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

In My Humble Opinion
21

I’m 33, but I’m going to go ahead and weigh in here anyway.

These aren’t even my own words. It’s a verbatim quote from some random person who commented on the Youtube video for the song “The Freshman” by The Verve Pipe. But it sums up my feelings perfectly.

That comment stuck with me so much the first time I saw it, that it’s my go-to 90s reference whenever this topic comes up. Particularly the part about the amazing new technology, but it not controlling us yet. As a kid, I watched computers go from pathetic MS-DOS black screens, 100% text-based interface, to Windows 98 and vivid colors and totally intuitive interaction. I watched computer games go from “Zork” to Quake. Nobody raised on modern computer/video games can possibly understand how Quake blew kids’ minds.

At the same time, despite this technology becoming pervasive, we still rode around on our bikes and had ‘adventures’ in the neighborhood just like the kids in E.T. We were not sequestered inside our rooms on the internet or stuck in mobile devices when out and about in the world. There was still a high degree of social interaction and situational awareness.

22

Wait. You’re 33 and you did Zork? Really? I mean, Zork III would have been five when you were born. I’m surprised when you came of computing age that Zork was even a thing. I was born in 1975, and when I was growing up, Zork was starting to get passé.

23

I attended a private elementary school that had many computers and numerous adult teachers who were gamers, so I witnessed these older games frequently even though I myself was only interested in games with graphics.

24

I turned 14 in 1990.

I certainly miss being young and not having this growing stiffness, growing waistline, and these wrinkles in my forehead.

How much of this was youthful naivete but you felt like the Soviets were beat, the budget was balanced, technology was growing exponentially, jobs were plentiful, the United States had all bad actors in the world under control, and there were nothing but good times ahead.

There was certainly a generational gap between me and my Boomer parents. But they seemed to be doing well with it and enjoyed the 90s as well. I never really got into the grunge scene, but listened to it when it came on the radio.

I do miss having a cell phone for my own personal convenience and not something that was expected by everyone to be tethered at my hip at all times. If I didn’t feel like talking with someone, then hey, I was at the mall, at my girlfriend’s, at the movies, at whereverinthefuck my phone wasn’t at. Email was the same. It was there for me to use, but if I didn’t check it for a week, well, my modem broke and I had to go get a new one.

I looked at shows like Springer as trash, and most people I knew did.

As far as aesthetics of cars and furniture, I thought the future had arrived. And way more reliable than the shitty cars of the 80s. I was in the tech field, so my pay kept increasing so I didn’t go to any of 2 or 3 other jobs that would have hired me on the spot.

Then 9/11 came. And I started aging slowly.

25

Kick boxing, sport of the future.
27

TV got much better in the 90s, but I didn’t notice til Netflix let me look back

For me, the 90s was the first decade that didn’t have a particular look or feel. Imho, ymmv, etc

I wasn’t as optimistic as I was in 84, but generally speaking, everything was working fine for me.

26

Born in Dec 1970, so I was in college in 1990. I was a witness and not a participant for most of the cultural touchstones you mention of the era, like “hair metal”, “parachute pants”, etc. And inasmuch as I miss the 1990s, it’s that I miss being in my 20s.

If you offered me a portal to step back to 1995 as I am right now, I would certainly take a visit to the old neighborhood, but I would not move there (assuming time travel paradox stuff is ruled out, like giving my past self stock tips or lottery numbers that would affect me in the modern time, or trying to prevent the WTC attacks of 1993 and 2001, or fixing the Mets… Scratch that last one, not even a TARDIS could help to fix the 1990s Mets).

The thing that stands out in retrospect about the 1990s is that there was a certain combination of optimism and cynical pessimism. The Cold War was over, but there was a recession going on in the US and the death of US industry was well under way. I remember a fair amount of talk that global corporations would replace local governments in influencing the next century of human history, as actual bang-bang, kapow-kaboom warfare would be replaced by economic warfare because large scale violence was too expensive/disruptive.

I don’t think many people envisioned the rapid changes in technology and the feedback loop we’ve seen in terms of how it’s affected society. That doesn’t mean I’d give any of it up; everything that’s happened I could or would have believed could happen, except for the easy, wireless availability of high bandwidth data connections.

