that's where this article intersects with ERE.

[ducknald_don]

You can't really replicate the cheap healthcare, education or housing.

[chenda]

I am the same age as the author and 100% agree. There was an optimism about the age and being a millennium baby. Climate change meant banning CFCs and leaded petrol. I don't remember doomerism or global extinction being a thing. Everything was going to be hunky dory.

Going abroad was different too. English was far less widely spoken in those days to the point knowing some local language was actually essential. Just going to France meant cutting yourself off from the English speaking world. No news, or indeed any contact with friends or family unless you found a pay phone and had enough francs. You were really in a foreign land in a way you could never be anywhere today.

[AlpineTR]

I am the same age as the author and 100% agree. There was an optimism about the age and being a millennium baby. Climate change meant banning CFCs and leaded petrol. I don't remember doomerism or global extinction being a thing. Everything was going to be hunky dory.

Going abroad was different too. English was far less widely spoken in those days to the point knowing some local language was actually essential. Just going to France meant cutting yourself off from the English speaking world. No news, or indeed any contact with friends or family unless you found a pay phone and had enough francs. You were really in a foreign land in a way you could never be anywhere today.

In the late 90s, everything seemed like it was getting better. There was an optimism centered around peace ("holiday from history"), prosperity, and technology at that time.

Good point about going abroad. I hadn't thought of that. I took my first trip to Germany in 1999. It was expensive and difficult to call home, so I didn't do it that often. It was a truly "foreign experience," which doesn't really exist today in the same way. I even went to the Love Parade in Berlin haha.

[luxagraf]

I am the same age as the author and 100% agree. There was an optimism about the age and being a millennium baby. Climate change meant banning CFCs and leaded petrol. I don't remember doomerism or global extinction being a thing. Everything was going to be hunky dory.

Interesting. Because I am a few years older (graduated high school in 93) and I had the sense that by 99 we were well past the apex of whatever the 90s were and well into a sense of impending doom. I do agree with many of the points in this essay though. Especially the underlying point that we've let technology over mediate the world at the expense of relying on ourselves and our communities.

[jacob]

I fall within the age-group, but I can't relate much to this article. I spent most of the 1990s (HS+university) with my nose in physics books (and other books) not paying much of any attention to the real/current world. I had a radio and was "hip" to the current music trends of the time (I did spend time in record stores) but had sworn off TV. I did not read news but I did read a lot of computer, science, and astronomy magazines. When I cleaned them out of my parents attic, there must have been the equivalent of 6 normal (3 very large) size moving boxes.

To satiate my addiction to books, I'd order stuff out of the back of the magazines from the US which would arrive in the mail 2 months later. I was the first person I knew to get a VISA card.

In terms of online living, I've never "hung out" on the street or the mall. I got online in 1989 and on the internet in 1995. I've actively created /hosted online content since 1991. You're all well familiar with how I think the internet was better in those times [before Eternal September]. What ruined it was not the technology but making that technology simple enough that even goldfish could get online. This caused a reflux of the kind of people I thought I had happily left behind after serving my time in middle school due to their innate inability to tell a serial port from a parallel port. Of course someone had to invent USB and wifi

I was certainly a techno-optimist at the time. Not in the "technology can solve all problems" because I was largely unaware of any problems, but in the technology is going to make everything and everyone better off in its march forward. I suspect that the current drive to privatize space and go to Mars are due to GenX'ers being disillusioned with how human space exploration largely went on the back burner/mostly focused on LEO after 1980.

The BIG RESET for me happened in late 2000 and was actually due to coming across a bunch of sites on the internet discussing resource economics and systems theory---basically geopolitics in terms I could understand it, that is, equations and graphs. Otherwise I spent the 90s being convinced that politics and business were for people who were too dumb to do math. It was still to be several years before I developed an interest in the "softer" aspects of the world.

[Ego]

Going abroad was different too. English was far less widely spoken in those days to the point knowing some local language was actually essential. Just going to France meant cutting yourself off from the English speaking world. No news, or indeed any contact with friends or family unless you found a pay phone and had enough francs. You were really in a foreign land in a way you could never be anywhere today.

We spent the entirety of '94 in Europe and the Middle East. In that time we called family maybe once in the entire year. I have a stack of letters we wrote. They mailed letters to American Express in the capital cities and Poste Restante elsewhere. We learned about major happenings in the lives of our family members months after they occurred.

I miss the mental challenge of not understanding something and having to figure out answers or solutions with extremely limited information. This leads to really novel solutions as opposed to "the" solution. And getting lost.

[luxagraf]

And getting lost.

