Me being perhaps a bit younger, I miss the days before "Everyone is beautiful and no-one is horny", when there was some residual respect left for the idea that someone might actually want to have a sexuality.
I suspect the sexlessnes of modern blockbusters has more to do with the international film market than anything else. Marvel movies and whatnot aren't just made for the U.S. in mind. They're made for the U.S., China, the Middle East, etc.
The last line is it. This is my grand unifying theory of why everything is "worse" now. No doubt it actually is, in some ways, but stuff has always sucked, for some people, all of the time, and on the whole it sucks less for everyone now, but we feel worse.
Simply, we have too much information. We're not supposed to know this much. We're not supposed to talk to this many people. I'm not supposed to sit in my underwear and write a few disembodied sentences to thousands of faceless strangers whom I hope agree with me. The 90s, during which I was a child, but sentient enough, seem, as you say, like the right balance of progress and technology without too much information.
We're not meant to drive cars. Our brains haven't evolved to work that fast. And we're not meant to be on the internet. Our brains haven't evolved to know that much.
So so true. I graduated in 2000 and spent the 90s (also in New England) smoking weed, having sex, going to cheap concerts and tailgating, going to festivals (thankfully missed Woodstock 99 for a smaller one up north), visiting Boston by train, driving around on 99 cent gasoline, buying CDs, dyeing my hair with box dye, talking in chat rooms with people I didn't know then later meeting some of them IRL, watching Nick at Nite and MTV on my 13" TV, and making collect calls just like you (though I remember 10 cent ones too somehow). I miss it all.
I was a teen in the early 80s and I feel I could have written this same essay about how I grew up in a real time and kids in the 90s didn’t. Teenagers in the 90s grew up inside and didn’t have the real experiences we had, and listened to cold music with no soul. This led them to be distant from themselves, to only have ways of knowing of themselves through the coldness of behemoth mega homogenized culture. To have Ronald Reagan as a surrogate dad. To have parents and school administrators afraid of giving kids freedom. Gen X and their helium speaking voices didn’t seem to be rooted, didn’t seem to be secure, didn’t seem to have courage, to us who were a little older, and it wasn’t their fault. They didn’t know how to put in their bodies and dance. They stood on the side and watched others watching others.
This is why generations as they are usually constructed don't really make sense. You seem to place yourself in the baby boom and not Gen X. But I can't think of someone who was listening to CCR and dodging the draft in 1968 as belonging to the same generation as Spicoli driving around listening to Van Halen in 1982
I agree. I’m a 1964 kid and technically a boomer. I don’t feel like it. But i feel generationally different than my brother, who is 4 years younger than me. I think it’s Reagan, milk carton kids, AIDS, and the Challenger disaster that largely caused the difference.
I think I was just born in a transitional era and it’s not worth it to make a tiny generation just for us.
There was a huge change that occurred in the late 60s, early 70s. It was fast and I wonder if it had to do with widespread access to good birth control for the first time ever. In the early 60s sex outside of marriage was a big no no. That changed in the 70s. I remember Vietnam but I also remember the world of John Travolta's Staying Alive.
One thing I've been wondering about is the change in women's attitude towards sex. Even into the 80s and perhaps the 90s the default was No... unless you convince me otherwise. Seduce me. Convince me or forget it. No.
Grace of the Aziz Ansari fame, who blasted him for being the worst date ever, wouldn't have considered lodging a public complaint because it was her right and responsibility to say no. If she didn't like his behavior she wouldn't have felt the need to take off her clothes and have oral sex. She would have said No. She would have walked out the door. If she was having a good time, she'd have said, Yes.
I was flabbergasted by that incident, not by his behavior...Really? What do you expect from men? But why did she feel she couldn't assert herself in the simplest, most basic ways? How did young women like her lose their power so thoroughly? Why did they gave it away.
There weren't many teenagers who were Gen X in the 90's, the 80's is really their teen playground. The 90's were really the college years/early career decade for Gen Xers, not their teen years.
Not sure if you got your decades mixed up, but Xers weren't the ones who didn't get any freedom from their parents. We did, we were called latchkey kids for goodness sake. It's the Millennials who had to endure that.
It's funny because my knee jerk reaction to your comment was "No, that was Gen Z!!" but I'm realizing that Millennials must have been the transitional generation between freedom and helicopter parenting so some of us experienced one thing and some the other, whereas Gen X was pretty universally free and Gen Z was (is?) pretty universally helicoptered. I was a latchkey kid as were many of my friends (born 1990-1994). Dazed and Confused could have been a documentary about our high school experience.
Gen X is usually defined as born between 1965–1980. Almost all my teen years were in the 90s and I'm X by any definition. All teens in the first half of the 90s were Xers.
Well yeah but all teens in the entire decade of the 80's were Xers. Plus a few in the late 70's. Not saying there weren't any Xers as teens in the 90's (I was one of them), but they share it with Millennials. If anything it's the 'Xennial' decade, although that's a weird term.
Just saying it's not the decade Xers really own in terms of their formative years (5-20). That would easily be the 80's.
The Internet Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster to the human race. My generation (Gen Z) have spent our lives using these instant-gratification devices. All it’s done is make us more atomized than ever before. Political partisanship has skyrocketed over the past few years, largely due to media echo chambers.
I live in Brooklyn where there are still record stores. But it’s mostly a hipster thing. So even that is a subculture now. Young people otherwise have no place to congregate, which is also a big reason youngsters aren’t having sex anymore. We all just stay inside and communicate through screens. That’s not how stable communities are built.
I agree with pretty much everything Freddie has written here and I cannot stress how so much of this is still available to anyone who wants it if they just do two things: (a) Get rid of your smartphone, and (b) get off social media. I've done both and it's fantastic. I'll never, ever go back to either. As the old AOL CDs used to say: Try it for a week!
Also:, re:
“I’ll be at Place at Time,” and then you were at that place at that time
Yes. And there wasn't this obsessive need to text someone when you left your house to go to their house. "I'm on my way!" "Leaving now!" I don't care. I do not care when you leave your home. Just be here when we agreed you would be here and that's enough. Mother of pearl.
I was out and about the other day and my apple watch buzzed to let me know someone was texting. I thought to myself, "wasn't it great when I could go outside for hours at a time without some device constantly reminding me of something or another." I wrote a book about underground music in the late 80s and 90s, when tours were all arranged by phone and a band could drive around the country with nothing more than a notebook indicating where they have to be and when.
Was also interested - I see there's a book about the Chicago indie scene in the 90's called "You're With Stupid" written by a gentleman with the same name as the commenter you're replying to. I'm not sure if they're one and the same individual, but if not, that's quite a coincidence.
I periodically think about doing this. I actually don't use my phone for much: texts, calls, directions, and photographs are my primary use cases, all easily solved by other means. Maybe I should get myself a flip phone off the local buy nothing group and try it out for a week.
I don't understand how a person could live without a smartphone at this point when all of society operates as if you have a smartphone.
I barely use cellular data but without some basic stuff like Waze, Venmo, and texting (including pictures) I think my wife and friends would all get annoyed at me.
I do this as well, the caveat being that I keep an old one around for e-tickets for sporting events. I prefer my day-to-day existence with the feature-phone to what I had with the smartphone
Me too—I've never had one. I've had to upgrade flip phones a few times, and they're getting harder to find, but the one I have now can even be a wifi hotspot. So if I get desperately lost when traveling, as a last resort I can use it to get the internet on my laptop. Writing or printing out directions to places is the main hassle, but it's not a big deal.
