Questions for Baby Boomer and Gen X Dopers - about the '90s

In My Humble Opinion
1

Hey,

This is a question for anyone who was at least 16 and above in 1990. Please state your age at the dawn of the 1990s. I was 0 years old as of November 1990.

My questions are aimed squarely at Baby Boomers and Gen Xers among us for the sake of posterity.

  1. Do you miss the 1990s, or have any nostalgia for it overall? My parents, who are both 65 miss the 90s, as do my sisters (who are 48 and 47).

  2. For both Baby Boomers and Gen X-Ers, how did you view at the time, and how do you view in retrospect:

-The Early 90s, encompassing 90-92 (GHW Bush, Hair Metal, Grunge, R&B, Vanilla Ice, Parachute Pants, dominance of the NES in 90-91, followed by the dominance of the Sega Genesis from 92 onward,Ruby Ridge, Waco)

-The Mid 90s 93-97 (First Clinton term, Whitewater, Grunge, Post Grunge, Rap, Skeet Ulrich, X-Files, multimedia explosion, OJ Simpson Trial, Sega’s dominance until early 1996, Sega 32X, PlayStation 1, Jurassic Park, Nintendo 64, Sega Saturn, other consoles like the Atari Jaguar and Phillips CDi, Macarena, first flip phone available in 1996, Pop Punk, Ska in 96-97)

-The Late 90s 98-99 (Second Clinton term, Lewinsky scandal, Rap-Rock, NuMetal, Industrial, Rap, Columbine, The Matrix, Playstation and N64)

What do you remember about each of those parts of the decade? Which stands out the most? What do you remember of the aesthetics?

  1. What is one thing you miss about the 1990s? What is one thing you don’t miss?

  2. How easy was getting a job in the 1990s as compared to today?

  3. Were the 90s a generally boring decade for Baby Boomers?

  4. Was there truly a big generation gap in the early 90s between Boomers and Gen X?

  5. What did you think of the technological leaps and bounds of the decade? Where did you think we would be technologically now?

  6. Overall, for Baby Boomers, did you see the 90s as a time of hope and optimism, or a cynical and pessimistic era? The same question goes for Gen X.

  7. What did you make of the rise of shows like Sally Jesse Raphel, The Jerry Springer Show, and other social television shows?

  8. What did you think of the general aesthetic of cars, furniture and clothes in the early, mid and late 90s?

  9. Are there any other things about the 90s which you’d like to tell me about that I haven’t mentioned? - I was 9 when the decade ended

2

Damn. Just missed the cutoff. I was 15 in 1990.

3

I was in my early 30s in 1990. I had a great decade. As 1990 broke, I was still a Peace Corps Volunteer in northern Thailand. Returning to the US, I had a blast living in Albuquerque for 15 months until I was accepted to grad school on a scholarship here in Hawaii. So I got to live here in Hawaii for 2-1/2 years, meeting my future Thai wife, also a student here. Then moving back to Thailand, living in Bangkok when the bar scene was just about at it’s height, thought of by many old-timers today as a Golden Age. In short, the 1990s were a Fucking Awesome Time for me personally.

4

I’m among the oldest of the Generation X cohort; I was 25 in 1990. (Were I born 3 months earlier, I would have been among the very youngest Baby Boomers.)

Somewhat. Mostly, what I miss is that it was, generally, a more optimistic time. The once we got past the early 1990s, the economic was growing like gangbusters. And, once the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact ended, and it was difficult to conceive that there would be another rival or threat to the U.S. and NATO.

OK, there is a metric crap-ton of different things in there.

  • In music, it was the first time, since I really started listening to music in the mid '70s, that a lot of what was popular (such as grunge) didn’t appeal to me.
  • Economically, we had a recession in the early '90s, and there was, at that time, the feeling that the '90s were going to be more austere than the '80s had been. That recession, and the mood of the country, was what made GHW Bush a one-term president.
  • I had an NES, and played it to death in the early '90s, but it was the last video game system I had in that decade.
  • The economy had turned around, and we had a long expansion, which led some people to wonder if recessions were a thing of the past (hint: they weren’t).
  • The Simpson trial was an utter and complete media circus for many months, and dominated the news.
  • Cell phones were becoming something that more people had; I got my first cell phone in '95 or so. But, at that time, most people had limited call minutes, so I didn’t use it often, or to talk for long.
  • This was the period in which people really started getting online in large numbers. The internet was a brave new world.
  • The Macarena quickly became “a dance that your grandparents do at your wedding.” :wink:
  • Skeet Ulrich??? OK, I know who he is, and while he was in a couple of popular films at that time, he wasn’t the lead actor in those films. He was never in the top tier of actors or celebrities.
  • What I said about the Simpson trial above is pretty much what the Clinton/Lewinsky situation was in the late '90s. It absolutely consumed the news for many months.
  • As a Star Wars fan, I was hugely excited by the release of The Phantom Menace in '99. It took a few viewings of it for me to realize that, yeah, it wasn’t a good movie at all.
  • The Matrix was amazing and groundbreaking.
  • Columbine was shocking and heartbreaking.
  • Also, at the end of the decade, the Y2K bug was something that a lot of money got spent to fix, and there was a fair amount of fear that computer systems might simply stop working on 1/1/2000. As it turned out, there were no widespread issues, because so much time and money got spent on fixing it.

