I had to choose just one decade in order to create a slightly less lengthy title…but I find it easy to say that romancing the late 70s, 80s, 90s, and early 2000s would be by far the most accurate. Why? Because those were some of the best decades to be young and alive. I lived them, and am forever grateful to have been one of the “lucky ones”. (And yes, I mean romancing and not romanticizing…because so many of us are actively still very much in love with what we had.)
I’ve noticed within the Gen X collective lately that we are all in a deep state of nostalgia…maybe even melancholy. Social media has thrust us deep into reminders of the music we listened to, the fashion we wore, the cult and pop favorites we all partook in in a series of reels and videos reminiscing about “the good ol’ days”…and man, were they good. So, so good. Even Gen Z kids are posting videos playing the music we grew up with and asking “Was it as awesome to be alive back then as it seems?” Yes, kids. It really was.
I watched a video recently in which a college aged girl waxes and wanes poetic on how incredible it must have been to attend University in the 90s. I watched this on repeat, commented that it certainly was, and of course, reposted for my fellow Gen Xers to see…because it really struck me how even kids now yearn for what we had. We were the last to live in a world that felt free. We were free from the trappings of social media and location services. We were untethered. We lived our experiences in the moment …raw, real, unfiltered and without the need to let the world know a darn thing about us or what we were doing.
We took photos to remember the people, places and things we loved…not to create grids of highlight reels for the consumption of strangers. Photos we often didn’t even know would turn out because sometimes film went bad, lighting was nonexistent, or the local Photo Mat would mess up our order. (Like the photo I took of the infamous P.Diddy in Monte Carlo on my 25th birthday that the Photo Mat clerk thought was underexposed and didn’t include in my order…..I made him reprint it though!).
We took in concerts and festivals through our actual eyes instead of through our screens. I often think how much it would suck to have to worry about loosing or breaking a smartphone while moshing or just dancing with the kind of wild abandon we were the last to experience.
We had incredible music across all genres, our fashion was curated by us and not an algorithm, we lived more for ourselves and less for the virtual-Joneses, we learned complete and total independence at much earlier ages, we traveled by way of huge maps that never quite folded back to their original state (until MapQuest came around!), we had to trust our instincts, and sometimes strangers, because we couldn’t just Google our way out of situations, we didn’t care about Botox, filler, or anything anti-aging (heck most of us didn’t even wear sunscreen!). St. Ives Apricot Scrub and Seabreeze reigned supreme.
Our movies, TV shows, music videos, and even commercials had an element of whimsy and distinctiveness that is sorely missing now. We hadn’t yet quite stepped into the cookie-cutter-art that is so prevalent today. I was a college kid in the early 90s in the Pacific Northwest surrounded by an explosion of music, art, and creativity that could never be duplicated today. To say I miss this…is an understatement. To wish my kids could experience this….also an understatement.
We were the last to experience total freedom. We had to forge friendships without apps, memorize phone numbers (lots of them), and make plans without group chats…and you know what? We flaked out less on those last minute plans to “meet by the fountain at 10:00 pm” than the long planned out 175 message long group chats with a location pin that exist today. I suppose when everything is digitized, including our plans and our communication, it makes it a lot easier to just not show up. We left a bit of our humanity behind when we crossed the bridge from analog to digital lives.
We had our issues…I won’t romanticize things so much that I ignore this…but we had a different level of teen/young adult angst than kids to now because we were simply not exposed to the problems of the world on a 24/7/365 rotation. We knew what was happening in our communities, maybe whatever current event was on the six o’clock news, and then we moved on to creating the next best mixtape. We didn’t have to stare at a device in our hands that incessantly tells us that our country, our world, our everything was doomed. We got to be young and alive without the nihilism so many kids are exposed to today…and we wonder why the state of our youth’s mental health is what it is now…
We learned to fight battles and set boundaries in person. If we didn’t like something or someone, we would have to communicate face-to-face….no subtweets, cryptic Instagram notes, online bullying, or keyboard warrior-ing. If you wanted to be a shitty person, you had the freedom to do so, but you’d risk your teeth and certainly couldn’t hide behind your iPhone or desktop to show your true colors.
We also got to be as insouciant as we wanted to be without the fear of being filmed and uploaded for posterity. Life without a digital footprint was sweet. We created memories for ourselves…not for the world’s validation or judgement.
So, yes….romancing the 90s (and 70s, 80s, early 2000s) is valid. For us Gen X, and some elder Millenials, it’s like yearning and mourning all at once for what we had, who we were, and what the world was. We all knew life would change as we became adults and took on the responsibilities thereof…but what we didn’t know is just how much everything around us would actually change. Yeah, maybe we envisioned flying cars or some of the cool contraptions the Jetsons had entering our daily lives, but I don’t think we realized that we would move from analog to digital in the blink of an eye, and that we would become so divided and disconnected by a little box we hold in the palm of our hands as if hermetically sealed there. Maybe we mourn and yearn for these decades because we really grew up with the best of everything, and I suppose you can’t go up much higher than that.
So, while we can’t relive the past, I am loving the nostalgia that comes across my feed every day. It’s a beautiful thing….just wish we could’ve savored it for a little bit longer while we were living it.
….and if any of you have a DeLorean sitting in an old garage somewhere….maybe let’s try firing it up?
