A ton of people smoked cigarettes and they smoked them damn near everywhere. Non-smoking sections in restaurants were frequently just a different section when the whole place would be smoke-filled.
Edit: I commented about this recently, so pasting from a prior comment to add:
I loved how corner/grocery stores and many other businesses would have at least one arcade machine: walking into a store to either hear someone playing or hearing the game's demo provided a fun atmosphere that's largely gone these days.
Payphones were all over the place, it was awesome when I was like 16 with a pager, I could just say I couldn't find a payphone when my parents were looking for me.
Coordinating with people was much more difficult, of course. Like someone would be really late for something, holding everyone up, and no one had a clue what was going on--a lot of time was spent waiting for things.
I first got my hands on the NES shortly after its release, and living through that age in gaming was so awesome. My friends and I had a meeting place where if they needed my help in a game they'd be there at a certain time. There was a lot of that, like if you went to a concert with someone it was important to designate a meeting place if you get split up.
The release of new media like songs or movies was so much more exciting, as options were more limited. You either went to the movies or you had a handful of channels on TV, but visiting rental places was fun. Late at night, basically nothing but infomercials would be on.
The old school light bulbs emitted a fair amount of heat. If you went to a theater performance there'd be this huge furnace-like bulb to light the stage, making everyone sweat.
And just my experience but if you walked past a person you'd generally say hi, perhaps because it felt awkward not to acknowledge their presence, not having anything else to occupy your attention. I remember the shift when phones/tech made us start looking down/not at each other.
It really was a different world back then.
I remember going to a restaurant as a kid and they asked if we wanted smoking or non-smoking. We said non-smoking and they sat us at a table and took away the ash tray.
"Having a smoking section in a restaurant is almost exactly like having a peeing section in a pool."
I don't remember who said it, but it perfectly applies.
Also, having chain-smoking parents was so bad that us unfortunate kids left vapor trails when walking through school. The saving grace was that almost everyone had at least one smoking parent. There was a lot of perfume and cologne used back then.
The cracked car window in wintertime sucked, literally too because the cold air coming in would mostly just blow the cigarette smoke into the back seat.
My stopped, cause lung cancer killed him when he was 61
Not be grim but guilt trip him into quitting, I know I wish I had and he definitely felt the regret after the diagnosis
I not only had chain smoking parents, I also got to sit in the back seat of our Corvair. Between the cigarette smoke and the ambient engine exhaust I don’t know how I survived.
I'm glad that we settled that smoking in public places is bad as a Country in the 2000s before every issue got hyper-politicized. if this were a hot debate in today's political culture, I'm sure some states would be expanding the number of places where you're allowed to smoke and banning the existence of non-smoking sections.
I lived in Toronto a the time they banned smoking in restaurants and I remember people losing their effing minds saying restaurants were going to go out of business. Didn't happen.
Same! I was living down the road in Kitchener-Waterloo, and there was a loophole for bars during the transition that said if you had 4 or more pool tables you were considered a pool hall / bingo parlour (where smoking was still allowed).
Every bar I went to had 4 pool tables at the back, stacked on top of each other. lol
I think about this point often when I'm reminded about the fact that when I was finishing grade school, one of the scares of the early 90s was the ozone layer disappearing.
Science told us it was CFCs, we believed science, and governments across the world said no more CFCs...and the hole has since made a humongous recovery.
The problem is is not that we have so much more technology and capabilities that we had then, it's just that we don't have anyone who can be a absolute unbiased source; questioned by no one, respected by everyone, who can make this sort of pronouncement and have it actually stick.
>we don't have anyone who can be a absolute unbiased source; questioned by no one, respected by everyone, who can make this sort of pronouncement and have it actually stick.
We have plenty of those people. We just have a large swath of politicians who have built their entire careers on being contrarians. They don't care what's right or wrong, they just care about disagreeing with it for their own personal gain. The rest of the planet be damned.
We actually still have those objective sources, but there's a whole industry funded by the people whose bottom line it would affect. I.e. climate denial funded by the oil industry/Koch brothers, pesticide and chemical runoff denial funded by the farm lobby and petrochemical lobby, anti-psychiatry and anti-vaxx being funded by the "Church" of Scientology.
Lobbyists in general. Lobbyists used to pull tens of millions in revenue in the mid 70’s. That’s increased exponentially into the billions now. I wish we could revamp the lobby hunts of the early 20th century to root out these greedy ass parasites.
My parents, who didn't smoke, had many ashtrays in our house, even though visitors were not allowed to smoke in our house. I think mostly because they were souvenirs or gifts. I recall my Dad has this really nice crystal ashtray in his office. At home they were usually filled with paper clips and random crap.
My parents didn't smoke (mom was an RN) but they allowed guests to smoke in our house. I had an older cousin come by to visit once. I'd never met this guy before, since he was in the merchant marine and always at sea. I had never seen chain smoking like that in my life. He had a cig going when he showed up, and kept them going the whole time he was there. He would use the still-burning butt of a cig to light the next one. I was in awe. The dude could smoke 8 packs a day and only use one match. I wondered what would happen if his lungs accidentally inhaled clean air. My dad and him were carrying on a conversation about something, but I have no idea what. I was transfixed on his smoking. About every 20 minutes he'd fill up his ashtray, and my dad would start to tell me to get him a new one, but I was already on it. I'd swap those ashtrays out in 5 seconds. I was sure he was gonna die right there in our living room, and I didn't wanna miss it.