I was someone who was quite involved in playing with new tech at the time, and working as a computer programmer, and what I assumed would hold things back was the lack of bandwidth. Even as CPU power and memory kept getting faster and cheaper, there was no significant user base in 1995 demanding high data bandwidth in areas where I personally thirsted for it (playing online games or downloading binary data).

I remember wondering, it’s too bad that AT&T won’t invest billions of dollars in improving affordable broadband technology, because where is the consumer demand for it? Who builds infrastructure BEFORE demand, unless they’re in the business of providing things that would then immediately use that infrastructure, which AT&T and other telecomm companies were not?

In 1995 I had an ADSL modem connection, using two phone lines at the same time, that was 10x faster and much more stable than using the fastest (copper-wire, ordinary telephone line based) modems. I loved it. But it was expensive, special-use technology that was paid for by my job, so I could log in and work effectively from home in supporting a 24 hour trading system for a major Wall Street firm - there was no way that I, as a 24 year old just three years out of college, would have justified getting that technology on my own dollar (especially holding a less well-paid job, like my first job out of college).

I underestimated the impact of AOL like companies “bringing the Internet to the people”. What had been the domain of highly educated or technically sophisticated geeks and gamers rapidly became, well, dumbed down, sped up, and glitzified for eye appeal and ease of use. It was the foot in the door. All advances in bandwidth were quickly leveraged to provide better, larger video and sound quality, which grew consumer demand for more bandwidth; and the 24-hour Internet changed the world of commerce, once enough people were online.

And then once an Internet-enabled lifestyle rapidly became standard, there would be a clear demand for having that lifestyle mobilized with cellular data bandwidth.

27

…

28

I was 20 in 1990, 3 years away from graduation, at which point I met the recession, and took a job that probably held back my career for a decade (it was all I could get in my field).

That’s the worst of it, the 90s improved dramatically the further in.

1994 I bought a house (at a horrendous 10% interest rate), and got married.

Mid 90s I was genuinely worried that Apple was going bust - I’m a designer, Macs were all I knew how to use, and things were NOT looking good. It wasn’t the iPod that saved us, it was the colourful iMac.

97 Tony Blair became PM, Brit Pop was riding high, and the world looked rosy.

1999 my marriage broke up when I came out as a lesbian. A tough period but oh so right in the grand scheme of things. At the same time I sold my house in London (£215k) - saw it for sale recently, I couldn’t even begin to afford to buy it back thanks to crazy house inflation (it’s now over £750k).

All-in-all the 90s was great. Don’t miss the bright orange I painted my living room and the bright lime I painted my stairwell.

29

I was 20 in 1990.

  1. I don’t have any nostalgia for the 1990s in general

  2. I felt 90s music stank, with the possible exception of a few grunge bands and the garage acts I was seeing locally. I had a Sega Genesis for about eight months that I bought used, and later swapped it. Had no other video game systems. Don’t know who “Skeet Ulrich” is or was. Vanilla Ice was always a joke, even in the 90s.

  3. I miss the alt-comics scene of the 90s. I don’t miss the fashions or the general nature of 90s pop culture, which was cover everything in fluorescent day-glo colors, spike everything, and label everything “extreme” in all caps. EXTREME!!!

  4. I never had trouble getting jobs, both in the 90s and later. My secret? Showing Up and Not Being An Idiot.

  5. Baby Boomers spent the 90s doing what they did in the 80s, which was reminding everybody how great the 1960s were. If they find that boring, they should stop.

  6. see above; if you’re constantly reminding everybody how great Woodstock was and how stupid you are for liking Nirvana, well, there’s gonna be a gap.

  7. by the end of the 1990s we were basically where we are now - cell phones, internet, email, people hollering at each other on message boards. Things got more portable. Grandma now gets on Facebook to spread gossip instead of telephoning people all day.

  8. the 90s were seen as the end of history, the cold war was over, we won, we could sit back and relax and enjoy the “peace dividend”. Didn’t work out that way.