I've done it and I was in my 20s at the time so not the typical "I've always had a flip phone and I can't fathom why anyone else doesn't!!" demographic. It's possible. It's very inconvenient, though, and I gave up after about a year. I miss my flip phone all the time but not being able to participate in group texts or call an uber ended up driving me crazy. I've found that a smartphone with no social media apps and no notifications except for texts and calls is a happy medium, if not my ideal situation.
Yep. That’s the only reason I ever got one. First my friends (gently!) let me know that I was being a dick because I didn’t have a phone, making getting in touch with me way harder than anyone else. So I got a flip phone and hated it. Then my job (not so gently!) told me to give them back their BlackBerry and get a fucking smart phone like everyone else. So I got one and hate it.
People don't quite get it, but until very recently, I did without a cell phone most of the time because we don't have cell service at our house. The iphones can use wifi for calling, but not android.
It was bothersome when people wanted to text me. Even if I explained that I wouldn't get the message, it didn't register.
But! it was all right. I'm not that important and bad news travels fast enough. My husband sometimes gets pissy about it, but too bad. I went for decades without ready accessibility, why change now?
The idea that everyone should be instantly 'reachable' is not practical or even healthy really. No one should have to be continuously linked to the net, humans aren't supposed to live with that level of social atomization.
My brother in Cali once chastised me for not answering my cell phone right away when family members called (he was on Mom's authority here). I told him I rarely carry it on me at home, I just check it for calls/texts a few times a night. He thought it was incredibly rude that I didn't have it on me at all times, "What if there's an emergency??" and all that. I reminded him that that's exactly how it was before cell phones - if you're not next to the landline when it rings, you're not going to answer it. So I treat my cell like a land line, and only answer it if a) it's next to me, b) I'm not busy, and c) I feel like talking right then.
Just because someone calls you doesn't mean you are obliged to immediately make time to talk right then, to me that's the rude part. If you set aside some time to call back, or set up a better time to chat for each other, then both parties are better off.
Besides, the natural world is infinitely much sweeter when your disconnected from the webz.
Your comment just made it occur to me properly for the first time that this ability to text one's status in going somewhere is probably contributing to our collectively becoming worse at being on time for things. (At least, I am much worse at this skill than I was brought up to be, and seem to be worsening every few years.)
As much I think this could be a great idea, having a smartphone really does seem like one of the requirements of a Minimum Viable Citizen at this point, at least for anybody employed in any remotely technical job.
I had a coworker once, and this was seven years ago and things have only gotten much, much worse since then (thanks COVID), who didn't have a smartphone. And we all kind of looked at him like "WTF is wrong with you?" So as much as we were all told to resist peer pressure as kids, it's a real thing and can be damaging to your career prospects. (It didn't help that the guy was deeply strange in a lot of other ways.)
I am trying to kick various social media addictions, but it does make me wonder what exactly defines "social media". I know, it's like trying to define pornography, we know it when we see it. Obviously, Twitter and Facebook are social media. I thankfully never got into Twitter and I managed to quit Facebook cold-turkey at the start of the pandemic; I've gone back to checking it once a day because some IRL social groups I've gotten involved with do most of their scheduling/coordination on FB. Importantly, though, I don't have the Facebook app on my phone. I recently got rid of the Instagram and TikTok apps from my phone, but couldn't get rid of YouTube because watching/listening to documentaries on that platform is the main way I relax/distract myself and has been for years. However, if you define "social media" as anything with the following properties:
1. You need a screen and an internet connection to consume it
2. The content is produced by individuals, not corporations
3. Other people are allowed to comment on it
it becomes hard for me to find much that interests me these days that doesn't fit that profile. This Substack blog that we're commenting on, for example, would fit. So would Reddit. So would YouTube.
Perhaps we need to add another clause:
4. Algorithmically-curated content
in which case, Substack and other blogs don't count (as long as you're following blogs based on human recommendations and not Substack's "Explore" page).
Anyway, it's hard. It's hard to quit the internet because so much, even meatspace things, depend on it these days. And for the same reason that it can be harder to quit overeating than it can be to quit smoking: you have to eat *something*, you can't just quit food cold turkey (or cold tofu for the vegans). And if you're an employed person in the West, you have to use computers and the internet to do your job, so the distractions are always there (I should be doing my job right now instead of writing this! I'm sorry, my employers, that some randos talking about 90's nostalgia is far more interesting to me than our product's latest feature request from sales and marketing.)
Sorry for the rambling reply to your comment. One more question: do you find that your non-use of a smartphone and/or social media causes any friction between you and your real-world friends and family? For example, are you "the person that we have to remember to call or e-mail directly if we want them to come to our party, because they're not in the group chat or won't see our Facebook invite"?
I'm in a technical job and I could easily get around this by using an old smartphone without a SIM for the two-factor authentication apps I need for my job, and keeping it in a drawer.
I think your fourth point is the key, and what people really mean when they say "social media." I became Very Online as a depressed teenager in the early 2000s, and the old style BBSes, message boards, and webrings were very, very different from what Facebook and Twitter and the like have become. Even the upvote/downvoted system of Reddit distorts conversation; the old web couldn't do that. Information could only be read in the order it was posted, and if you didn't like something you were exposed regardless and had to choose to ignore it, just like real life. Most importantly, everyone saw and experienced the same thing, even if we experienced it asynchronously.
Algorithmic curation broke all of that and I think it's where online culture took a wrong a turn.
You gave a guy crap for not having a smart phone 7 years ago?? And here I thought they were only 5 years old or so lol.
You don't need it for any job, or at least you shouldn't. If a job does require one, then they should provide one for you. That's a personal device after all.
As for friend/family friction because you're not on social media...so what? If they can't handle you not being 'on' all the time, how strong are those relationships anyway?
Smartphones have been around for decades, but I would say they didn't become what we now know them as until the first iPhone, and that was almost 20 years ago, in 2007. Which is... terrifying.
My lord you're right! I guess I didn't know they were 'a thing' with the general public for so long now. Goes to show how much I've been in the proverbial dark I suppose lol.
1. We didn't actually say anything to the guy. And maybe everybody else on the team was like "whatever" and I'm the only judgemental prick who thought he was a weirdo for not having a smartphone. I probably wouldn't have thought much about it if it wasn't for that fact that, again, he was a deeply weird person. He didn't come off as being on the spectrum, but he definitely was either clueless about social norms, or completely uninterested in conforming with them.
2. Family/friend friction goes beyond being on social media or not; I'm thinking of things more like "my wife wants to text me and expects a reply" and I'd rather not have to go back to texting on a phone keypad. She's loving and supportive and I'm sure if I was really, really serious about not having a smartphone, she could learn to just call me instead if she needed to communicate.
But then I'd be the guy who has to duck out of meetings to take a phone call, or have a phone conversation on the train, instead of being able to just handle it over SMS.
Again, social norms, and motivation to conform to them. I'm pretty high on this, other people aren't. More successful people probably aren't, but I'm not all that interested in "success" if it means being "that guy".
An analogous story: in college/post-college there was a girl in one of my social circles who didn't have a car (while living off-campus in a very car-dependent city). I'm sure she had principled reasons for not having a car - environmental, political, financial, whatever - but the practical upshot was that if we wanted to include her in our activities (and we did - she was otherwise very nice, and we weren't assholes) we had to give her a ride. And I definitely thought at the time "she's having her cake and eating it too - she gets to feel smug about being car-free, but her lifestyle still depends on the internal combustion engine".