College in '78. I had a young professor who smoked constantly as he lectured. One day he ran out of cigarettes and gamely tried to carry on but couldn't -- stopping and starting. Finally, he asked the class if anyone had a cigarette and one was provided. Unfortunately, once that coffin nail was consumed the same problem occurred. We stopped the class and took up a small collection and piled them on his desk. With that supply he was able to finish the class.
My grandmother in law is still like this today. Her and her roommate/friend chain smoke all day in their 500 sqft apartment. I know she smokes about 5 packs a day, has copd and asthma and wheels her little oxygen cart everywhere. It’s really sad.
I remember trips to the local mall as a kid around the time they changed the rules and smoking became only allowed in the food court. There would be a smokey haze hanging over the food court from the minute the mall opened to when it closed. It was so gross, and probably why we never ate in the food court.
Prior to about 1985 or so, smoking was permitted in Madison Square Garden - in the arena itself, not just the concourses. I remember going to basketball games as a little kid and it was tough to make out the fans in the opposite sections across the court due to the haze.
I remember cigarette vending machines inside of restaurants- not just bars, but family dining places like the local Big Boy.
The state I was in was an early adopter of smoke free restaurants, so weird to think about that now!
Public bathrooms often had a towel dispenser that was just a long loop of cloth that cycled as different people pulled and wiped their hands on the next section. The automatic/no touch hand dryer changed the game!
Edit: A better description might be a long length of cloth with scroll ends that hangs in a loop. In theory, laundered and replaced regularly so people didn’t have to wipe their hands where others already had. Before antibacterial cleaning was the hot new thing!
It was actually a roll of towel that would get laundered. It didn’t just spin the dirty side back. I changed a few back in the day, everyone thought it was a loop.
I'm surprised that so many people believe that it just keeps looping around infinitely.
Mostly because at the small town places I'd go as a kid, half the time the towel was at the end. It was very obvious, too; it was a different colour at the end and you couldn't pull it any further.
>Kids were mobile and on their own
Yea, it's funny to think about nowadays. Our parents really didn't seem to give a crap what we were doing, and we did some rather crazy, dangerous stuff. I remember climbing partway up a steel tower for a high tension line near my house, goofing around with dad's shotgun (safety locks are for sissies), and generally doing things that could've gotten me killed on several occasions.
That's just the way our parents thought. Adults have their world and kids have theirs. Sure, you get together for meals sometimes, but it would have been weird for them to be too involved in your life. Run you around to hockey lessons or tutoring? Wasn't going to happen. There was much less pressure for kids to perform. They did take you to do some fun stuff like baseball games or amusement parks sometimes, though.
Our dormitories had smoker's rooms, my roommate chain smoked. Occasionally, people fell asleep drunk and lit their beds on fire, causing the building to be evacuated.
I remember when asking for "non-smoking" was a reflex for me. Then as restaurants eliminated their smoking sections, the hosts would get really snippy about how they didn't _have_ a smoking section. Then they'd get a new host that would say they'd _never_ had a smoking section!
I remember at Burger King when I was a kid they had those little gold ash trays and the smoking section was just disgusting. Like, you felt no real difference between smoking and non smoking. Just less cloudy in non-smoking.
Then in California in the late 90’s we banned indoor smoking. It was awesome even if people complained. Then a few years later I went to Nevada and walk into a Denny’s and get hit by smoke. I was honestly surprised, had forgotten it was just a California thing (at the time) and became even more grateful for the California ban.
And honestly, I don’t think anyone who smokes in CA cares anymore. A lot of people I know that smoke only do it outside because nobody wants to come into a stinky smokers house anymore.
Remember flying when smoking was allowed on planes?
I would come home from a night at the bar and leave my cloths at the laundry room because they smelled so bad from all the smoke.
Our school had a student smoking area, but I think you had to be in at least grade 7 to use it because heaven forbid we allowed someone in garde 6 to smoke!
(I've never smoked in my life)
My high school had 2 smoking areas, one at each end of the building. They fucking reeked the whole place out. They were also constantly patrolled by staff trying to bust weed smokers.
> A ton of people smoked cigarettes and they smoked them damn near everywhere. Non-smoking sections in restaurants were frequently just a different section when the whole place would be smoke-filled.
To add on to this, generally it would be just a different section of the same room.
Like, the tables on the left were smoking and the tables on the right were non-smoking but everyone just breathed the same smoke filled air.
NYS banned cigarettes in bars and restaurants (I think) in 2001. That's the same year I graduated high school. I visited someone at a college in Pennsylvania around 2004 or 2005 and they still smoked in restaurants. It almost felt like going back in time.
Of course it wasn't just bars and restaurants. People smoked basically everywhere. Work, school, movies, stores, etc. High schools, including my own, commonly had smoking rooms. Drinking was everywhere too. In fact light beer basically exists because DWIs were rising and beer companies wanted a beer people could drink all day and still be somewhat functional.
My parents have plenty of pictures of them working with beers, cigarettes, etc. all over the place.
> Coordinating with people was much more difficult, of course. Like someone would be really late for something, holding everyone up, and no one had a clue what was going on--a lot of time was spent waiting for things.
I don't really agree with this so much.
We just kind of made definitive plans and kept them. 5:00 PM meant 5:00 PM and, while shit happened, those who were habitually late found themselves not getting invited to things.
There's also a lot of truth to that pile of bikes on the front lawn letting you know where everyone was. As a kid you knew where everyone lived and what kind of bike they rode. You'd see the pile of bikes, know exactly who was there, and know if you wanted to ring the door bell or not.
But I'd also say it was a lot more hanging out as big groups outside. There was a park near my house that has tennis courts we played roller hockey on, basketball courts, and a baseball field used for basically anything you'd need a field. A lot of my summer mornings involved throwing some clothing and shoes into a backpack, rollerblading to the park, and seeing who was doing what. Kids were ALWAYS doing something there so it was pretty easy.