  9. I ignored the hell out of Sally Jesse Raphael, The Jerry Springer Show, and the rest of their ilk.

  10. Cars turned into boring rounded blobs, clothes got distressed and stone-washed within an inch of their lives, and if there are any trends in furniture that typify the 90s, I am unaware of them.

  11. to me it felt like video games assumed greater importance in the last half of the 1990s, the Playstation really seemed to be what kicked it back into pop culture. I never saw a Atari Jaguar, a Philips CDI, a Sega Saturn or a 32X, whatever that was. Adults in the 90s didn’t really care about video games, it wasn’t a part of our lives as a whole. “Video games” meant the Atari 2600 we played when we were kids or the coin op games we played in the arcades, before the arcades all vanished. Now, of course, you can’t escape games or gamer culture.

30

Well, since you ask so nicely…

  1. I turned 21 during 1990, in August.

  2. Do I miss the 1990’s? You bet. For me it was a time of great energy and personal achievements, trying new things, moving and traveling around the country, even traveling abroad. I finished my undergrad and got a master’s degree.

Because of the level of interesting and new activities, I’d say my parents (slightly older than Boomers) also enjoyed the 1990s.

  1. Now, granted, the early 1990s were a bit of a mess, as we were having this Gulf War and the economy was starting to implode. The reason I went to get my master’s degree was because of the recession. But after the recession lifted, and the “peace dividend” of the end of the cold war was starting to be felt, it was the start of a period of good times that lasted until the bubble burst in the early 2000s. I traveled abroad a fair amount between 1995 and the end of the decade, which I have not been able to do since then.

Yes, the OJ thing was a big scandal and was mildly entertaining. The Monica Lewinsky scandal was also a slow-moving, demoralizing trainwreck.

As far as pop culture was concerned, I largely ignored the new wave of reality tv, as I was not watching much TV, starting from the 1990s. (The last TV I watched was ST-TNG and Twin Peaks. I stopped soon thereafter.)

As for popular music, I never was one to go with the crowd. I did notice, however, that actual melodic singing seemed to be going back into style, which to my ears sounded a lot nicer than hard rock / screeching which seemed popular at the height of the cold war.

  1. What did I miss? Well, it felt relatively safe, economically as well as existentially. There were fewer apocalyptic threats hanging over peoples’ heads. Cold war? Over. End of the world thanks to inaction on global warming? Hadn’t reached peoples consciousness yet. The worry was there, but much more low grade.

One thing I did not miss: The space industry was pretty much Kaput. I grew up in the afterglow of Apollo, and got my master’s degree in Aerospace. In the 1990s, and even into the 2000s, there was hardly anything to do. New aircraft programs? Too expensive. Spacecraft and rockets? Nope. Not until the reins were handed over to the likes of SpaceX in roughly 2008 did we see any meaningful growth in that area. So, I was not able to have the career I wanted in the 1990s and 2000s, but I went back to academia to get my PhD in Aerospace so I can help teach the next generation, who WILL finally have some work to do in this area.

  1. Getting a job? Early decade, forget it, recession time. End of decade, the economy was booming so much you had to be an idiot to NOT get a job.

  2. Did my parents consider it a boring decade? I don’t think so. They had plenty going on.

  3. Big generation gap? Well, we GenX’ers were the kids of baby boomers, basically. So there was some gap. It wasn’t terrible. Some things that stood out, and continue to stand out today: The older gen (Boomers) kept underestimating how hard it was for us GenX types to get jobs, high paying jobs, to keep up with the skyrocketing cost of housing. The housing costs were already ridiculous in urban areas and only got worse over time. This kind of thing continues today, with the stories of the plight of millennials, who had it even worse than GenX, being hated on by older, even more clueless boomers…

  4. The late 70’s / early 80’s were all about silicon. The 1990s were all about software. During the 1990s we saw the rise of the internet, and saw almost every American household gain access to a PC (or Mac) and the internet. Without this critical step, we’d be a whole decade behind in terms of computers. Here’s another generation gap: I grew up with personal PCs and did programming and gaming for fun. My mom, just 23 years older, missed it. She’s never quite understood computers as well, or uses them as often. I’m perfectly comfortable with every photo I own being digital, because I have access to it anytime, being online well over 12 hours per day. She still prefers printed photos, go figure.

