The 90s were seminal for me
Her: Listen, you old geezer.
Me: Did you just insult me with a lame name?
Her: …yes.
Me: I don’t know what I found more offensive, the insult itself or the lameness of it.
Her: I apologize for the lameness. (pause) But not the sentiment.
Me: Fine.
Heard a fact the other day that blew my mind:
Back to the Future, which I saw in theatres, came out in 1985 and was about a distant time in the past, 1955 – which was 30 years prior.
Welp, it’s 2026 now and 30 years prior was…1996.
That was three years AFTER I graduated college.
Sara essentially grew up in the 90s but I went to college and became a young adult in the 90s.
The 90s were when I stopped being my parent’s kid (mostly) and started being my own person.
In any case, I read something the other day that echoed this about the last analog generation, which was GenX, my generation.
If GenX was the last analog generation, then the 90s was the last analog decade.
I say this because I worked – deeply – in tech during this time and I saw firsthand that:
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- Analog media was still the default – newspapers, magazines, etc.
- Online social media wasn’t really a thing yet – Friendster came out in 2002 and was the first real social platform that anyone used.
- We shared stuff physically – tapes, minidiscs, CDs, etc.
- We communicated both digitally and analog but digital was optional.
By 2010, this wasn’t true at all.
And now, literally nuthin is analog anymore.
Everything is digital, which – let’s be honest here – is often better than what we grew up with.
But there was something about a life that was less superficially connected back then versus now, where we all seem to feel pressure to keep up with…everything and everyone.
Like, in the 90s, to have a social interaction, you actually had to walk out your door and strike up a conversation with someone or pick up the phone and give someone a call.
I met alla my good friends at that time either at college, or through people I met in college or law school.
And we all had more shared cultural experiences because we just had fewer choices available.
The other thing is that I – and a lotta people my age – grew up as a latchkey kid, which really came about in the 80s.
For those of you that don’t know what that term means, a latchkey kid was a kid that came home to an empty home after school and let him/herself in and took care of him/herself.
But that meant that we were free from supervision and were pretty self-reliant.
Compare that with how attached people are to their phones and their social circles – even if a kid did come home to an empty apartment, he would hardly be “alone.”
Nowadays, there are cameras and speakerphones for a parent to check in on their kids, and a kid has any number of friends online with which to chat with.
Being alone is barely possible these days.
I honestly don’t know how much of the 90s remains with me nor do I know how those things manifest from me.
And that means I truly don’t know how much of my old analog life comes out in my current digital one.
But I know that it’s gotta because the 90s were such a seminal part of my adult life.
Looking back at all these pictures, it didn’t feel like it was 25-30 years ago, but the numbers/dates don’t lie.
While the 90s are long gone they definitely shaped how I see, connect, and move through this modern digital world.
And even though the digital world is better in a thousand ways, it doesn’t replace the feeling of growing up in a world where you had to show up in person to matter.
Maybe that’s why the idea that the 90s were the last analog decade hits so hard for me; it was the last time most things were analog and digital was a choice and not a requirement.
And the echoes of that last decade are something only I, and those of us that lived through it, can hear.
Location: in my head, the corner of West 45th Street and 6th Avenue at 3AM sometime in the mid 90s, stumbling home drunk from a club with numbers scribbled on my palm and wondering when life would be grand, not realizing that it already was.
Mood: nostalgic
Music: I can do whatever I want, I can see whomever I choose (Spotify)
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