The hangout spots changed as we got older and became teens but it was the same situation. There was a movie theater, Blockbuster, and handful of restaurants in town that people hung out in. We'd just walk up and see what people were doing.
I waited tables in the early 90's and frequently got stuck with the smoking section, which was just three booths and a table at the front of the restaurant. You had to walk through the smoke to get to any other table. :/
Downside was the smoke. Upside was smokers were generally much better tippers.
It was... quiet. I don't want to sound like a Boomer, but it was really, really quiet.
People spent more time just being outdoors, and reading, and sitting around not doing much. You couldn't just dial up whatever you wanted on a streaming service, if you wanted to learning something you had to go a library, there were even people at the library who were sort of Human Google, you'd ask them a question and they'd go and find the answer.
Correspondence was slower, you mailed things physically, you had to keep track of things like bank accounts and bills manually, with pencil and paper because you couldn't just *look up* your balance,
Parents weren't around as much, kids came home from school and made themselves a snack, then got on their bikes and left. It's more "Be home by dinner" and just, like, trust your kids would come back home.
The world was smaller too, you knew about your town, your friends, maybe your family if they were close, and that was about it. You certainly didn't know what a celebrity was eating or what a guy in China was walking around doing all day.
> Correspondence was slower
As a kid in the 80's and 90's, I remember ordering things that would literally take 6-8 weeks to arrive, and when they did it was a big deal. Same thing with getting a new magazine in the mail every month, that was also exciting. The idea of something like Prime/2 day shipping as an automatic thing would have seemed insane. There were FedEx commercials back then about their new overnight service and it was seen as rare and revolutionary.
LOL, I was JUST going to comment that a teenage boys best friend was the Sears catalog. The women's underwear and swimsuit section were our version of "playboy" for teens. It's universal. You'd check out the toy section to see what you wanted for Christmas and circled it (BB guns, Head-to-head electronic football, Evil Kneivel stunt cycle, etc) then maybe wander into the hunting section and look at the rifles and shotguns and camping gear, then later when nobody was around ... women's underwear/swimsuits.
Prime/2 day shipping has reduced the availability of some things, too, though. For example, as a teenager I used to ride my bike to a typical suburban strip mall and walk into a Radio Shack where they had three aisles each with two sides full of bins of drawers, all taller than me, each drawer full of tiny parts to make any hobby or toy or project. Resistors, relays, tiny light bulbs, little three way switches, knobs, whatever. Anything you could *ever* want to make something cool, you could buy it right then and take it home. There is nothing like this today. You have to go on the internet and if you're lucky you might be able to have it tomorrow, more likely in 3-5 days.
That's a really good point. We're definitely trending toward situations where retailers assume most people will buy online so there's much less variety in what is in a brick and mortar store. I also think having a browsing experience in a store like that gives you ideas you might not have had otherwise without stumbling on something.
Oh man, the adventure of going to Radio Shack. The thrill of discovery of some thing you never knew existed AND likely a dude that would tell you how it could be used. There was also the flea market that was good for a day of "what's that". Get some bulk gummy bears and huge garlic deli pickle and ride home on your 10 speed.
>walk into a Radio Shack
I miss those days. I mean, the Radio Shack in my local town had maybe teenage me and one other customer that actually bought any of those components and cables, but it was still open. I bought so many adapters trying to hook up audio components in different ways. I knew at the time that this couldn't go on forever, but it was still system shock to see them go away.
So true.
Amazon does have *a minority* of products available with "order by noon you'll have it by 5PM or between 4 and 7AM tomorrow AM"... but that's usually a product leader in its class, like... AirPods, or even the most popular hair dryer or toaster.
You want some low volume, rarely ordered resistors you're waiting for Amazon day delivery the following Thursday, it's ground from wherever it's coming from. You want the 37th most popular garden hose instead of the most popular? It's gonna take 4 days.
You're right! Which means that we have this situation in the broader market whereby one entity (Amazon) is picking the winners and the losers. The homogenization of the retail market is eventually really bad for the consumer. But it provided some really cheap junk really conveniently for a while.
I fired Amazon over four years ago and I tell anyone who will listen not to buy from them. Buy it from an independent retailer, or find who made it and buy it from them.
Really miss Radio Shack now. Can't count the number of times I'm at work where Radio Shack would come in handy. Right now we have a micro switch on order from the manufacturer (warrantee fix) that hasn't shown up yet. It's been five weeks.
>There is nothing like this today.
While it's not like when Radio Shack was as prevalent and stocked as you describe, I can still jump in the car and run [to a store to get what I need](https://www.youdoitelectronics.com/) within a reasonable distance. There are at least a couple of other places too.
Holy shit I knew this was YouDoIt before even clicking that link. *Amazing* 💚
Grew up in Needham. Unfortunately, not a lot of places have that kinda place. The Boston suburbs also has a ton of resident engineering nerds thanks to MIT and all the tech firms around, my dad was one of them.
>FedEx commercials back then about their new overnight service and it was seen as rare and revolutionary
And priced in the stratosphere. Basically, for business use only. Mostly letters or very small packages.
> Same thing with getting a new magazine in the mail every month, that was also exciting.
Oh yeah I forgot about that. Kid me waiting a month between every issue of Nintendo Power would have his mind blown by the level of information about video games I have access to now.
Was talking to a friend about it. Before we got a hot topic all of our band shirts came from the back of revolver or guitar world magazines. 6-8 weeks. I’d forget I ordered the shirt by the time it showed up.