  5. Optimistic

  6. I could care less about these shows; part of the reason I quit TV was because of crap like Jerry Springer.

  7. Aesthetics? Well, I thought 1970’s and 1980’s car styling was generally terrible, and liked the 1990s stuff a little better. There were a few cars here and there that I actually liked the looks of, such as the Honda Accord (there was a sporty version). I prefer the even more modern looks of almost all cars; they have a better style nowadays IMO.

Clothes? I’m blind to fashion; nothing to say here.
Haircuts? I guess I liked the more “natural” look of the 1990s over the poofy stuff of the 1980s.

  1. To me, the 1990s was a nice spot in a generally downward trend in our nation’s history that got underway in earnest during Reagan. A lot of the nasty political “realities” we have today were being pushed openly by Republicans starting in the 1990s. I guess the lesson learned, for me, is that if things seem to be going well throughout the world, it’s only because we’re lucky to be living between the usual state of crises (of our own making). Conversely, hopefully, if things really seem dark it may be that we’re due some sanity, peace and justice soon.
31

Age 18 in 1990
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).

I miss the 90s as one would miss certain aspects of being age 18 to 28.
*2) For both Baby Boomers and Gen X-Ers, how did you view at the time, and how do you view in retrospect, What do you remember about each of those parts of the decade? Which stands out the most? What do you remember of the aesthetics?:

-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)*

I graduated high school in 1991. So for me there was a very hard line where in high school, everyone listened to Motely Crue, Def Leppard, Bon Jovi and so on, then I got to college and everyone listened to Pearl Jam, Nirvana, Soundgarden, etc.

Most of the aesthetic when I was in college was a sort of preppy lumberjack LL Bean, J Crew, Ralph Lauren look. Layers of plaid shirts, waffle / Henley long-sleeve T-shirts under concert T-shirts.

Console games couldn’t be played over the internet yet. So I do recall one winter break where a dozen of my friends and I played an entire season of Tecmo Super Bowl and you had to stop what you were doing and go over to our one friend’s house to play.

-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)

Multimedia didn’t “explode” for me until after I graduated college in 1995. Until that time, we very much continued to listen to music on physical CDs.

Although this was also about the time where I decided to take advantage of all the opportunities in the exploding tech industry.
Keep in mind that all these news events you described were nothing like news events today where you are bombarded with them non stop on a dozen different channels and social media feeds while everyone endlessly debates them ad nauseum.
-The Late 90s 98-99 (Second Clinton term, Lewinsky scandal, Rap-Rock, NuMetal, Industrial, Rap, Columbine, The Matrix, Playstation and N64)

I remember many of those things sucking. Or at the very least, as part of a mid to late 90s “cyberpunk” aesthetic of pounding electronic music, rap/metal fusion and dark sunglasses at night.

3) What is one thing you miss about the 1990s? What is one thing you don’t miss?

I kind of miss not having to be connected electronically all the time. But I also miss being at an age starting my corporate career when the internet was still “new”.

I don’t miss how most women seemed to dress like lesbians who raided their lumberjacks dad’s closet. Case in point this screen grab of one of the hottest sex symbols (Alicia Silverstone) in one of the hottest music videos (Aerosmith’s Crying) wearing an baggy, oversized flannel shirt.
4) How easy was getting a job in the 1990s as compared to today?

Depends. Once I graduated college and built some tech skills, It was super easy. It was getting to that point that was hard. It’s hard for me to judge as the jobs I look for 20+ years into my career are different from a new hire. Also, a lot of the jobs that I looked at in the 90s - jobs with large consulting firms that just needed thousands of barely skilled peons - are outsourced.

5) Were the 90s a generally boring decade for Baby Boomers?

Don’t know.
6) Was there truly a big generation gap in the early 90s between Boomers and Gen X?

I think the biggest gap is the Boomer expectation of graduating college, find a career, settle down and get married vs the Gen-X expectation of living with a bunch of roommates until your 30s, job hopping and put off adult shit as long as possible.
7) What did you think of the technological leaps and bounds of the decade? Where did you think we would be technologically now?