Basically, one of my few principles in life is "don't be a problem for other people if you can possibly help it."
"But then I'd be the guy who has to duck out of meetings to take a phone call, or have a phone conversation on the train, instead of being able to just handle it over SMS."
This part I wanted to comment on: why do you need to be reachable during a work meeting? Or anyone else? You're at work, it's their time not yours. If it's a work phone that makes perfect sense, as long as it's about work. But if it's your own phone not so much.
Personally I try and leave my cell in a drawer in my desk, don't carry it around with me, and only check it over lunch or scheduled breaks. Because I'm on company time, not my own.
As for the train scenario: I wouldn't consider texting to be a feature of smart phones, it predates that tech. Both calling and texting are features of any cell phone, not just smart ones.
I'm also on the side of folks saying it's damn near impossible, and not a reasonable expectation, to get by without a smartphone today. Or at least, you would have to have a very particular kind of profession and/or lifestyle to be able to live comfortably without one (e.g. be like my mother, who is retirement-age and whose social circles consist of other people who don't depend on smartphones).
I was recently discussing with some friends a very contentious situation in a major university's mathematics department where one (formerly highly respected) tenured faculty member had his salary reduced to $0 (see https://www.purdueexponent.org/campus/article_292fefc0-5c74-53fc-b5c9-63b3fde6f6af.html for a slightly biased summary). Combing through the full story, one key moment was the when the professor forgot to attend a class he was teaching, discovered his mistake when he got home, and then was unable to let his students know until the following day because he didn't have email at home (or any kind of internet connection at all, apparently?). And we were saying that yeah, making the initial mistake of missing one class might not have been a fireable offense after decades of being in good standing, but that combined with not being able to communicate with anyone maybe kind of is. If you don't have internet most of the time, perhaps you are living inexcusably behind the times for most jobs.
Not having a smartphone is obviously a good bit milder an issue than never having internet at all outside of one's office, but a similar principle holds, I think. That said, I'm all in favor of cutting down on using extraneous apps on smartphones, and Zack Morris, if you have the particular kind of job/lifestyle that makes it feasible to not have one entirely without risking problems, then more power to you!
I respectfully disagree with this. I just don't think being 'always instantly reachable' is a reasonable expectation for human beings, despite our day and age. I know lots of people with regular jobs and social lives who either don't own a smart phone (minority), or simply don't treat it like a mobile internet connection device that needs constant monitoring and interaction (majority). Jobs have actual phone calls or emails to use, same with friends/family. This need for instant contact is just strange to me. Maybe it's a 'non-coast' thing, I don't know...just throwing darts here.
Your professor story is unfortunate, I was quite appalled they actually fired him over a simple mistake like that. That was quite unfair...I mean what was lost here, an hour of students time? And why didn't he call the department office, couldn't they have someone step into the classroom to inform the students? This seems like something else was going on here.
The not having internet at home thing...broadband is not considered a general public service. If it was a communication method federally paid for like the postal service, then the professor would have no excuse here. But it's not, home internet is still a personal choice. And any job should not require you to be able to communicate with it, off the job, on your own dime...that's not how it's supposed to work. Realistically, I would argue all phone service should also be federal like the post office - I consider that basic public infrastructure but I'm guessing a lot would throw a fit at that.
In any case, if a job requires you to not be incommunicado when off work, then it's the employers job to supply the method for communication - i.e. company phone. This idea that anyone should use their personal devices for work is a really bad road to be going down.
I have able to achieve most of this while retaining the benefits of modernity using a simple strategy: moderation. I sometimes use social media like Facebook to keep track of people I know and see a little bit of what's going on with their lives. I look at it for a little bit, then stop and go on with my life. Rarely, maybe two or three times a week, I go to the comments section of an article and discuss issues that interest me with strangers. I don't Tweet.
I mostly use my smartphone to enhance activities that I was already doing before I got a smartphone. I listen to a lot of audiobooks while I do chores, my smartphone has really helped my reading. I'm also really glad to have started driving only a few years before navigation apps became widespread. But in general I don't use my smartphone that much, and when I do it's often to improve an activity rather than replace it (i.e. listen to a book while doing the dishes).
I understand moderation is harder for some people, but practicing it really can help people like me, who simultaneously enjoy new technology and miss the old days. It's really helped me find a happy medium where I can enjoy new technology the way I was meant to.
Also, I do like it when people text me that they're leaving their house. It lets me know if they are running late, and if I have time to start or finish something before they get here.
Don't use a driving app in the country. It can be dangerous. They'll send you down dirt roads that no longer exist or run you into a thriving pot farm blocking the road. Then you lose cell service and are really up shit creek.
So many of my friends and family have broken door bells that failure to send these texts would waste a ton of my time... I wonder if anyone else started sending those texts for the same reason?
so weird I was listening to Klosterman on Conversations with Tyler podcast (from a year ago) this morning and wondering "huh, I wonder what FdB would think of this?"
I have nothing but fondness for the 90s. Back in '95, I was a divorced American living in the States and AOL was the only internet game in town. I entered a language chat room to practice my German and a nice person helped me out. Turned out he had a great sense of humour and he was (surprise, surprise) German. We exchanged emails, private chats on AOL messenger, and even texted each other per pager. We finally exchanged photos per snail mail. Telephone calls ensued. Then, much to the horror of my family, I visited him in Germany. We met, fell in love, and were married for 22 wonderful years until he died at age 54 and now I live alone in Germany. I will be forever thankful to the Internet for introducing me to my German, salsa-dancing mathematician husband.
The 90s were awesome, indeed, but I actually graduated from high school in 1989, and although college was amazing, I spent most of my 90s working for some weird, unknown reason. There were quite a few wonderful moments nevertheless, but personally, my 30s (the 2000s) were better, even though the world was worse for affluent Americans. That decade is the one in which I met my wife and became a Dad.
Even in the early 90s, we still had the sense that earlier generations had partied harder and better than we had, and that the glory days of youth culture were not quite over, but they were ending. I can't imagine that young people felt that way in, say, the 60s and 70s.
I am of course aware that it's always this way, and that I really am romanticizing my youth, and that everybody feels like they just missed the good times. At the same time, there are things about that way of life that were better, and I want us to count the cost.
I am about 2 years younger than you and I can attest that we all thought those who were juniors and seniors when we were freshmen and sophomores had just a bit more freedom and fun than we did (personally I blame Columbine). Of course I have two brothers that are nearly 6 and 10 years younger than I am respectively and the world they grew up in really was a totally different planet.
Yeah. I’m four years younger than Freddie, and I remember school policies changed *while I was in high school* such that kids just a year or so older had more freedom than my year did for things like leaving campus for lunch, etc. And on the other side, I remember playing out in the yard and roaming the neighborhood without supervision when I was <10, and by the time I was baby-sitting in the late 90s, that was not the norm where I lived anymore.
I roamed the neighborhood without supervision in the 90s and early 2000s - in retrospect it was a transitional period where some of my friends had a lot of freedom and others were over-scheduled and helicopter-parented but neither parenting style was fully dominant. There were kids whose houses you could bike to and ring the doorbell to ask if they could come out and play and others whose moms had to schedule playdates a week in advance (my mom always laughed at the concept of a playdate). Sometimes those two families lived next door to each other. Those of us with more relaxed parents developed a healthy sense of independence and looked forward to adulthood and we felt awful for our friends whose parents wouldn't let them drive or get jobs. Even worse were the rare kids whose parents tracked their flip phones, which was considered unfathomably invasive at the time. I babysat a lot from 2005-2010 and the kids I babysat were almost universally helicoptered to a degree that would have shocked my own parents just a decade earlier. Not sure why the early 2000s were such a turning point for parenting - 9/11-induced anxiety maybe?