I miss the optimism. I don’t miss dial-up internet.

Difficult at the beginning of the decade, due to the recession. Likely a lot easier for many people in the mid-to-late '90s.

You didn’t have online job tools, so it was a very different kind of thing (ads in newspapers and magazines, headhunters, etc.), but I’m not at all sure that the fact that so much of it is done online now makes it actually any easier to find a job.

No idea.

I’m not sure if it was exactly a “generation gap,” but there was the sense that Boomers had an outsized influence on culture, and the country in general.

Between cell phones and the internet, it did change a lot from the beginning to the end of the decade. I wouldn’t have had a clue what tech would be like today.

See above. Optimistic, on the whole.

Trashy and exploitative, and I never watched them.

Hard for me to delineate early-mid-late. Cars became more aerodynamic, and as a result, they started to all look kind of the same. I never paid much attention to styles in furniture, and I’m about the last person to talk to about fashion.

5

To add to that, since the OP asked to divvy up the decade: First couple of years, Thailand and Albuquerque. Then Hawaii to 1994. Then Bangkok from 1994 onward. I never knew a lot of that social and tech crap at all, I was too busy studying or running around Southeast and East Asia and Nepal. Heard about OJ Simpson and a few of the other items mentioned, but seeing as I had no TV stateside and there was no real news coverage in Thailand, all of that rated only mentions buried in the inside pages of the Thai newspapers. The '90s really rocked.

6

People didn’t ask so many questions in the 90s. I miss that.

7

I graduated from high school in 1992; joined the army in 1993; started college in 1996; and got married in 1998. So it was an eventful decade. I kissed a girl for the first time, fired a lot of weapons, backpacked across Europe, lost my virginity, met my soul mate, honeymooned in London and Paris. Hell yes I miss the 1990s. I miss being young and thin and with nothing but my future.

I also miss the music.

8

By the 90s, most of my friends, lovers and acquaintances were dead from AIDS. It was a very lonely decade for me.

9

Boomer here, born 1954.

  1. I don’t miss the 1990s one bit.

It was an eventful decade for me - got married, got my PhD, got a potentially permanent professorship and decided it wasn’t for me, and near the end of the decade, finally fell into my long-term career as a government statistician - but it was hard.

Studying for and surviving my comprehensive exams was hard. Then I had a long stretch of little progress towards my dissertation, and that was worse. Had one good year as the dissertation results finally came together, and I wrote them all up in TeX. Five years of teaching with a heavy course load at a small, struggling Christian college in the middle of nowhere was exhausting; practically had a nervous breakdown in my second year there. (And the isolation was far more intense back in those pre-Internet days.) Seriously, fuck the '90s. Fuck 'em hard, with blunt instruments.

  1. I was oblivious to most of the cultural stuff the OP mentions. I was living in Columbia, SC for the first year and a half of the decade, then in Florence, SC for two years, then in Bristol, VA for five years. And I’ve never been much of a TV-watcher, so when you don’t watch TV and you spend most of the decade in small towns, seeing the larger world through the local newspapers, only the really big things get through to you.

  2. I’m racking my brain for something I miss about it, and drawing a blank.

  3. Harder in the ‘jobless recovery’ of the early 1990s, and a lot easier in the late 1990s.

5,6) No thoughts here.

  1. The Internet, even in its earliest iterations, was a godsend. Hell, I wouldn’t have even known about the job opening that pulled me into stats work for the government if it hadn’t been for the Web. But even without that, it helped me reconnect with the larger world and with friends in other places.

  2. Pessimistic early, optimistic towards the end.

9, 10, 11) No thoughts here either.

10

The 90s were a blur for me. I started my second marriage in 1990. (the first lasted only from 1987 to 1988) We had a kid born in 1991 and one in 1994. By the end of the decade I was divorced again (not entirely my fault this time), had changed jobs four times, had started a business that boomed and then busted. It was an era of a start ups and IPOs, and a lot of people thought they were going to get rich. Some did, I suppose. I didn’t have time for TV or music (other than Barney and the Disney Chanel).

By 1999 my ex had the house and the car, I had a used Torus and lived in a rental house and saw my kids every other week.

So, I can’t think of anything I miss about the 1990s. There were certainly some good times and some interesting events, but none I attribute to “the 90s.” It would have probably been the same in any other decade. I will say that since then things have gone quite well.

ETA I was 29 when the decade began.

11

I was 39.

I have some nostalgia for being younger and more energetic; but it’s not for the 90’s in particular.