Interesting, but not as transformative as the last decade. Kind of like the early years of the airplane or automobile when they were still somewhat novel.
8) 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.

Aside from the idea that the world would be destroyed because none of the software written could handle the year 2000, generally as Gen X we don’t feel “optimism” or “pessimism”. Just various levels of “irony” and “sarcasm”.
9) What did you make of the rise of shows like Sally Jesse Raphel, The Jerry Springer Show, and other social television shows?

Trash for hillbillies.
10) What did you think of the general aesthetic of cars, furniture and clothes in the early, mid and late 90s?

Boring and uninspired.
11) 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

If I would characterize the 90s, it helps to reference pop culture references like Seinfeld, Friends, Reality Bites, Office Space, Fight Club, Green Day songs and others. To me they all boil down to “too many young, well educated, directionless people with too much time on their hands and not enough real problems.” Like, just enough society upheaval that the old ways no longer seemed to work for most people. And yet, things were generally good enough that you didn’t really suffer for it. I mean other than the suffering of being bored and directionless.

32

The 90s were basically my 30s. It was the only decade that I didn’t move, change jobs, or have a major family change. Kids went from five to high school. A lot of it was work and being a soccer dad (I was a soccer coach). TV was America’s Funniest Home Videos (the Bob Saget version), Jeopardy and Where in the World is Carmen San Diego. So, basically the only decade that wasn’t focused on kid stuff.

33

I’m 47, and I turned 18 in 1990, and graduated high school in 1991. Started college the following Fall, and graduated in Dec 1996 (a little late). Started my first job in Jan 1997 and worked it until late 1999 when I moved to Dallas for a new job.

Anyway, here are my answers:

I don’t really miss the 90s in terms of anything 90s-specific. I miss being young though!

For me, it broke up like this:

High school- roughly corresponds to your “Early 90s” stretch. For all intents and purposes it was an extension of the late 1980s- hair bands roamed the land, pop music was still popular, there was NO public Internet, and computers were something mostly done by nerds- if you were gaming, it was NES or C64.

College - roughly corresponds to your “Mid-90s” For us anyway, we started using the internet and saw how it worked and how to use it. Grunge was from about 1992-1995. Wasn’t too interested in politics really, but did vote in the Bush/Clinton election. Games started being a common thing as well, with PC gaming was/is where it’s at ever since, as CPU and GPU capabilities far outstripped consoles sometime around this point, and has never let up. Stuff like Doom I/II, Warcraft (the original), Star Control II, Wing Commander games, X-Wing series, and a whole lot more were commonly played by people I knew in college.

Post-college work - roughly corresponds to your “Late-90s”. The internet/web was a “thing” as were home computers by this point.

I miss the optimism- there was a feeling that things were good and going to get better that we don’t have these days.

I don’t miss not having phones/internet commonly available.

For me, it was a little bit easier in the 90s than it is now- I was in the right field at the right time and I was young.

I’m guessing most Baby Boomers were in early middle age, so probably not boring, exactly. Maybe not too fun though.

Not any more than any other generation gap, and I’d argue less than today, as parents have far more easy access to what their kids are reading, watching and listening to than ever before.

I’d seen it happening during the 80s as well, so it wasn’t exactly surprising, but it was sure fun. PCs sure moved a long way- from 33 mhz DOS 80386 computers with 40 mb hard drives to 500+ mhz computers with 1 gigabyte drives and multiple megabytes of memory. Games went equally far as well.

Optimistic- the cold war was over, and the US had won. The world was a lot less scary place, and we were starting to concentrate on other things to fix.

I didn’t watch them. Pretty much every criticism of today’s reality shows applied equally to those shows back then.

The early 90s was very 80s-like, and the rest of the decade was getting away from that in various ways it seemed.

34

More assorted notes:

Comics: Rob Liefeld era, the “S&M Bodybuilder Psycho” look - straps, belts, pouches, spikes, absurd body proportions, muscles on top of muscles on top of muscles, and every character had to carry a minimum of 8 guns and 6 knives.