As parents of Gen Z kids, my wife, my close friends, and I explicitly tried to let our kids be as free range as possible when they were small in the mid-late 2010s. We live in San Francisco, and at 8 or 10, they could walk to multiple parks on their own to hang out with friends, and by 12 they were taking city buses all over town.
I am almost 10 years older than you, and I do not feel I just missed out on the good times. Quite the opposite.
I think that's because the 70s and 80s were still very culturally optimistic, lived the post civil-rights era, and then the Cold War ended. I had none of the hardships of those that came before me, and gained all the benefits of the work of predecessors.
The rollback of freedoms since 1991 in many countries has been difficult to watch. We now live in the best times for humans in history, yet there is so much unfinished business, and we risk losing the gains we once cherished. Bewilderingly, the west doubts its own towering endowments and achievements, and consumes itself mostly with irrelevancies. It feels like there are no more adults around.
I wanted to hate this piece. I turned 11 in 1999, so I mostly associate the nineties with being bored, plus Britney Spears, N'Sync, and Limp Bizkit. But...yeah, I remember Going Places to Do Things. I remember feeling like the world I lived in was the world, and not some lame copy of a million other suburbs, unsatisfying because it's not the two or three cool places that have something original going on (except if I do more research, I'll realize even those places are copying some other place). I get it.
Also, I had the too small Dodge (Plymouth, actually, in my case) Neon, and was in my school's production of Arsenic and Old Lace.
Feb 6, 2023·edited Feb 6, 2023Liked by Freddie deBoer
Yes. A bit earlier, in the mid-80s, I spent a couple of years living and traveling in South America, and God, was it a different world. I'd call home once a month so my parents knew I was alive and kicking (calls were $3-5 a minute, and I was living on $5 a day, so once a month was it), and there was something wonderful about the complete freedom of no one I knew knowing where I was on any given day. (I was 23/24 then and oblivious; now as a parent I look back and I can't believe my parents had to go through that, but that was life then, and we all took it for granted.) You'd meet other travelers and spend the night talking, and then you's shake hands and say, "have a good life," and mean it, because there was no way to stay in touch beyond that (yes, you could exchange mailing addresses, but no one was going to write). Today I have two girls, 18 and 3, and I am sad that they will never know that level of freedom. So yes, I am old, etc., and some things are better now, but others were definitely better then.
Give your daughters that freedom. It takes effort, and it's worthwhile. My four children are 9 to 16, and it's the best gift you can give them. The resiliency of my children is starkly greater than their peers, because of it.
Agreed! Whenever we are outside, my 3 -year-old (she will be 3 at the end of the month) often walks 10-20 feet ahead of us, and almost never looks back. The world is hers to explore. We are just there to support her. (People in NYC respond in fun and funny ways when they see a toddler walking confidently towards them, but so far, so good.)
The best thing I ever did was let my kids roam all day, until dinner, by age 6.
As I was allowed to do.
It's hard, because few other kids are allowed to do that any more, so it requires conscious parental decisions, rather than occurring organically. It helps if inside isn't as attractive because you don't have screens (home office excepted).
The three keys for us have been:
A) teaching them to be outside, all day, even when it's -20C. (~5 F). This was formerly an 'automatic' skill, now it needs to be consciously taught.
B) giving them boredom, so they learn to cope with it, and use it to their advantage
C) not allowing cell phones until at least 15. Minimize parental use around children too.
Kids aren't just physically healthier for this, but mentally healthier too. Anxiety in teenagers is through the roof, and our techno-society changes are the only rational explanation.
This pays dividends later on. On her break between semesters last week, my 15 year old daughter and her friends slept in snow structures they built and didn't see any adults for 3 days.
Those girls come from families that will never get them into expensive colleges. But they will own the world.
Nitpick: -20C = -4F, not 5F. A much colder temperature than has ever been recorded in the history of the city I grew up in, so not an allowance my parents had to consider making.
In general, within a reasonable margin of safety, I think it's great for young people to be forced to interact with the outside world in a greater range of temperatures. I've definitely noticed a relative lack of tolerance for diversity of climates among folks who grew up in very temperate areas.
You're right. My conversion to Fahrenheit was better in the '90s too!
My locale gets below -30C, so -20C is a common (winter) occurrence. In a generation or two, most youth have gone from being out in it all day, to not being able to be out for more than half an hour. Many families, despite being able to afford the clothes, simply don't buy them.
It's hard for me to separate nostalgia from a cold-hearted assessment of the present age. But for me, the thing I hate the most about the present time is the hyper-politicization of every goddamn thing under the sun. Why does every single opinion or speech act or piece of art have to be coded left or right now? It's the height of dumbassery.
It's probably yet another curse of the internet. People have no real connection to each other and get sucked into the magic box as a placebo, and before they know it, they care about shit they don't care about.
re: email. I'm a little older than you and there was this beautiful time, between 1993 and 1996 or so, when everybody got an email account for the first time. And it was magnificent! There were no stamps to buy and delivery was instant. And without any other paradigm for electronic communication, people wrote each letters. The letters! I've archived my email over the years and the emails I received from friends in this period were just magnificent: witty, informative and full of enthusiasm for the new medium.
Now email is a vaguely oppressive source of work angst. And no current form of interpersonal electronic communication remotely comes close.
Also, important emails get buried under junk. I have over 25,000 unread emails in my inbox, and looking at it feels like I'm floating in that garbage patch in the ocean. People gotta make moneeeeeyyyyyyy, I get it.
It is uncontroversially true that the best videogames of all time all came out in the 1990s (especially if we count Mario 3's US release rather than its Japanese release).
You write about how the US was the seat of capitalism and empire, and it was and is, but the 90s feeling is inextricably tied up with the end of the Cold War. Really, the end of a century of war. The 90s were not a good time for Russians, and they were great for Americans. Everyone got their share of the peace dividend, mostly psychologically and culturally.
Not a good time for (soon to be former) Yugoslavs, Somalis, Iraqis, Algerians,or Rwandans either. And incidentally, the 90s were also the first great heyday of global jihadism, the birth of Al-Qaeda etc. Mohamed Atta was burning with rage in Hamburg while Americans and Europeans celebrated the End of History.
Actually now when I think about the '90s, can't help but see all the dark shit seething in the background that would explode in the next three decades.
Jihadism, far-right extremism (Oklahoma City 1995), runaway corporate greed fuelled by cheap credit, and the first stirrings of 'online culture' (though this was genuinely more benign at the time)
Me being perhaps a bit younger, I miss the days before "Everyone is beautiful and no-one is horny", when there was some residual respect left for the idea that someone might actually want to have a sexuality.
I suspect the sexlessnes of modern blockbusters has more to do with the international film market than anything else. Marvel movies and whatnot aren't just made for the U.S. in mind. They're made for the U.S., China, the Middle East, etc.
The last line is it. This is my grand unifying theory of why everything is "worse" now. No doubt it actually is, in some ways, but stuff has always sucked, for some people, all of the time, and on the whole it sucks less for everyone now, but we feel worse.
Simply, we have too much information. We're not supposed to know this much. We're not supposed to talk to this many people. I'm not supposed to sit in my underwear and write a few disembodied sentences to thousands of faceless strangers whom I hope agree with me. The 90s, during which I was a child, but sentient enough, seem, as you say, like the right balance of progress and technology without too much information.