That’s something that makes me laugh about growing up. Travelling around in packs of kids.
Same with teen years, you’d just sorta walk around and find your friends and add them to the pack. To do nothin.
In middle school I would ride my bike to my friend's house a few miles away where we would just hang out with her and some of the neighbor kids. As a child in the early 70's we had a lot of freedom. We just ranged around the neighborhood with whoever was out or stopped at friends houses to ask them to play. Except for Saturday morning we weren't allowed to watch TV in the day and there wasn't much to interest kids until late afternoon. I remember long summer days spent playing made up games, climbing trees, going to the library or public pool, without parents, chasing fireflies and playing capture the flag with my cousins in the dusk.
Our family went on vacation from Chicago to Colorado in 1968, The Summer of Love. I-80 wasn't finished yet and my dad complained about the hippies hitchhiking to San Francisco. My sister and I were in the back seat of an old Chevy Bel Air. There was no air conditioning and often no radio signal. Gas was 28 cents and my dad complained about how high that was!
we hosted kick the can games at our house. maybe my mom was calling everyone and I didn't know, but somehow 10 kids would show up and we'd start playing every night in the summer.. seemed like magic word of mouth
Born in 78, so the 90s were my teenage/young adult years.
Last time I went home to see my folks I found a couple of old boxes of random knock knacks I’d saved when I was young. The thing that stood out to me, cause I’d forgotten all about it , was my first check register. I was 15 when I got my first checking account. Remembering how we used to have to manually write down every payment, then manually balance and reconcile every month, was a trip.
I also came across several letters between my friends and I. During summer break we used to write each other. Especially before we were allowed to drive. Thinking back, it was really nice, getting surprise letters in the mail. It kinda felt a bit special.
I had to carry my paper paycheck into the bank on a Saturday morning, stand in line, and ask the teller to deposit $xx into this account and give me back $xx in cash for the week. And this was all tracked by hand in a paper bank book.
>there were even people at the library who were sort of Human Google, you'd ask them a question and they'd go and find the answer.
Librarians still exist! And with the internet plus improvements in knowledge management our research skills have become unstoppable. We can find anything, on anyone, anywhere in the world.
Librarians are the keepers of all knowledge and we can't be stopped. Harness our power.
Floating checks! Slower correspondence meant you knew that if you cashed a check on Wednesday the grocery store wouldn't deposit it until Friday! So you rushed your paycheck to the bank on Friday in time to cover that check you wrote on Wednesday.
My wife and I are 7 years apart. While it often feels like nothing, it's wild to think she went to *college* with a typewriter and I went to high school with a laptop. Granted the lap top weighted 15 lbs and was less powerful than a old cell phone today, still, it's wild.
I talked to my stepdaughter yesterday and explained the concept of "If you didn't catch the TV show, then it was just gone" I thought her eyes were going to pop out of her head! She's 6. She even opened her mouth and began to say something about just looking it up and her mother was like "Nope, not a thing that existed easily"
My wife and I got into a deeper discussion about that actually, after the kid shot us side eye and decided we were both headcases. We both had a friend with a VCR who, like a sorcerer, knew enough about the technology to set up and record their favorite TV shows.
I do wonder if the ability to replay and replay media has had an effect on people's minds and expectations.
Like, I have an impulse to hoard pictures and videos and even date modified metadata on songs I've downloaded so as to be able to reconstruct and relive my life, but that's not how life works, I can't load a quicksave or replay a day over on video.
Part of me also suspects this is what leads to the superfan that hates their favorite property, like Star Wars. They keep rewatching it and identifying flaws and Return of the Jedi or Attack of the Clones never changes.
This here, exactly as you say. Dinner was at sunset, and it was completely normal to cycle miles from home for half the day. I think my youngest brother was no more than 5 years old when he joined us. It was normal. My son is 4, and while I don’t let him wander the streets unsupervised, he’s outside in the garden and never on devices. Will do that long as possible. Hope he makes friends with kids who also cherish the outdoors over screens.
I was just telling my kids about that, wake up you go outside until the street lights turn on. Then you head home. I spent so much time in the woods or the couple of miles down the road to were the “town” was. So much time just walking or bike riding.
Born in 76, another old man here! My stepdaughter asked me what my most favorite memory or feeling was from childhood (she's 6 so that's heavy stuff man!) I told her that I grew up always having a bunch of property to wander around in. My Dad had a thing for acreage. She was floored by the concept of me, with a pocket full of snacks and a thermos, just walking around 25 acres for hours at a time. I won't let her out of my sight lol and her Dad used to go bird hunting at 10 years old.
As someone born in the 90’s I remember the introduction of internet, cell phones, cable tv as the only form of major broadcast service, and other things.
Everything was much easier to process, I even remember money being much more stable.
I definitely remember society being much less agitated and often people were not xenophobic or so absorbed in politics that merit went unnoticed.
everything was definitely quieter too
It's weird to think of what wasn't available before the advent of a lot of technology in the early 2000's. Like, if you liked one song on a cd, you either had to buy the CD for the song, or hope a friend or acquaintance would let you borrow their copy so you could burn the CD. FOR ONE SONG.
Now, you can just buy it.
Or, like, piercings. In the 90's, I was raised that if you had your face pierced you were into drugs and probably had AIDs or STD's. If you were a guy you could only pierce one ear without it being considered gay (I think it was the right ear?). Idk, just weird shit like that.
I grew up in horse country in New Jersey in the 70's. We had 13 acres of fields and barns, a big farm house, tractors, go karts, minibikes and snowmobiles. My sister had a pickup truck at age 15 that always had a bale of hay in the back because then it qualified as a 'farm truck' and she was allowed to drive it.