Most of that I paid no attention to whatsoever; or, at most, noticed vaguely in passing.

I was opposed to Bush, and disappointed in Clinton, in particular in that he gave the Republicans an opening to try to make his presidency about his sex life. I thought both Ruby Ridge and Waco were badly mishandled.

I miss the cats I had then, my mother, and having a couple of people I knew at the time in the same country as I am, so that I could see them.

I don’t miss trying to allocate a phone bill among a batch of people who had made long-distance calls to various places; some of them to some of the same phone numbers.

I wasn’t looking for one. My impression is that it depended on when in the decade you meant.

Generally? I’ve no idea. I haven’t been bored since I took up farming. Overworked, harried, frustrated, sometimes confused, and broke; but never bored.

I think these things are always blurry at the edges.

I wasn’t paying much attention to the technological leaps and bounds of the decade; the results of most of them didn’t start to become apparent to me until the 2000’s. And I don’t think I spent a lot of time wondering where we’d be technologically in thirty years; though I probably assumed that we’d have gotten further with space exploration and habitats.

I think most of it seemed more optimistic than now.

I wasn’t watching them. From what I heard of them I thought they were probably silly, but not necessarily sillier than a lot of other television shows.

Again, I wasn’t paying much attention. I like older furniture; it’s often better made, and it’s more likely to be made for people somewhere nearer my height. I like my clothes comfortable. I like my cars to stop, go, and turn when I need them to do so.

Was it in the 90’s that cars started to be designed for aerodynamics more than for looks, and therefore to mostly look like each other? I can’t remember.

I think that by the 90’s it was getting more acceptable, at least in the USA, to wear nearly anything out in public; which I thought was an improvement; though it’s an improvement which probably started by the 70’s. – were extremely baggy pants worn half falling off the 90’s? I thought those looked silly. But then, I think a lot of fashion looks silly. And again, none of this is linked in my head to the 90’s in particular, and I may have it in the wrong decade entirely.

12

Gen-X. Fashion made girls look about as bad as possible in the early 90’s - an unpardonable sin. German reunification made me nervous. The end of the nuclear threat was great. Life was fairly simple: just make as much money as you can. Entertainment was getting better towards the end of the decade (Sopranos 1999). Grunge music was an improvement over insipid pop, but the look was fughly.

13

21 in 1990. I’m mobile at the moment, so this will be shorter than I’d like.

I fondly remember the 90s, not so much from a cultural perspective, but because it was the era where I was wrapping up college and entering the real world. I was young, energetic, and I had lots of friends unencumbered by family, career, health, or other demands. I didn’t have a lot of money, especially in the first half of the decade, but I also had few expenses, so I’d go out and hang out in bars, coffee shops, cafes, music venues, etc almost every night. Sleep was for the weak.

Any fondness I have For the music, movies and other cultural things from that time period is because I was having a kickass time and everything benefits from that aura.

14

You realize that you’re leaving out about half of Gen X when you ask for only people at least 16 in 1990, right? The youngest members of Gen X were born in the early 80s.

15

I turned 36 in January of 1990. Apart from the 2 moves we made that decade and getting a different job, I don’t have any particular memories, and no nostalgia to speak of. I didn’t pay a lot of attention to politics back then, nor did I follow popular music. There was nothing really special about that time.

16

The only reason I picked 16…it was arbitrary. I guess 13 or above would be fairer. it’s just if you’re say…10, 11, you can remember a decade to a degree but not necessarily how it was, in the big picture, you know? I was 11 when the war on terror began. I just remember it was scary…Not the wider context.

17

Bangkok also had quite a bar scene in the mid '70’s. The US had just pulled its thousands of troops out of Vietnam and the thousands of bar girls that had “serviced” the US Military on R&R, for the most part, didn’t go home to the farm. The Atlantic Hotel was ground zero, but every bar and street corner was packed with girls desperate to make a baht. Already reasonable “prices” nose dived.

18

This. I can’t really answer the OP because I was focused on this sort of thing, not pop culture.

19

I was born in 1957. And I don’t miss the 90’s. I enjoyed them for the most part but my parents died young in the 90’s. I was also just starting to recover from 7+ years of addiction by mid 1990

All a fucking bunch of bullshit to me, dealing with recovery and work and young kids loss of parents

My fitness level. My early recovery years (which always are tough).

Once I had my medical license back, jobs were easy to get. Just like today

I was a lot of things, but not bored.

I still am not sure who the fuck generation X is, exactly.

I was constantly quoting Future Shock to people. I still hoped for flying cars and jetpacks by now, though. But I did not envision pocket phone/cam/computer/media center/etc.

I recognized quickly that, even after the evil empire fell, people were still people and that wasn’t going to change.

Never watched 'em.

Didn’t give a damn.

The 90’s were just another road sign on the treadmill to oblivion.

20

Damn my gun barrel is getting rusty after reading this post.