We're not meant to drive cars. Our brains haven't evolved to work that fast. And we're not meant to be on the internet. Our brains haven't evolved to know that much.
I agree with your disembodied sentences, faceless stranger.
So so true. I graduated in 2000 and spent the 90s (also in New England) smoking weed, having sex, going to cheap concerts and tailgating, going to festivals (thankfully missed Woodstock 99 for a smaller one up north), visiting Boston by train, driving around on 99 cent gasoline, buying CDs, dyeing my hair with box dye, talking in chat rooms with people I didn't know then later meeting some of them IRL, watching Nick at Nite and MTV on my 13" TV, and making collect calls just like you (though I remember 10 cent ones too somehow). I miss it all.
I was a teen in the early 80s and I feel I could have written this same essay about how I grew up in a real time and kids in the 90s didn’t. Teenagers in the 90s grew up inside and didn’t have the real experiences we had, and listened to cold music with no soul. This led them to be distant from themselves, to only have ways of knowing of themselves through the coldness of behemoth mega homogenized culture. To have Ronald Reagan as a surrogate dad. To have parents and school administrators afraid of giving kids freedom. Gen X and their helium speaking voices didn’t seem to be rooted, didn’t seem to be secure, didn’t seem to have courage, to us who were a little older, and it wasn’t their fault. They didn’t know how to put in their bodies and dance. They stood on the side and watched others watching others.
This is why generations as they are usually constructed don't really make sense. You seem to place yourself in the baby boom and not Gen X. But I can't think of someone who was listening to CCR and dodging the draft in 1968 as belonging to the same generation as Spicoli driving around listening to Van Halen in 1982
I agree. I’m a 1964 kid and technically a boomer. I don’t feel like it. But i feel generationally different than my brother, who is 4 years younger than me. I think it’s Reagan, milk carton kids, AIDS, and the Challenger disaster that largely caused the difference.
I think I was just born in a transitional era and it’s not worth it to make a tiny generation just for us.
I was ten when the Challenger exploded. The whole school watched it live in the auditorium. We were thrilled with the unexpected turn of events.
Tastes great AND less filling!
There was a huge change that occurred in the late 60s, early 70s. It was fast and I wonder if it had to do with widespread access to good birth control for the first time ever. In the early 60s sex outside of marriage was a big no no. That changed in the 70s. I remember Vietnam but I also remember the world of John Travolta's Staying Alive.
One thing I've been wondering about is the change in women's attitude towards sex. Even into the 80s and perhaps the 90s the default was No... unless you convince me otherwise. Seduce me. Convince me or forget it. No.
Grace of the Aziz Ansari fame, who blasted him for being the worst date ever, wouldn't have considered lodging a public complaint because it was her right and responsibility to say no. If she didn't like his behavior she wouldn't have felt the need to take off her clothes and have oral sex. She would have said No. She would have walked out the door. If she was having a good time, she'd have said, Yes.
I was flabbergasted by that incident, not by his behavior...Really? What do you expect from men? But why did she feel she couldn't assert herself in the simplest, most basic ways? How did young women like her lose their power so thoroughly? Why did they gave it away.
Yeah the shift in sex etiquette was massive, quick, bewildering, and not for the better.
It's Social Astrology, plain and simple.
There weren't many teenagers who were Gen X in the 90's, the 80's is really their teen playground. The 90's were really the college years/early career decade for Gen Xers, not their teen years.
Not sure if you got your decades mixed up, but Xers weren't the ones who didn't get any freedom from their parents. We did, we were called latchkey kids for goodness sake. It's the Millennials who had to endure that.
It's funny because my knee jerk reaction to your comment was "No, that was Gen Z!!" but I'm realizing that Millennials must have been the transitional generation between freedom and helicopter parenting so some of us experienced one thing and some the other, whereas Gen X was pretty universally free and Gen Z was (is?) pretty universally helicoptered. I was a latchkey kid as were many of my friends (born 1990-1994). Dazed and Confused could have been a documentary about our high school experience.
Gen X is usually defined as born between 1965–1980. Almost all my teen years were in the 90s and I'm X by any definition. All teens in the first half of the 90s were Xers.
Well yeah but all teens in the entire decade of the 80's were Xers. Plus a few in the late 70's. Not saying there weren't any Xers as teens in the 90's (I was one of them), but they share it with Millennials. If anything it's the 'Xennial' decade, although that's a weird term.
Just saying it's not the decade Xers really own in terms of their formative years (5-20). That would easily be the 80's.
Not true - the first three years of the 80s you still have boomer teens
The Internet Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster to the human race. My generation (Gen Z) have spent our lives using these instant-gratification devices. All it’s done is make us more atomized than ever before. Political partisanship has skyrocketed over the past few years, largely due to media echo chambers.
I live in Brooklyn where there are still record stores. But it’s mostly a hipster thing. So even that is a subculture now. Young people otherwise have no place to congregate, which is also a big reason youngsters aren’t having sex anymore. We all just stay inside and communicate through screens. That’s not how stable communities are built.
I agree with pretty much everything Freddie has written here and I cannot stress how so much of this is still available to anyone who wants it if they just do two things: (a) Get rid of your smartphone, and (b) get off social media. I've done both and it's fantastic. I'll never, ever go back to either. As the old AOL CDs used to say: Try it for a week!
Also:, re:
“I’ll be at Place at Time,” and then you were at that place at that time
Yes. And there wasn't this obsessive need to text someone when you left your house to go to their house. "I'm on my way!" "Leaving now!" I don't care. I do not care when you leave your home. Just be here when we agreed you would be here and that's enough. Mother of pearl.
I was out and about the other day and my apple watch buzzed to let me know someone was texting. I thought to myself, "wasn't it great when I could go outside for hours at a time without some device constantly reminding me of something or another." I wrote a book about underground music in the late 80s and 90s, when tours were all arranged by phone and a band could drive around the country with nothing more than a notebook indicating where they have to be and when.
Was also interested - I see there's a book about the Chicago indie scene in the 90's called "You're With Stupid" written by a gentleman with the same name as the commenter you're replying to. I'm not sure if they're one and the same individual, but if not, that's quite a coincidence.
C'est moi. https://utpress.utexas.edu/9781477321201/youre-with-stupid/
I periodically think about doing this. I actually don't use my phone for much: texts, calls, directions, and photographs are my primary use cases, all easily solved by other means. Maybe I should get myself a flip phone off the local buy nothing group and try it out for a week.
I don't understand how a person could live without a smartphone at this point when all of society operates as if you have a smartphone.
I barely use cellular data but without some basic stuff like Waze, Venmo, and texting (including pictures) I think my wife and friends would all get annoyed at me.
I'm living proof, it's possible! Not just possible, but eminently doable. I'm not just surviving, I'm thriving! Living my best life over here!
I do this as well, the caveat being that I keep an old one around for e-tickets for sporting events. I prefer my day-to-day existence with the feature-phone to what I had with the smartphone
Me too—I've never had one. I've had to upgrade flip phones a few times, and they're getting harder to find, but the one I have now can even be a wifi hotspot. So if I get desperately lost when traveling, as a last resort I can use it to get the internet on my laptop. Writing or printing out directions to places is the main hassle, but it's not a big deal.
I've done it and I was in my 20s at the time so not the typical "I've always had a flip phone and I can't fathom why anyone else doesn't!!" demographic. It's possible. It's very inconvenient, though, and I gave up after about a year. I miss my flip phone all the time but not being able to participate in group texts or call an uber ended up driving me crazy. I've found that a smartphone with no social media apps and no notifications except for texts and calls is a happy medium, if not my ideal situation.