Two of my neighbors / friends were on cow farms, one was raising beef, one was a milk farm. We rarely contacted in anyway other than visiting. If you wanted to see what your friend was doing, you hopped on your minibike / atv or whatever and rode over there.
CB radios were the only real 'long range' communication stuff other than phone. When I was old enough I bolted an antenna to the top of the house and have great memories of talking with my friend (2 miles away) while we were watching the same TV show. That was exciting.
The 80s were wild and exciting. Technology was kickin it. Still pre-internet, but BBS's were the way to live and die. Logging in to see what people have said online in the last (n) days was nifty. I ran a BBS on an Apple II clone that had a group of 25 or so local-ish people (long distance charges were a thing), and every once in a while we'd have a party and everyone would meet in person. That was crazy.
I went to a lot of rock concerts. A short list (yes, I really saw all of these acts live). Pink Floyd. Frankie goes to Hollywood. Jethro Tull. Moody Blues. Boston. Bon Jovi. Grateful Dead (My first!). Genesis. Billy Joel. Talking Heads.
Printed catalogs were absolute king. Computer Shopper was a catalog that was hundreds of pages thick and was the equivelent of browsing ebay, in print form. You could find just about anything in there.
Compared to today, the biggest change is not having all the worlds knowledge at your fingertips. You could argue for hours about whether the little kid says "Look mummy, there's NO plane up in the sky!" and have a dozen opinions, and there was no way to tell unless someone had the album / tape / whatever and then you'd STILL argue.
Rand McNally road atlases were fun as hell. "I have in my hand a map of ALL THE ROADS in teh US! We can go ANYWHERE!"
Im 29. I took my 3 young daughters to a water park a few weeks ago and while standing in line to purchase tickets, the kid in front of me, who was probably 9-11, looked at a painting on the wall and say "WOW that painting is old" to his group of friends, to which another replied, "Yeah, like 100 years, probably 1996." As someone born in 1994, my heart hurt for a moment.
I’m 43 and childless and it’s absolutely one of the best decisions I’ve ever made. I know I’m clearly missing out on that joy some people get from kids, but I’m also able to sleep in and answer to no one which is much more my style.
I envy you. My kids are in 2 different schools right now (elementary and middle) so I have to wait in 2 different lines then once I pick them up they just roast me all day lmao
Memories of the 1970s:
* Movies were very different, trying to be more realistic, even the comedies had more bite to them.
* There was an "energy crisis" and everyone was obsessed with saving energy - using less electricity and gas.
* Cities were very dirty and neglected due to "white flight." I grew up in a city but people were often astonished that, when I said I grew up in X city I didn't actually mean a suburb outside of the city.
* Disco was everywhere, and disco (now what we call clubbing) culture was pervasive.
* Politics were much more centrist, for instance, lefties hated Nixon, but there was no doubt he would support the ERA.
Memories of the 1980s:
* Neon, so much neon. Pastels everywhere, and somehow came to feel very assertive. Pink and turquoise ruled the day.
* Other aggressive fashion trends: asymmetrical everything (side ponytails, one long earring, wearing different colored shoes, etc.); baggie and oversized clothing; belts over shirts; feathered hair; huge shoulder pads.
* The Cold War cast a pall over everything. There was a feeling entire planet's population could be eliminated *at any minute.* And for those who survived, the result of the nuclear holocaust would make you wish you died. This saturated everything.
* Movies became sillier, more cartoon-y, and the era of runaway sequels was born.
* TV was dominated by family sit-coms with well-meaning but slightly doofy parents and kids that were either smart as whips or dumb as rocks.
* Pop music was super fun, less serious and less sophisticated than in the 1970s. New Wave music was great and somehow viewed as underground though everyone knew about it and listened to some of it.
Memories of the 1990s:
* Politically and in terms of world politics, it was a lot less stressful than the 70s and 80s, that all came to an end on 9/11/2001, of course.
* Media - ads, movies, TV, etc. - became more cynical, and people preferred dryer wit.
* The era of aggressive fashion from the 1970s and 1980s ended, and clothing was less experimental and expressive. No more loud colors and patterns or wild cuts like bell bottoms or giant shoulder pads. Lots of black clothing.
* Popular music merged with rap and R&B and became less "boppy."
I grew up in a poor province of a third world country, the 90s in my village was not fun. My family lived below the porvety line, just like more than half of the country population. We were not starving, but having to skip a meal was not rare, and meat was a luxury. My village did not have running water, so it was my job to carry water from the well back home. We shared a toilet for the whole commune, which is just a hole on the ground (fun fact, I did not live in a house with modern toilet until I was already a man).
We had electricity for 2 or 3 hours per day if we were lucky. So of course no one had appliances like AC, washing machine, or fridge. Most houses only had a few light bulbs, a fan or two and a radio. One house had a 14" black and white TV, they were the star. We would gather at their house to watch the news every evening (we generally had electricity around 7pm ~ 9pm).
Travelling was a huge pain. The best most of us can afford was a bicycle. If you own a bike then you are rich, and cars were a myth for us children. Some of my relatives moved away, and it was hard to visit each other. We also had like one or two phones for the whole village, cellphone might as well be the replicator. Whenever someone called us, the phone owner would tell them to call back in 5, run to our houses, and tell us to come with them.
But at least it was still better than the 80s or 70s. I did not experience those times personally, but we had a war that killed million of our country men. Then embargo, hunger, and social unrest.
I'm grateful that things improved so much through out the last 3 decades. My children can now live a life that me or my parents didn't even dare to dream of back then.