I'm waiting for getting lost to be something people pay to do. Along the lines of how candlelight become "fancy" once everyone has electric lights. Getting lost, like genuinely confusingly lost, like I did every time I went to San Diego prior to Maps apps, seems likely to eventually be perceived as a luxury worth paying for (does anyone remember those spiral bound map books that were like detailed maps of LA or NYC and other big cities, I loved those things)

[7Wannabe5]

All of life is a spoiler, and today’s kids get to experience nothing with virgin eyes. I feel bad for the young women whose sexual partners have been trained how to fuck by internet pornography

Yeah, like the old guys who are still alive haven't been ruined by internet pornography too? I started dating in 1979, and my oldest partner was born in 1940, and my youngest "partner" was born in 1986, so I can confirm that sexual styles have definitely varied over the decades, and I can pretty much tell what era a man "came of age" in, but it's really not the most important factor. However, it does seem to me that there is an increasing tendency towards what I would describe as "consent to script" rather than "going with the flow." For instance, the last time I went on a date with somebody new, a man in his late 50s like me, I felt compelled to describe what I wished to contract/consent to as "just old-school."

[daylen]

I'm waiting for getting lost to be something people pay to do.

Open-world video games. Increasingly into the future: augmented real-world adventures.

[Walwen]

I'm too young for my own generation to get nostalgic, but I've already seen a little bit of the "2008 was the best time to grow up, sure am glad I'm not like the new kids with their shittier cartoons". Yeah I'm not sure 2008 was a great year, even if the cartoons were better.

Is it bad if I say I think the years right now are the high point for me? It's just been on an up and up. I'm not really on board with the "everything is going to hell" thing. Next five years or so are going to be better than the last. I really hate when my peers say life will end at 25 or 30 and the fun will all end and it'll all be endless suffering. With that attitude maybe.

[DutchGirl]

For some people the years in high school truly are their best time. And then they have to live like 40-60 years more in "meh" times, imagine that...

So I'm happy to report that for lots of people, their best years indeed aren't their teenager years. For them the best years are when they are more developed, have an income, and have more freedom to do with their life what they want to do.

As for the 1990s being the best era ever (I assume specifically for the US by the way)...
In medical science I know that there are a lot of new cures since the 1990s. So for example, back then if you had leukemia your survival rate would be 40% or so (up from 0% in the 1920s), now it's 80% or more. Heart attacks and brain infarctions were also way more deadly or debilitating more often.

Now for healthy young people most of the time the idea that there are more cures available for diseases that they probably won't have in the next 20+ years anyway may not influence how much they appreciate a certain era. But for the general population there has definitely been meaningful progress.

Same is true for the treatment of LGBT+ people. In the Netherlands, 1998 was the first year ever that people of the same sex could get an officially recognised relationship status similar to what marriage was (a civil union). Then in 2001 they could actually get married. That is progress, too. Again, maybe progress that doesn't 100% directly affect everybody, but still: meaningful progress.

[Jean]

As sayed Daylen, video games are already a way to pay to get lost (and if anyone hasn't, Outer Wilds is really an awesome game).
When I go outside, I'm atracted to place that aren't documented. Of course you find them on maps and you can see satelite images on google maps, but you don't always see what they are.
My lust for exploration in real life and videogames have been feeding each others recently. It's more challenging today to find accessible mistery (where you don't need to break the border of human knowledge), but it's still relatively easy.
On friday, i swam down a section of the Aare river. I explored a few places that aren't accessible from the ground. You don't find any guide online about how to swin down this part of the river. And that was a lot of fun and sense of adventure.
Those undoccumented experience are still all over the place. But we are often traped into thinking that what isn't documenting doesn't exist. Which leads to never go into something virgin or blind anymore.
It is very fortunate that I'm too lazy to document those things, thus avoiding to spoil those adventures for other peoples.

[Jean]

I realised that in contradiction to this, on subject where most people would like to know the truth, there are overwhelming contradictory information, which require a lot of prior knowledge to filter, and most of the time, you end up having to thrust someone.

[7Wannabe5]

Same is true for the treatment of LGBT+ people. In the Netherlands, 1998 was the first year ever that people of the same sex could get an officially recognised relationship status similar to what marriage was (a civil union). Then in 2001 they could actually get married. That is progress, too. Again, maybe progress that doesn't 100% directly affect everybody, but still: meaningful progress.

I think what seems to just be progress for a small minority can often affect us all in ways we don't quite realize. For instance, I recently read something about how giving equal rights and recognition to trans people, frees us all in terms of how we can choose to dress or groom ourselves. For instance, all the heterosexual cis-female post-menopausal old ladies (such as me) could choose to let their mustaches grow out like Frida Kahlo and wear zoot suits.

[unemployable]

Is it bad if I say I think the years right now are the high point for me? It's just been on an up and up. I'm not really on board with the "everything is going to hell" thing.

Nor am I. Apropos to this forum, ER and ERE are a lot easier than ever — there's more research and more discussion than ever, more ways to pursue alternative lifestyles and more ways to take advantage of the waste stream of consumerism, to paraphrase something Jacob once said. But maybe I'm just getting better at it.

But when you do have to buy something everything is still too goddamn expensive. These may be different sides of the same coin, I dunno. I concede the view is different once you've climbed the asset-accumulation hill.

I'm not sure what the best time of my life was. No era in mine hasn't had significant downsides.

[icefish]

I think what seems to just be progress for a small minority can often affect us all in ways we don't quite realize.

The curb-cut effect!