Yep. That’s the only reason I ever got one. First my friends (gently!) let me know that I was being a dick because I didn’t have a phone, making getting in touch with me way harder than anyone else. So I got a flip phone and hated it. Then my job (not so gently!) told me to give them back their BlackBerry and get a fucking smart phone like everyone else. So I got one and hate it.
People don't quite get it, but until very recently, I did without a cell phone most of the time because we don't have cell service at our house. The iphones can use wifi for calling, but not android.
It was bothersome when people wanted to text me. Even if I explained that I wouldn't get the message, it didn't register.
But! it was all right. I'm not that important and bad news travels fast enough. My husband sometimes gets pissy about it, but too bad. I went for decades without ready accessibility, why change now?
You don't actually need one though.
The idea that everyone should be instantly 'reachable' is not practical or even healthy really. No one should have to be continuously linked to the net, humans aren't supposed to live with that level of social atomization.
My brother in Cali once chastised me for not answering my cell phone right away when family members called (he was on Mom's authority here). I told him I rarely carry it on me at home, I just check it for calls/texts a few times a night. He thought it was incredibly rude that I didn't have it on me at all times, "What if there's an emergency??" and all that. I reminded him that that's exactly how it was before cell phones - if you're not next to the landline when it rings, you're not going to answer it. So I treat my cell like a land line, and only answer it if a) it's next to me, b) I'm not busy, and c) I feel like talking right then.
Just because someone calls you doesn't mean you are obliged to immediately make time to talk right then, to me that's the rude part. If you set aside some time to call back, or set up a better time to chat for each other, then both parties are better off.
Besides, the natural world is infinitely much sweeter when your disconnected from the webz.
Your comment just made it occur to me properly for the first time that this ability to text one's status in going somewhere is probably contributing to our collectively becoming worse at being on time for things. (At least, I am much worse at this skill than I was brought up to be, and seem to be worsening every few years.)
As much I think this could be a great idea, having a smartphone really does seem like one of the requirements of a Minimum Viable Citizen at this point, at least for anybody employed in any remotely technical job.
I had a coworker once, and this was seven years ago and things have only gotten much, much worse since then (thanks COVID), who didn't have a smartphone. And we all kind of looked at him like "WTF is wrong with you?" So as much as we were all told to resist peer pressure as kids, it's a real thing and can be damaging to your career prospects. (It didn't help that the guy was deeply strange in a lot of other ways.)
I am trying to kick various social media addictions, but it does make me wonder what exactly defines "social media". I know, it's like trying to define pornography, we know it when we see it. Obviously, Twitter and Facebook are social media. I thankfully never got into Twitter and I managed to quit Facebook cold-turkey at the start of the pandemic; I've gone back to checking it once a day because some IRL social groups I've gotten involved with do most of their scheduling/coordination on FB. Importantly, though, I don't have the Facebook app on my phone. I recently got rid of the Instagram and TikTok apps from my phone, but couldn't get rid of YouTube because watching/listening to documentaries on that platform is the main way I relax/distract myself and has been for years. However, if you define "social media" as anything with the following properties:
1. You need a screen and an internet connection to consume it
2. The content is produced by individuals, not corporations
3. Other people are allowed to comment on it
it becomes hard for me to find much that interests me these days that doesn't fit that profile. This Substack blog that we're commenting on, for example, would fit. So would Reddit. So would YouTube.
Perhaps we need to add another clause:
4. Algorithmically-curated content
in which case, Substack and other blogs don't count (as long as you're following blogs based on human recommendations and not Substack's "Explore" page).
Anyway, it's hard. It's hard to quit the internet because so much, even meatspace things, depend on it these days. And for the same reason that it can be harder to quit overeating than it can be to quit smoking: you have to eat *something*, you can't just quit food cold turkey (or cold tofu for the vegans). And if you're an employed person in the West, you have to use computers and the internet to do your job, so the distractions are always there (I should be doing my job right now instead of writing this! I'm sorry, my employers, that some randos talking about 90's nostalgia is far more interesting to me than our product's latest feature request from sales and marketing.)
Sorry for the rambling reply to your comment. One more question: do you find that your non-use of a smartphone and/or social media causes any friction between you and your real-world friends and family? For example, are you "the person that we have to remember to call or e-mail directly if we want them to come to our party, because they're not in the group chat or won't see our Facebook invite"?
I'm in a technical job and I could easily get around this by using an old smartphone without a SIM for the two-factor authentication apps I need for my job, and keeping it in a drawer.
Took me a second, then I realized you're probably thinking a VoIP number with SMS support over WiFi.
I really should do burner VoIP #s for all this 2FA proliferation.
I have encountered essentially no meaningful problems going without a smart phone. I mean none.
I think your fourth point is the key, and what people really mean when they say "social media." I became Very Online as a depressed teenager in the early 2000s, and the old style BBSes, message boards, and webrings were very, very different from what Facebook and Twitter and the like have become. Even the upvote/downvoted system of Reddit distorts conversation; the old web couldn't do that. Information could only be read in the order it was posted, and if you didn't like something you were exposed regardless and had to choose to ignore it, just like real life. Most importantly, everyone saw and experienced the same thing, even if we experienced it asynchronously.
Algorithmic curation broke all of that and I think it's where online culture took a wrong a turn.
You gave a guy crap for not having a smart phone 7 years ago?? And here I thought they were only 5 years old or so lol.
You don't need it for any job, or at least you shouldn't. If a job does require one, then they should provide one for you. That's a personal device after all.
As for friend/family friction because you're not on social media...so what? If they can't handle you not being 'on' all the time, how strong are those relationships anyway?
Smartphones have been around for decades, but I would say they didn't become what we now know them as until the first iPhone, and that was almost 20 years ago, in 2007. Which is... terrifying.
My lord you're right! I guess I didn't know they were 'a thing' with the general public for so long now. Goes to show how much I've been in the proverbial dark I suppose lol.
1. We didn't actually say anything to the guy. And maybe everybody else on the team was like "whatever" and I'm the only judgemental prick who thought he was a weirdo for not having a smartphone. I probably wouldn't have thought much about it if it wasn't for that fact that, again, he was a deeply weird person. He didn't come off as being on the spectrum, but he definitely was either clueless about social norms, or completely uninterested in conforming with them.
2. Family/friend friction goes beyond being on social media or not; I'm thinking of things more like "my wife wants to text me and expects a reply" and I'd rather not have to go back to texting on a phone keypad. She's loving and supportive and I'm sure if I was really, really serious about not having a smartphone, she could learn to just call me instead if she needed to communicate.
But then I'd be the guy who has to duck out of meetings to take a phone call, or have a phone conversation on the train, instead of being able to just handle it over SMS.
Again, social norms, and motivation to conform to them. I'm pretty high on this, other people aren't. More successful people probably aren't, but I'm not all that interested in "success" if it means being "that guy".
An analogous story: in college/post-college there was a girl in one of my social circles who didn't have a car (while living off-campus in a very car-dependent city). I'm sure she had principled reasons for not having a car - environmental, political, financial, whatever - but the practical upshot was that if we wanted to include her in our activities (and we did - she was otherwise very nice, and we weren't assholes) we had to give her a ride. And I definitely thought at the time "she's having her cake and eating it too - she gets to feel smug about being car-free, but her lifestyle still depends on the internal combustion engine".