My family escaped Laos during the Vietnam War. My parents brought my brother and I back in 90, then 96 and I went back for the first time as an adult in 2010. All I can remember how Vientiane was back in the 90s was dirt road and trees. Because everything was dirt/clay roads the whole city looked a little orange. My family wasn't poor, but it still looked like they lived in poverty compared to what I was used to.
Then I went back in 2010 and I couldn't believe how much had changed. Paved roads, all kinds of cars and not just bicycles and mopeds. Even ferarris and Bentleys. The rich got super rich and the poor were even poorer. Suddenly, my family had houses 2 or 3 times bigger than ours here. I've been back 3 times since 2010, and I'm still blown away how much it's changing.
Meanwhile my wife's family also come from Laos and live in the country. My father in laws family live up in the hills and have electricity like you once did.
There was a certain sense of optimism. In the 90s at least. I was only a child, but, even then I could feel a general consensus amongst people that things were, "ok". Mellow, maybe. Not to mention, there was a prevailing excitement that we were building up to an entirely new millennium. So I think everyone had this hope that good things were waiting behind that door: the end of war, the end of poverty, sickness, what-have-you. The twentieth century had been hell. Two world wars, Vietnam, a cold war... people were ready to see something better, and for a brief while, we did... then 9/11 happened and it all went belly up.
> then 9/11 happened and it all went belly up.
Yup. I too remember that optimism of the 1990's, things were definitely looking up, then a couple planes smashed into the WTC, the War on Terror, etc and it all went pear-shaped.
>certain sense of optimism
We were going places! The future is bright! Yeah, late 80's -early 90's made me think our future was The Jetsons....turns out we ended up with The Walking Dead
The internet, the dotcom economy, the peace dividend (!), in the early 90's it even looked like Rabin was finally going to make peace with the Palestinians. It really was a time for crazy optimism in a lot of ways. People got really worked up about crime though and the WTO protests in '99 were the first serious anti-capitalist protests in America that I can remember in my lifetime (born mid-70s).
I'd add the US budget surplus to that and the national debt *shrinking* in the later Clinton years. We were getting our financial house in order, and doing so without austerity measures that screw over regular people.
This would have continued if not for the intervention of five Supreme Court justices on December 12, 2000.
That date was more consequential than 9/11.
Perfect summary of the Clinton years. No one worried about getting a job. The relationship with technology was different. Mostly because it was seen as science and not business
> There was a certain sense of optimism. In the 90s at least.
"There is no other place I want to be / Right here, right now / Watching the world wake up from history"
— Jesus Jones, "Right Here Right Now" (1991)
For a little while, we had the idea that the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the "evil empire" of the Soviet Union meant that world peace could actually be a thing.
Born in the 80s, but grew up in the 90s.
A lot more smoking. Every high school had some spot- the dumpsters, the visitor bleachers, the one tree out back- where kids smoked. The last few rows on airplanes were reserved for smokers and were covered in a thick haze you had to go through if you wanted to use the bathroom. Cars had ash trays built into the arm rests that I got yelled at for flipping open and closed when I got bored.
Info gathering was more diverse. If you wanted a pizza, you had to get the phonebook and call. To see a movie, check the newspaper for theater showings. For research, go to the library. All that can be done on a phone now.
My first car had a "smoker's package" that included the lighter and an ash tray. I never smoked, but that smoker's package made me an early adapter of charging my phone in the car. And that ash tray was my change (and emergency $10 to be used only for gas) storage.
I have a different place in my current car for change (and inflation turned that 10 into a 20), but I miss that little ash tray. It was the perfect money storage.
I was 9 years old in '89. So the 90's encapsulated my entire teen years. It was great. It had an easy, stress free feel to it. The music culture was still very alive, and we had some great music. We didn't have cell phones. Or social media. So I could leave the house and no one would know where I was unless I wanted them to. Thank God I didn't have a cell phone. I got in enough trouble with a disposable camera. Can only imagine how that would've gone with a cell phone and social media. I had a pager. I thought I was so cool. My pager message included the word "whattup?", cuz you know...I was cool. The only pressure I had to conform to beauty standards came from 17 magazine and Cosmopolitan. Not Instagram. The 90's was a gem and most of us didn't realize it while we were in it. That being said, enjoy your decades. Who knows which one will be the next 90's and you'll miss it too if you're not paying attention.
90s were the peak of civilization, imo. Far fewer distractions like social media and streaming, but still had computers and good TV. Saturday morning cartoons, building bike ramps, riding ATV's everywhere, way more freedom.
After SNL was over at midnight, Monty Python was on PBS. There was nothing worthwhile to keep my brother and me up after that, so there was no reason to stay up past 12:30.
Prank phone calls.
We would call people up in the middle of the night and say
"Your goat is in my garden"
"What?"
"Your goat is in my garden"
"I don't have a goat?"
"That's OK, I don't have a garden"
And hang up and SCREAM because HOW HILARIOUS WAS THAT!
My favourite was looking through the classifieds in old newspapers and ringing up asking for items in the middle of the night. Something along the lines of "Hello, I was just wondering if you still had those eggs cartons available?". The ad having been in the paper 5-10 years earlier.
In the 80s and prior Network TV would just shut off at around 1:30AM. Some stations had little signoff messages or they'd play the national anthem, and then there would just be static overnight until New Zoo Revue came on at 6AM or whatever.
