Why were the 90s so great?
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Anonymous
| The decade where racist, sexist white males could get away with their horrible behavior. |
Anonymous
+1000 I could be a teen and college student without social media The music was great 9/11 hadn’t happened yet And this is why the 1990s were great |
Anonymous
Oh please. There is NEVER a perfect decade in history without violence and war in the world. You need to do a comparison. Compare those events to the decades prior when the Cold War was at its peak and you had to have school kids learning how to try to survive a nuclear blast. The decades prior had even worse genocides than Rwanda like under Pol Pot, Mao, and Stalin. The Vietnam War was worse than the Gulf War and the Bosnian War. I mean maybe you could argue that the 80s had less serious wars in which the US was directly involved in, but the music was so bad, AIDS was rampant, and you still had the Cold War going on. During the 90s, you just never worried about being nuked by Russia anymore like all of the decades prior because the nuclear treaties between the US and Russia to deescalate were in full swing. Then the 2000s rolls around and you have 9/11, a 20 year war in Afghanistan, a never ending war on terror, Putin takes complete control and reignited the Cold War, and China starts invading the South China Sea while losing as a serious challenge to US hegemony. |
Anonymous
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Technology, more than anything else.
Tech introduced the instantaneous news era with everyone having a smart phone in their pocket. Well into the 1990s technology was something the geeks and dorks did in their basements  I actually remember sneering at interest in computers and this weird thing called email because only the dorks seemed to find it interesting and who wanted to stay in a darkened bedroom all day looking at this box thing when you could be out doing stuff with people. And then when cell phones first starting emerging in the very late 1990s, we laughed at the people who rushed to get one because it was so obvious they were slaves to their phones and who wanted to be at beck and call all the time?
As you can infer, I was a cruel and sanctimonious high school kid. But there's truth it it - we lived in a world were you really didn't feel pressured around the clock with constant social media and instantaneous news and the expectations that come with it. If someone wanted to reach you, they called your landline number and you could let it go to the answering machine if you didn't feel like answering. And for kids it meant sharing a phone with your parents and siblings. But today everyone assumes you're available 24/7 with email, phone and texts and if you don't respond within a minute they thing something's wrong or are offended. Things were just more relaxed all around when "news" meant something you watched for half a hour after dinner, not in your face screaming internet headlines and notifications popping into your inbox or phone ceaselessly throughout the day. There were certainly still pressures of various forms in the 1990s. And typical anxiety. But altogether, the 1990s, particularly after 1992 till 2001, was a period of remarkable peace and a sense of genuine progressive growth to a better and cohesive world. Some people still whine about racism or bigotry, but even in the 1990s we were aware of how much progress had been made compared to a decade earlier and were proud of it. Barriers were falling everywhere, the whole world was opening up and travel was starting to become cheaper and ordinary people could go to more places. Francis Fukuyama's End of History was the prevailing sentiment. In a way, it was nearly the best of liberal democracy. After 9-11 things really did start changing although it took me a while to realize it. And while I'm appreciative of the improvements in health care and certain technological advantages, on the whole I don't see it better because people aren't happier and we seem much more disunited and divided and the extremes of politics on both the left and right, and I'd argue more the left, have become more authoritarian and angry and less respecting of this casual and relaxed liberal tradition we once took for granted. I'd never thought I'd see the day that papers like the NYT or Washington Post would brazenly lie and justify it in the name of a greater progressive good, whatever that is.
Really don't know what the future will bring. Part of me is hopeful, other parts are not. |
Anonymous
You make me sick |
Anonymous
+1 any decade where you had little to no responsibility is better than the current one. Duh. |
Anonymous
But your parents’ personal problems had nothing to do with the 90s. |
Anonymous
Really, that’s the take away you get from someone who gave explicit reasons why they disagreed with the op? |
Anonymous
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It’s not an unpopular opinion, and it isn’t just millennial childhood nostalgia either. For middle class Americans, it was a decade of stability and predictable economic growth, relative peace and prosperity and common popular culture.
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/08/opinion/sunday/the-best-decade-ever-the-1990s-obviously.html https://www.history.com/news/1990s-the-good-decade https://www.thedoe.com/narratives/why-the-90s-was-best-decade-ever-a-nostalgic-love-letter I also think the “good 90s” is part of the reasons why stereotypical white suburban millennials are considered lazy and spoiled. They were raised in good times and were promised good times. Then growing up with the triple whammy of 9/11, the 2008 recession, and the pandemic were repeated waves of being slapped in the face with reality, that life actually sucks, your childhood was a tease and a fluke. |
Anonymous
Yes! Broke but fun. |
Anonymous
+1 why would you respond this way to someone who was bullied and assaulted? Your comment makes me sick |
Anonymous
😍 |
Anonymous
| I agree OP. The 90s were the last good decade. My family now is doing fine, but I really really miss the stability we had in society and how things were more at peace globally. We have so much dysfunction & disruption now…. It’s really worrisome. |
Anonymous
| You must be white and at least middle class. Probably grew up in a small town or not an east coast city at the least. |
Anonymous
| because The Simpsons was still good |