Basically, one of my few principles in life is "don't be a problem for other people if you can possibly help it."
"But then I'd be the guy who has to duck out of meetings to take a phone call, or have a phone conversation on the train, instead of being able to just handle it over SMS."
This part I wanted to comment on: why do you need to be reachable during a work meeting? Or anyone else? You're at work, it's their time not yours. If it's a work phone that makes perfect sense, as long as it's about work. But if it's your own phone not so much.
Personally I try and leave my cell in a drawer in my desk, don't carry it around with me, and only check it over lunch or scheduled breaks. Because I'm on company time, not my own.
As for the train scenario: I wouldn't consider texting to be a feature of smart phones, it predates that tech. Both calling and texting are features of any cell phone, not just smart ones.
I'm also on the side of folks saying it's damn near impossible, and not a reasonable expectation, to get by without a smartphone today. Or at least, you would have to have a very particular kind of profession and/or lifestyle to be able to live comfortably without one (e.g. be like my mother, who is retirement-age and whose social circles consist of other people who don't depend on smartphones).
I was recently discussing with some friends a very contentious situation in a major university's mathematics department where one (formerly highly respected) tenured faculty member had his salary reduced to $0 (see https://www.purdueexponent.org/campus/article_292fefc0-5c74-53fc-b5c9-63b3fde6f6af.html for a slightly biased summary). Combing through the full story, one key moment was the when the professor forgot to attend a class he was teaching, discovered his mistake when he got home, and then was unable to let his students know until the following day because he didn't have email at home (or any kind of internet connection at all, apparently?). And we were saying that yeah, making the initial mistake of missing one class might not have been a fireable offense after decades of being in good standing, but that combined with not being able to communicate with anyone maybe kind of is. If you don't have internet most of the time, perhaps you are living inexcusably behind the times for most jobs.
Not having a smartphone is obviously a good bit milder an issue than never having internet at all outside of one's office, but a similar principle holds, I think. That said, I'm all in favor of cutting down on using extraneous apps on smartphones, and Zack Morris, if you have the particular kind of job/lifestyle that makes it feasible to not have one entirely without risking problems, then more power to you!
I respectfully disagree with this. I just don't think being 'always instantly reachable' is a reasonable expectation for human beings, despite our day and age. I know lots of people with regular jobs and social lives who either don't own a smart phone (minority), or simply don't treat it like a mobile internet connection device that needs constant monitoring and interaction (majority). Jobs have actual phone calls or emails to use, same with friends/family. This need for instant contact is just strange to me. Maybe it's a 'non-coast' thing, I don't know...just throwing darts here.
Your professor story is unfortunate, I was quite appalled they actually fired him over a simple mistake like that. That was quite unfair...I mean what was lost here, an hour of students time? And why didn't he call the department office, couldn't they have someone step into the classroom to inform the students? This seems like something else was going on here.
The not having internet at home thing...broadband is not considered a general public service. If it was a communication method federally paid for like the postal service, then the professor would have no excuse here. But it's not, home internet is still a personal choice. And any job should not require you to be able to communicate with it, off the job, on your own dime...that's not how it's supposed to work. Realistically, I would argue all phone service should also be federal like the post office - I consider that basic public infrastructure but I'm guessing a lot would throw a fit at that.
In any case, if a job requires you to not be incommunicado when off work, then it's the employers job to supply the method for communication - i.e. company phone. This idea that anyone should use their personal devices for work is a really bad road to be going down.
I have able to achieve most of this while retaining the benefits of modernity using a simple strategy: moderation. I sometimes use social media like Facebook to keep track of people I know and see a little bit of what's going on with their lives. I look at it for a little bit, then stop and go on with my life. Rarely, maybe two or three times a week, I go to the comments section of an article and discuss issues that interest me with strangers. I don't Tweet.
I mostly use my smartphone to enhance activities that I was already doing before I got a smartphone. I listen to a lot of audiobooks while I do chores, my smartphone has really helped my reading. I'm also really glad to have started driving only a few years before navigation apps became widespread. But in general I don't use my smartphone that much, and when I do it's often to improve an activity rather than replace it (i.e. listen to a book while doing the dishes).
I understand moderation is harder for some people, but practicing it really can help people like me, who simultaneously enjoy new technology and miss the old days. It's really helped me find a happy medium where I can enjoy new technology the way I was meant to.
Also, I do like it when people text me that they're leaving their house. It lets me know if they are running late, and if I have time to start or finish something before they get here.
Don't use a driving app in the country. It can be dangerous. They'll send you down dirt roads that no longer exist or run you into a thriving pot farm blocking the road. Then you lose cell service and are really up shit creek.
So many of my friends and family have broken door bells that failure to send these texts would waste a ton of my time... I wonder if anyone else started sending those texts for the same reason?
I always frame this feeling as "I miss when the internet was a place we visited, not a place we inhabited."
We didn't land on the internet; the internet landed on us!
It's been September on the Internet since 1993.
I really wish you would have wrote that 90s book instead of Klosterman. This was so much better than any chapter in that book.
so weird I was listening to Klosterman on Conversations with Tyler podcast (from a year ago) this morning and wondering "huh, I wonder what FdB would think of this?"
That book is the Gen X take on the 90s; should be supplemented by an elder millennial.
I have nothing but fondness for the 90s. Back in '95, I was a divorced American living in the States and AOL was the only internet game in town. I entered a language chat room to practice my German and a nice person helped me out. Turned out he had a great sense of humour and he was (surprise, surprise) German. We exchanged emails, private chats on AOL messenger, and even texted each other per pager. We finally exchanged photos per snail mail. Telephone calls ensued. Then, much to the horror of my family, I visited him in Germany. We met, fell in love, and were married for 22 wonderful years until he died at age 54 and now I live alone in Germany. I will be forever thankful to the Internet for introducing me to my German, salsa-dancing mathematician husband.
That is a wonderful, fantastic story!
This is how the internet is supposed to work. Thank you for sharing this.
Beautiful, seriously. Bless.
What a beautiful story. I'm glad I had the fortune of finding this comment.
The 90s were awesome, indeed, but I actually graduated from high school in 1989, and although college was amazing, I spent most of my 90s working for some weird, unknown reason. There were quite a few wonderful moments nevertheless, but personally, my 30s (the 2000s) were better, even though the world was worse for affluent Americans. That decade is the one in which I met my wife and became a Dad.
Even in the early 90s, we still had the sense that earlier generations had partied harder and better than we had, and that the glory days of youth culture were not quite over, but they were ending. I can't imagine that young people felt that way in, say, the 60s and 70s.
I am of course aware that it's always this way, and that I really am romanticizing my youth, and that everybody feels like they just missed the good times. At the same time, there are things about that way of life that were better, and I want us to count the cost.
I am about 2 years younger than you and I can attest that we all thought those who were juniors and seniors when we were freshmen and sophomores had just a bit more freedom and fun than we did (personally I blame Columbine). Of course I have two brothers that are nearly 6 and 10 years younger than I am respectively and the world they grew up in really was a totally different planet.
Yeah. I’m four years younger than Freddie, and I remember school policies changed *while I was in high school* such that kids just a year or so older had more freedom than my year did for things like leaving campus for lunch, etc. And on the other side, I remember playing out in the yard and roaming the neighborhood without supervision when I was <10, and by the time I was baby-sitting in the late 90s, that was not the norm where I lived anymore.