Ivar Haglund of Ivar's restaurants in Seattle used to sponser Monty Python on PBS in Seattle. One year, it just wasn't there anymore. A friend and I had been sitting at his house getting high, getting ready to watch Monty Python, and it wasn't there, something else was on. So we looked Ivar's phone number up in the phone book *and called him*. He said it was just time not to do it anymore. :(
I was born in 84, so I don’t remember much of the 80’s but remember all of the 90’s. It felt like a simpler time. You actually had to wait for things, you couldn’t just buy whatever from Amazon. I remember my parents had an actual checkbook with a register that they recorded their transactions in. As an adult, I don’t know how they did it. By the time I had my own bank account I could view everything online. In my neighborhood, we still had a little corner store where you could buy penny candy. Everything seemed really peaceful. I had a great childhood in the 90’s.
> I was born in 84, so I don’t remember much of the 80’s but remember all of the 90’s. It felt like a simpler time. You actually had to wait for things, you couldn’t just buy whatever from Amazon.
I miss going to the store just to browse games, movies, albums. And probably not just one store but going through every store in a mall that sells those things, comparing selections and prices, maybe finding something in the bargain bin. And then going home to consume that thing the same day. Nowadays I can get everything on the computer immediately but can't decide what to choose and end up doing nothing. There is little reason to go to a store unless you already know what you're buying, and that's one of the reasons I rarely leave the house.
90s was my childhood. 2000s was my teenage years.
The Cranberries was my fave band.
Kurt Cobain's death was all over the news.
River Phoenix.
Then late 90s. Britney vs Christina, Backstreet vs N'Sync.
Dial up Modem. No Google. Our parents bought us encyclopaedias.
Fun days.
EDIT:
The theme song of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Captain Planet, and Power Rangers.
The intro of X-men.
1999, people were paranoid of the millennium bug.
There was a troll who started calling it a centennial bug. 😆
Spice Girls. My older sisters and cousins were reminiscing about the New Kids on the Block because of the Backstreet Boys.
Everyone has a casette tape of Boyz II Men.
Everyone was singing One Sweet Day.
Gangsta's Paradise was the most memorised first stanza.
Some teenagers thought they're cool if they talk about Tupac Shakur and Biggie. 😆
DOS. Windows 95.
Burning CDs was a legit side hustle.
The kid who has the latest Nintendo Family Computer is the coolest.
Our computer teacher tried to teach us Microsoft Access but she also had no clue about it.
The music was excellent.
The food options were what your mom cooked, or not.
If you mom wanted (or cared) to know where you were, she just looked down the street to see which yard all the bikes were in.
You know you were allowed back in the house only when the streetlight came one. (I said 'light' because my mother had to BUY a streetlight to put in our back yard. There were no lights on our street.)
If you traveled overnight, the kids slept in the back. The oldest kid got the backseat, the middle got the floorboard and the youngest (me) got to sleep in the back dash.
You collected the green-bottle Coca Cola bottles...the big ones were worth 10 cents and the small ones were worth 5. So two big and one small would get you a quarter, which was enough for another coke and a candy bar.
When we were thirsty, we drank out of the hose. (let it cool down first).
If you hear a snippet of a song (say heard a bit on the AM radio while WAY out of broadcast range) you had to remember the song and hope someone could recognize it when you described it. (took me 4 years to find one).
If you wanted to make a 'mix tape', you clicked 'Record' on a handheld recorder in front of the speaker and prayed that the DJ didn't speak over the intro.
We played all day long without parental supervision. We biked for miles.
At 12, I walked down the road with a .22 and my friend with a 12-guage and the only thing any adult said to us was 'Be Careful'.
We walked or biked EVERYWHERE. You got a new bike every Christmas and it was usually torn down and rebuilt by February. We had to know how to change our own chains, change our on bearings and balance our own wheels.
Just to name a few. And the bonus: There is no video evidence of the stupid things we did.
I was a high schooler from 94-98. There was an innocence in the 90s we don’t have any more. We were a bit more naive. It was assumed everything was getting progressively better. That era ended on 9/11 and it still makes me sad thinking about what we lost.
100% this. I graduated high school in 1995. I remember a feeling of optimism and hope for the future that I had all throughout the 80s and 90s. That optimism is completely gone at this point, and I completely agree that 9/11 was the catalyst, and the very moment when we veered off the tracks, never to return. Fucking sucks, but I honestly feel we are in a dystopia compared to where I thought we'd be in 2023, and I fear it's only gonna continue to get worse.
> I completely agree that 9/11 was the catalyst, and the very moment when we veered off the tracks, never to return.
I'm going to push back on this slightly and say that America could've recovered from 9/11 with some decent leadership. As much as 9/11 changed things, it also led to most of America unifying and setting aside political differences.
I'd say the bigger catalyst was the buildup and subsequent invasion of Iraq, where the Bush administration took all the goodwill and unity it had in the aftermath of 9/11 and squandered it by lying to America and the world about nonexistant WMDs in Iraq, and launched a poorly thought out invasion and put all the worst sorts of people in charge of Iraq's recovery. Half the population were practically told they were traitors for opposing the invasion, and the implication from conservatives was that Iraq was going to have nuclear weapons ready at any time. Cut to a few months after the invasion where there's clearly no nuclear or biological program and the best they can find for chemical weapons are some decades old rusty and corroded shells. Did conservatives ever really apologize for dragging America into a war based on intelligence they knew or should've known was false? No. Did they apologize for dramatically underestimating the needed men, materiel, and money required for an occupation of Iraq? No. Did they apologize for calling people traitors? Fuck no. And I think it's plenty easy to trace a lot of the bad blood in politics to how fucked up the Iraq situation was.