Cars: this was the era where Japanese import cars became huge in America (and the Fast and Furious movies helped this, but it was already happening before they came out.) The 90s saw restyles of the RX-7, the Supra and Celica, the Prelude, and various other Japanese sports cars that were on the cutting edge of sleek aerodynamic performance oriented design. Those cars were to the 90s car kids what the classic American muscle cars were to earlier eras of car kids.

Movies: it was a good decade for tight and tense thrillers (Se7en, Heat) and funny action/comedies (Con Air, Rush Hour). Terminator 2: Judgment Day took the action genre to previously unseen heights in 1991 and everyone was trying to emulate that for the next 10 years. Large TVs existed in homes but their quality was poor; the only way to really enjoy a movie was still to see it in a real theater. Our minds would be blown by a preview for an amazing-looking movie, and we’d spend the next few months in anticipation of it.

35

I barely miss your cutoff, but I am emphatically a Gen-Xer so I’m answering anyways.

Nah, not especially. Compared to the shitshow that is the post-truth Trump-era happening today, everything looks pretty damn rosey, but I’m not overly nostalgic for the 90s. Not any moreso than the 80s or the 00s anyways.

Not going to type up a multi-part essay answer here, but generally they were pretty good. The Clinton years were pretty damn good economically, jobs were available and college was affordable and it was before the dot-com bubble burst. Computers and game systems were just hitting their stride so you kind of felt like you were living in the future. Socially it was a little bit counter-cultural and diverse and it felt like we were fixing a lot of the wrongs of the 80s which was good. Some of that translated into cynicism (hence the Grunge era) but on balance most people were optimistic. Don’t get confused by the revisionist history on Clinton and the bogus Whitewater/Lewinsky stuff, at the time the people were overwhelmingly on the side of the Clintons. It was a political witchhunt and most people saw it for what it was.

Nothing really. Cheap state-subsidized college tuition was incredible, but that would be called “socialism” in today’s media. But I’m well past college age so I can’t say I miss it exactly. The thing that is the most obviously worse today is the news media, there was plenty of sensational bullshit back then but you could usually spot it and there was a fair bit of actual news being produced to keep things civil. The crap generally stood out and got dismissed by most intelligent people.

I hit the job market just in time for the dot-com bust so it wasn’t great right out of college, but for most of the decade it was a boom time.

I wasn’t a boomer, so I’m speculating a bit, but I’d probably say no. Most boomers were in their 40s and were just hitting their peak earnings and sending kids to college. The middle class was strong and wide so on average you had plenty of disposable income to play with.

Of course. Boomers were Gen-Xer’s parents. Why wouldn’t there be a massive generation gap? The kids had video games and computers, the parents were clueless. The kids had rap and grunge. The kids wore wiped jeans, baggie pants, flannel and had weird hair cuts. The two generations are day and night different.

It was awesome at the time, video games were simply everywhere, cable TV was brand new to most people and cars were getting pretty good finally. I think most of us would have predicted things close to modern video games, ubiquitous cell phones, CGI in movies and HD TV. The internet and smart phones were still a bit out of sight for most people so social media and immediate access to everything in your pocket would have been pretty mind blowing. Ironically things like digital assistants and AR/VR were assumed to be a standard feature of the “home of the future” at the time.

Boomers probably felt threatened because of the counter-culture movements. It was a less aggressive version of the 60s coming in response to the Reagan era. Plus the boom of rap, hip-hop and gay culture (and their acceptance by suburban white kids) probably felt pretty scary. You saw this with crazy shit like the banning of music albums and the villainization of video games from supposedly progressive democrats like Gore. You also saw some really destructive criminal justice policy from Clinton. Safe to say they were reacting.

As noted above I think most Gen-Xers felt pretty good about things in spite of all the morose music. Grunge kids were bummed out about “their lack of purpose” because they didn’t have any real problems to worry about. I can’t speak for minorities but to venture a guess, I think the explosion of rap and hip-hop probably felt like they were finally getting a voice.

Most people viewed it as harmless trash. It was the social media of its day. Boomers viewed it as a sure sign of the collapse of decorum and civilization.

