And now we know that about you. 
I was 33 in 1990. The decade sucked. Started with my then-husband losing his job in the Army due to the Reduction in Force, and the fact that he had gotten passed over for promotion due probably to his alcoholism. We moved home to Ohio, he got a commission job selling insurance, we ended up having to borrow money from my mom to pay the company each month for our insurance coverage because he was making zero sales. He decided the best way to deal with this was to have an affair, then to divorce me and start not seeing our two kids, despite living literally across the street from us. I started working in retail, our kids started their slide into delinquency and then I lost my job, which pretty much tipped us straight into poverty. Got a new job in 1997 that I loved, but it was still retail so had to pick up side jobs as well. Daughter dropped out of high school, son eventually did also. So yeah, the 90’s were about drinking, divorce, depression, delinquency, drop-outs and drama. Not a fan.
I wouldn’t say I miss it, but it was fairly eventful for me. I retired from the military in 1990 at age 43 and had been living in Europe for three years. Stayed in Europe to work, then got hired by the U.S. Dept of State and met my new wife. Stayed overseas for the next six years and then moved to Alaska. Voted for Clinton twice. Being overseas, I missed a lot of the American cultural goings on. Ignorance was bliss in some cases.
I hadn’t really thought of it that way, but you’re right. Except it didn’t really hit until the 2000s for most of the people I know (Gen-Xers- we were all born in the early-mid 1970s), as we got out of school, and got a few years of grace to “get our feet firmly planted” so to speak, before our parents started making noises about family, houses, permanent jobs, etc…
I guess that Tipper Gore/PMRC/Body Count/Ice-T nonsense was in the 90s, although to me, it seems like it was just an extension of the same BS that had gone on through the 1980s. That was definitely a generation gap thing.
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 was 13 but I’m answering anyway.
I miss the 90s, or actually life pre-Sept 11. We had one set of priorities and the future seemed to be very promising. Tech was really taking off and anything seemed possible. Our society as a whole seemed to be improving in all the social niceties. It seemed like we were very close to an amazing breakthrough. Then 9/11 happened, and war, and Bush.
**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)**
I’m kind of a Xennial actually. I feel much closer to Millennials than Gen X.
But I remember all of this vividly. I thought GHB was okay, hair metal was actually dying out at this time, liked grunge, no R&B, liked that one Vanilla Ice song, was perplexed by parachute pants, didn’t play NES (only PC games), and Waco was the kind of shock you kind of expected to happen from those gun-piling crazies.
-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)
I didn’t know what to think about Clinton and tried to ignore him. I thought he shouldn’t have cheated on his wife. I liked grunge and wore the plaid shirt with crop top underneath and loose jeans, so comfortable. Don’t like rap. Like I said, I was a PC player, so the console wars passed me by. Hated the macarena, and I did have a phone. Hated ska.
-The Late 90s 98-99 (Second Clinton term, Lewinsky scandal, Rap-Rock, NuMetal, Industrial, Rap, Columbine, The Matrix, Playstation and N64)
Same as previous with Clinton. It was safe and comfortable to ignore politics and see it as a sideshow back then. Business as usual, nothing to see here, until 9/11.
I loved industrial and the new metal that started at the time. Columbine was tragic but I think it was the only thing that would make us start addressing bullying in schools. Hated The Matrix. Didn’t get a Playstation until 2005.
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 aesthetics weren’t terribly different. Jeans were more comfortable. In the early 90s a lot of women were poofing their hair and men were frosting their tips. That changed with grunge. I do miss being able to wear comfortable jeans with pockets. But honestly if I wore the same things now, no one would bat an eye. Jeans and a shirt, not a crazy wardrobe. I generally just wore my hair down and straight.
What stands out most for me was listening to amazing hardcore rock with my moon roof open and feeling as free as a bird, hanging out with my friends on warm summer evenings, playing pool and laughing a lot. Oh yeah, we used to hang out in the airport service roads and watch the skies, they don’t let you do that now.
3) What is one thing you miss about the 1990s? What is one thing you don’t miss?
I miss the music. I’m not fond of the new music now.
I don’t miss doing homework.
4) How easy was getting a job in the 1990s as compared to today?
Probably about the same, just different methods. I used to walk into a place and fill out an application. Or I would call and send in a CV. Now you fill out applications online.