I roamed the neighborhood without supervision in the 90s and early 2000s - in retrospect it was a transitional period where some of my friends had a lot of freedom and others were over-scheduled and helicopter-parented but neither parenting style was fully dominant. There were kids whose houses you could bike to and ring the doorbell to ask if they could come out and play and others whose moms had to schedule playdates a week in advance (my mom always laughed at the concept of a playdate). Sometimes those two families lived next door to each other. Those of us with more relaxed parents developed a healthy sense of independence and looked forward to adulthood and we felt awful for our friends whose parents wouldn't let them drive or get jobs. Even worse were the rare kids whose parents tracked their flip phones, which was considered unfathomably invasive at the time. I babysat a lot from 2005-2010 and the kids I babysat were almost universally helicoptered to a degree that would have shocked my own parents just a decade earlier. Not sure why the early 2000s were such a turning point for parenting - 9/11-induced anxiety maybe?
As parents of Gen Z kids, my wife, my close friends, and I explicitly tried to let our kids be as free range as possible when they were small in the mid-late 2010s. We live in San Francisco, and at 8 or 10, they could walk to multiple parks on their own to hang out with friends, and by 12 they were taking city buses all over town.
I am almost 10 years older than you, and I do not feel I just missed out on the good times. Quite the opposite.
I think that's because the 70s and 80s were still very culturally optimistic, lived the post civil-rights era, and then the Cold War ended. I had none of the hardships of those that came before me, and gained all the benefits of the work of predecessors.
The rollback of freedoms since 1991 in many countries has been difficult to watch. We now live in the best times for humans in history, yet there is so much unfinished business, and we risk losing the gains we once cherished. Bewilderingly, the west doubts its own towering endowments and achievements, and consumes itself mostly with irrelevancies. It feels like there are no more adults around.
To harken back to one of your posts a week or so ago, Dazed and Confused nailed this with the line about the girls in the grade ahead of you.
I wanted to hate this piece. I turned 11 in 1999, so I mostly associate the nineties with being bored, plus Britney Spears, N'Sync, and Limp Bizkit. But...yeah, I remember Going Places to Do Things. I remember feeling like the world I lived in was the world, and not some lame copy of a million other suburbs, unsatisfying because it's not the two or three cool places that have something original going on (except if I do more research, I'll realize even those places are copying some other place). I get it.
Also, I had the too small Dodge (Plymouth, actually, in my case) Neon, and was in my school's production of Arsenic and Old Lace.
Yes. A bit earlier, in the mid-80s, I spent a couple of years living and traveling in South America, and God, was it a different world. I'd call home once a month so my parents knew I was alive and kicking (calls were $3-5 a minute, and I was living on $5 a day, so once a month was it), and there was something wonderful about the complete freedom of no one I knew knowing where I was on any given day. (I was 23/24 then and oblivious; now as a parent I look back and I can't believe my parents had to go through that, but that was life then, and we all took it for granted.) You'd meet other travelers and spend the night talking, and then you's shake hands and say, "have a good life," and mean it, because there was no way to stay in touch beyond that (yes, you could exchange mailing addresses, but no one was going to write). Today I have two girls, 18 and 3, and I am sad that they will never know that level of freedom. So yes, I am old, etc., and some things are better now, but others were definitely better then.
Give your daughters that freedom. It takes effort, and it's worthwhile. My four children are 9 to 16, and it's the best gift you can give them. The resiliency of my children is starkly greater than their peers, because of it.
Agreed! Whenever we are outside, my 3 -year-old (she will be 3 at the end of the month) often walks 10-20 feet ahead of us, and almost never looks back. The world is hers to explore. We are just there to support her. (People in NYC respond in fun and funny ways when they see a toddler walking confidently towards them, but so far, so good.)
The best thing I ever did was let my kids roam all day, until dinner, by age 6.
As I was allowed to do.
It's hard, because few other kids are allowed to do that any more, so it requires conscious parental decisions, rather than occurring organically. It helps if inside isn't as attractive because you don't have screens (home office excepted).
The three keys for us have been:
A) teaching them to be outside, all day, even when it's -20C. (~5 F). This was formerly an 'automatic' skill, now it needs to be consciously taught.
B) giving them boredom, so they learn to cope with it, and use it to their advantage
C) not allowing cell phones until at least 15. Minimize parental use around children too.
Kids aren't just physically healthier for this, but mentally healthier too. Anxiety in teenagers is through the roof, and our techno-society changes are the only rational explanation.
This pays dividends later on. On her break between semesters last week, my 15 year old daughter and her friends slept in snow structures they built and didn't see any adults for 3 days.
Those girls come from families that will never get them into expensive colleges. But they will own the world.
Nitpick: -20C = -4F, not 5F. A much colder temperature than has ever been recorded in the history of the city I grew up in, so not an allowance my parents had to consider making.
In general, within a reasonable margin of safety, I think it's great for young people to be forced to interact with the outside world in a greater range of temperatures. I've definitely noticed a relative lack of tolerance for diversity of climates among folks who grew up in very temperate areas.
You're right. My conversion to Fahrenheit was better in the '90s too!
My locale gets below -30C, so -20C is a common (winter) occurrence. In a generation or two, most youth have gone from being out in it all day, to not being able to be out for more than half an hour. Many families, despite being able to afford the clothes, simply don't buy them.
It's hard for me to separate nostalgia from a cold-hearted assessment of the present age. But for me, the thing I hate the most about the present time is the hyper-politicization of every goddamn thing under the sun. Why does every single opinion or speech act or piece of art have to be coded left or right now? It's the height of dumbassery.
The gas stove discourse was the thing that nearly pushed me to live in the woods.
Might as well use red font for your post, Eric! :]
It's probably yet another curse of the internet. People have no real connection to each other and get sucked into the magic box as a placebo, and before they know it, they care about shit they don't care about.
re: email. I'm a little older than you and there was this beautiful time, between 1993 and 1996 or so, when everybody got an email account for the first time. And it was magnificent! There were no stamps to buy and delivery was instant. And without any other paradigm for electronic communication, people wrote each letters. The letters! I've archived my email over the years and the emails I received from friends in this period were just magnificent: witty, informative and full of enthusiasm for the new medium.
Now email is a vaguely oppressive source of work angst. And no current form of interpersonal electronic communication remotely comes close.
Also, important emails get buried under junk. I have over 25,000 unread emails in my inbox, and looking at it feels like I'm floating in that garbage patch in the ocean. People gotta make moneeeeeyyyyyyy, I get it.
It is uncontroversially true that the best videogames of all time all came out in the 1990s (especially if we count Mario 3's US release rather than its Japanese release).
Whereas now, as Hot Dad sings, even Mario is no longer innocent!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kj1gWsuiCAY
You write about how the US was the seat of capitalism and empire, and it was and is, but the 90s feeling is inextricably tied up with the end of the Cold War. Really, the end of a century of war. The 90s were not a good time for Russians, and they were great for Americans. Everyone got their share of the peace dividend, mostly psychologically and culturally.
Not a good time for (soon to be former) Yugoslavs, Somalis, Iraqis, Algerians,or Rwandans either. And incidentally, the 90s were also the first great heyday of global jihadism, the birth of Al-Qaeda etc. Mohamed Atta was burning with rage in Hamburg while Americans and Europeans celebrated the End of History.
Actually now when I think about the '90s, can't help but see all the dark shit seething in the background that would explode in the next three decades.
Jihadism, far-right extremism (Oklahoma City 1995), runaway corporate greed fuelled by cheap credit, and the first stirrings of 'online culture' (though this was genuinely more benign at the time)