I would say for the most part it’s forgettable. The whole point of the 90s was to stop trying so hard. It was in direct contrast to the narcissism of the 80s. The clothes were comfortable first and fashionable second. There’s always trends and there’s always status symbols, but on balance it was at a minimum in the 90s. The one real innovation, and it was lauded at the time, was sneakers. Jordans were straight fire, sneakerheads were born in the 90s and it’s probably the most durable trend in fashion. Big hair was pretty awful at the time, thank god for “The Rachel”. Cars became a lot more reliable and a lot more practical, the Camry, the Civic and the Taurus were probably the most important cars of the era, and it’s when the BMW 3-series found it’s place as the go-to status symbol of the yuppie heralding the current dominance of the Germans in the luxury car market.

The 90’s birthed Reality TV. We’re sorry about that.

36

Not true, at least if you put stock into what the academically assigned cutoffs are. 1980 is the cutoff so by definition no Gen-Xers were born in the 80s. That said, he is still excluding about 6 years worth of Gen-Xers so you’re right on that count.

You picked the named generations when framing the questions. They aren’t really arbitrary. If you want to be precise 10 years old would be the bottom boundary in 1990. The younger group that you’re probably trying to isolate were what were called “Gen Y” or “Xennials” in popular media, but again that doesn’t neatly line up with the decade and your chosen age either. Based on what you’re saying I suppose you’re not actually interested in comparing generations, you just want a sense for what people who were “adults” during the 90s thought about it.

37

A million times this. In the 90s your Boomer parents were looking at you when you graduated and expected you to get married, buy a house, have your wife churn out 2.4 kids, go to the church social on Wednesday night, and eat dinner with them on Sundays.

Gen Xers were all about working hard and partying hard. (Still are actually until our joints and/or livers give out). It was rare for us to marry your high school sweetheart. We didn’t want to buy a house because we weren’t as homebodied as they were. We saw many of our Boomer parents and/or their Boomer friends get divorces so we weren’t all into that getting married right away shit.

Because of us, even the gays are going to ask to be able to get married in a few years (said jokingly then, but it got more not jokingly as it started to happen).

I remember that generational clash. If you weren’t ready to get married at 22, then something was wrong and you needed to settle down. Grow up and be a man; you’ll never find love in a bar; what’s wrong with Susie/Janie/Jennifer, she’s so nice. You know what is better than working until 8pm? Cutting grass. You pay money to exercise? Well, son, outside is exercise for free.

Buy a house; get to know the neighbors. Find a church.

Yeah, there was a generational thing. :slight_smile:

38

Born in 71.

It was an okay decade all around. Had it’s ups and downs.

I have virtually no nostalgia for it however. I had some major life experiencess, but that was not tied to the 90s, it was tied to my stage of life.

I do have nostalgia for the 80s. If I could redo a decade, that’d be it.

39

I was 40 at the beginning of 1990.

I miss several things about that decade, none of them however had to do with entertainment. Not because it was bad but just because I wasn’t paying attention.

I finished therapy and met my husband in 1992, and that was a huge turning point for me. We are still together.

I worked for newspapers for nearly my entire career, and the 90’s were a hugely positive decade in terms of expansion and optimism. The big dotcom boom in the latter part of the decade (remember that? and the bust in 2000?) was very good for newspapers because every one of those dotcom businesses did a lot of newspaper advertising to attract attention and new customers. Every year for a few years our income and profits outpaced expectations. (I had a presentiment that this wasn’t going to last forever, but I had no idea how quickly and how devastatingly it would turn around in the next decade). For me personally, I was an important manager in the advertising department with 8 or 9 people reporting to me. Several years before I retired in 2014, the last of those people either left or was re-assigned to another department, and I managed no-one but myself.

Politically, it was post-Soviet collapse and there didn’t seem much to worry about in the world. The floor dropped out of that elevator too not too far into the next decade.

In 1998 I was finally diagnosed with Obstructive Sleep Apnea, and got a CPAP and finally could get a good night’s sleep. It saved my job and probably my life. Fairly important stuff.

Sorry I’m not answering your questions in order, but that list is ridiculous.

40

I’m sorry; I just don’t feel any need or compunction to offer a huge amount of personal data all at once on the urging of a complete stranger.