5) Were the 90s a generally boring decade for Baby Boomers?
No idea. I think my parents bought and sold three houses and also they had to deal with me. Their careers were doing well. It was just life.
6) Was there truly a big generation gap in the early 90s between Boomers and Gen X?
Not really. I remember there was a huge marketing push to try to get Gen X to identify with certain products like sodas or sports drinks, which were kind of laughable. There were also “XTREME SPORTS” things that started during that time, which were pretty cool on occasion. Boomers didn’t really like grunge and I can’t blame them. They didn’t understand goth culture but I agreed with them there.
They thought we were all lazy good for nothings but they think that about everyone, sooooo…
7) What did you think of the technological leaps and bounds of the decade? Where did you think we would be technologically now?
Hard to say. The .com bubble burst but that was a good thing because it was artificially inflated. I actually think we would be further along technologically if everyone were earlier adopters of technology. People tend to drag their feet about some things, especially with regard to business.
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.
The 90s, to me, were about hope for the future. Everyone seemed to have an idea about how to improve and people seemed to be doing it. Drugs weren’t a huge problem, terrorism wasn’t a problem, people were trying to be more accepting of others and work on the environment. A lot of today’s environmental measures stemmed from efforts starting in the 90s - or if they didn’t start then, they definitely made progress then.
9) What did you make of the rise of shows like Sally Jesse Raphel, The Jerry Springer Show, and other social television shows?
They were ridiculous and didn’t affect me at all.
10) What did you think of the general aesthetic of cars, furniture and clothes in the early, mid and late 90s?
Crap. Cars were cooler in the 60s. Furniture was tatty. Clothes were comfy, or at least they were for me.
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
When you live through something like that, it’s not bookended by dates; we didn’t say OKAY ITS THE 90S EVERYONE ACT DIFFERENT and then on New Year’s 2000 we didn’t just start to suck again. Some good things happened, some bad things happened, and living through it was just life. I graduated two schools, had boyfriends, had a lot of jobs, lived a few places, listened to music, had friends. I liked to read and write, and play a few games.
I wish 9/11 hadn’t happened because it changed the tone for everyone and everything, but all of those things in the 90s didn’t just go away; they’re still here if you look.
The 90s is probably the best example of tech making a big difference in a single decade. Really, I find it wholly unremarkable in almost every other regard. It seems to have started a trend in “boring sameness” that has lasted to this day.
I turned 13 in 1990 and graduated from high school in 1995. This likely colors my perception, but to me there was a significant difference between the first half and the second half of the decade. The way I remember things, the internet didn’t become a thing for ordinary people until 1995. Pop music also seemed to change a lot that year as well, and so did the types of movies being made. I have a lot of nostalgia for the early 90s, but none for the late 90s. Just the opinions of a 42 year old gen X’er.
I was 27 years old in 1990.
What I recall from the decade are personal milestones rather than cultural or technological ones.
The second half of the 80s and first half of the 90s were my bachelorhood. I lived alone for the first time, dated, made mistakes, had fun, basically found my way in life as an independent adult. I didn’t necessarily find it hard to get jobs, just that the process was different than it is now. Same goes for dating, I suppose - to an extent. I went out with women I knew from work or through mutual friends; I’m sure that still happens. Instead of Tinder et al, we had newspaper personals and telephone chat lines, both of which, believe it or not, I utilized with some success. We also had video dating, with actual VHS tapes sent through the mail. I tried this with zero success.
In 1994 I met the future Mrs. Wheelz, so the second half of the decade is defined by the progression of our relationship. Meeting, pursuit, dating, living together, engagement, marriage, buying a house - That all happened between 1994 and 1999. Everything else about this period is essentially background noise to me. I don’t know if that’s a commentary on the cultural impact of the late 90’s (or lack thereof) or my own emotional phase of my life - likely a combination of the two.
Not sure this post actually answered any of your questions, but it was a fun trip down memory lane!
I don’t know that anyone ever specifically told me this was expected. It was more like a general sense that that marriage/career/house/etc was “normal”, but something to be put off as long as possible. Like I don’t recall terms like “post adolescence”, “failure to launch” or “quarter life crisis” being used prior to the 90s. Or all these shows and films and whatnot about people in their 20s and early 30s in these holding patterns of living with 4 roommates, struggling with their careers and/or having perpetual relationship problems.
That’s an important point- back then, you felt like you could trust the TV/radio news, CNN and newspapers to be reasonably accurate and if not unbiased, at least the bias was subtle and generally along the lines of HOW the facts were presented, not in WHAT the facts were.
There wasn’t any concept of “fake news”, at least outside of obvious garbage like tabloids and paparazzi-type celebrity rags. I mean, nobody actually believed in the adventures of Bat Boy as published in the Weekly World News or anything like that. But there wasn’t any question about whether articles on the AP wire were as truthful as could be reasonably ascertained. And on top of that, there weren’t other news sources for the most part.
It probably is self-evident, but this was really the last era before social media took over. In personal terms, this meant that while you still did have to worry about friends or people with cameras taking embarrassing pictures, you didn’t have to worry about cameras being omnipresent, nor about any embarrassing pictures being shared publicly with the world. At the very worst, someone might get two copies of the embarrassing print and share it with the people they knew.
Until late in the decade with the rise of the web, there wasn’t any sort of weirdo echo chamber going on; if you were a kook who believed in orgone or phrenology or whatever, you had to go to a real, live meeting of other orgone enthusiasts, or you subscribed to some poorly typeset, photocopied newsletter that some other kook mailed out. There weren’t handy-dandy online forums and chat rooms and whatever so you could meet up with your kooky brethren online and convince each other of the validity of your particular kook.
This was actually true of most any sort of hobby or activity as well- if you were a model airplane wonk, you had to go to the monthly model airplane club meeting and get on their mailing list, and go to conventions or whatever. Same for computer geeks and any other sort of enthusiast group that has an online presence these days, so I guess that one’s a double-edge sword.
Social attitudes were different for sure. While Gen-X wasn’t as relentlessly conformist and hostile as earlier generations, we were (and sometimes are) pretty rigid with the roles, and what was cool vs. what was not. Stuff like computer games were NOT considered cool for the most part, there was a lot of homophobia and casual bigotry. But… on the whole, younger people weren’t consciously racist like their parents had been- it wasn’t socially acceptable. But inadvertent casually bigoted stuff was everywhere in colloquialisms and humor. Political correctness started during this era, much to many’s frustration and chagrin. And at the time, a lot of it DID seem to be a bunch of absurd euphemisms for things that didn’t seem to be an issue- was someone in a wheelchair disabled, handicapped, or “differently abled”? Or that someone is “visually impaired” rather than “blind”. And why does it matter? This was the genesis of a lot of faux-PC terms like “Vertically Challenged” instead of “short”.
Not only that, I feel like that lack of social media made things feel a lot more “local”. Like there was no Facebook or even Myspace when I graduated high school (or college for that matter). When I went off to college, I pretty much assumed I wouldn’t see anyone from high school again, except for when I was back home on break or maybe at the reunions. Same thing with moving to a new town.
And making plans was a pain as well. Mobile/smart phones and voice mail weren’t ubiquitous like they are now. You couldn’t just send real-time texts to meet you at various places as you went about your evening. Typically we had to stage at someone’s dorm room or apartment, figure out where we were going and who was driving (not necessarily in that order), and then coordinate will phone calls to other people or groups we planned to meet. Often you got someplace and never new if you just missed someone or they were just about to show up.
I hadn’t thought of that, but you’re absolutely right. I found it WEIRD when Facebook became popular, and here I was, reading about people I hadn’t thought about since 1991, and people from college I never really had the ability to keep up with. On one hand, that’s nice, but on the other, I can totally see how it’s a sort of failure to launch type thing on younger people.
I mean, going to college and being away from family AND friends, and being essentially forced to make new ones and reinvent myself was a major life change. I can’t help but think that if I’d been a text or social media post away from all those people, then I’d never have really left that setting and engaged in the new one. Which would be a shame, because while high school was mostly the luck of the draw in terms of who you went to school with, college was the first time that people are really free to hang out with the people THEY want to, without their parents or anyone else having any say.
Another thing I remember was that there was a level of trust involved- meeting people at places was much more of a firm expectation- they couldn’t call you 5 minutes beforehand and say they were running late, etc… like they can today with smartphones. So unless you wanted to be considered rude, you had to show up on time.