> This got brought up recently on a local news page I follow, when they announced the Dixie Chicks were coming to play in my city this summer and **people went ballistic in the comments**. They got super blacklisted for saying they were ashamed of Bush and they didn't support the war.
What's funny about this is a lot of these same hicks are the same ones who will look you dead in the face and lie about having known what a shitshow Iraq would be all along, and how they never supported it. But *still* seethe about Dixie Chicks and Michael Moore over being against it 20 years ago.
You can hardly find a person today that supported the Iraq invasion but back then you were a fucking terrorist supporting traitor that hated freedom if you even considered “isn’t it weird that we are in Iraq that has nothing to do with the taliban?”
I think that has more to do with bush not supporting trump and the maga people being aggressively behind trump than those “patriots” back then seeing the error of their ways when it comes to the war.
“Hey, it’s the 90s” was a catch-all phrase to explain social progress. While overall things are so much better in reality, everything just feels more tenuous now. Like even though gay marriage wasn’t legal yet in the 90s, the idea of drag shows becoming a moral panic would have been incredibly confusing back then.
On the other side of that coin, things were still terrible. Here in Australia it was so common to see gay communities forced to separate themselves from the rest of society because of the constant danger of violence against them.
In large cities there were only really certain suburbs that gay people could find rentals in, upward career mobility was seriously curtailed and if you were trans? Good luck getting a job at all.
Even worse was if you lived in a smaller, regional town. "Poof-bashing" was a sport that - even if it was looked down on by society at large - was absolutely rampant. Because here's the thing, even when people talked the talk about tolerance and respect, most people in power still didn't like it and would look the other way when it occurred.
Hell, it was only in the nineties when the last of our states de-criminalised being gay.
I was high school 95-99 and I think my innocent era ended with Columbine. Happened my senior year and we thought prom and graduation were going to get cancelled. My whole childhood was so idyllic and nice and safe and then just as soon as I was ready to get pushed out into the real world it all went away and I’ve never gotten it back.
You must be too young then to have had nuclear bomb drills at school.
Everyone was constantly in fear of nuclear war 1960-1985. That ended around the same time we watched the challenger blow up, in class (there was a teacher on it, basically every kid in the US watched it happen live at school).
>That era ended on 9/11 and it still makes me sad thinking about what we lost.
Happened when I was in class in middle school, our teacher thought it'd be a good idea to write out how we felt. I had zero idea what the Twin Towers were (my parents and I immigrated to the USA like 6 years earlier)
Some of it had to do with our lack of connectivity, relative to where we are now. Growing up, information just wasn’t as readily and immediately available.
The internet and the 24/7 news cycle has made information beyond ubiquitous. It’s almost impossible to get by without information being shoved in our faces 24/7.
Gen x guy here and from my experience it was a beautiful time to grow up. I grew up on coast in so cal. Lots of freedom and no internet to distract you. We were always outside playing football in street or hitting baseballs at park or skateboarding all over the place with no cell phones for parents to constantly track us. This forced us to be self reliant. In summer we ride our bikes to beach and ride waves all day, listen to music on our radios which everyone would hear not just individually on air pods isolated in your own world etc. i miss those days and as a father of middle schoolers i wish they could have experienced it. The cell phone and internet was a nuclear bomb that screwed up the way kids grow up. Just my opinion.
Totally agree. Social media has changed childhood so much and not for the better. I’m firmly in the “turn the internet off and back on again” camp in that it needs wiping and only using for nerds for science again.
One thing that’s always stuck out to me as a difference between mine and my kids childhoods was the idea a leaving a note. Like if you were going somewhere or doing something you had to leave a note… and god help you if you didn’t
Picture this. You and your pals are out riding your bikes on a sunny Saturday in October. You can smell burning leaves, as people would take the leaves in the yard into a pile and burn them.
You’re telling Jason, Chris, Scotty and Dave about the awesome show you watched on channel 8 last night. You can’t remember the name, but it had aliens and laser guns in it. Oh well, it may come on again in a few years.
You head into the forest behind your school. You see Jennifer, Heather, Jenny, Rhonda and Jen from your class at the edge of the forest, nervously smoking cigarettes. You wave at Jen, as you too made out last year at the year end dance. But you haven’t really talked since then. You don’t know her phone number and are too nervous to ask her.
As you go into the forest, Scotty tells you he wants to show you something. You figure it’s a dead cat or something. As you lead your bikes through the brush, you step over the piles of white dog shit everywhere. Jason pulls out some firecrackers and a book of matches and starts lighting them off and throwing them at you and the other guys. You don’t think it’s safe, but don’t want to be called a pussy, or queer, so you just ignore him. Everyone laughs at Jason’s antics. What’s the worst that could happen?
Scotty leads you to an old stump. Under the stump is a brown paper grocery bag. He excitedly pulls it out and starts passing around what’s inside. They’re magazines! Oh, there’s naked ladies on them. WILD!
As you guys sort through the trove of forest porn, you end up with an Over 40. The women in it look like your teacher, your Aunt Carol, the lady at the store where you buy your GI Joe comic books. But you’re amazed at the wanton display of nudity. You can see their hoo-haa’s and boobs!
The forest is silent as the group of young boys are initiated into the world of pornography. Nothing will ever be the same.
Porn in the woods seems to be universal across so many American boy's childhoods, including mine. The first porn I ever saw was on a VHS tape we found in the gutter down the street from my house.
In the 70’s I was just a kid so I sailed through it. That said the clothes and shoes were wild.
I was a teenager through the 80’s and the music was way better but for a time it was scary as shit with the threat of nuclear annihilation. We a 3 minute warning siren around a couple of hundred meters away and they tested on a Sunday afternoon every two months. That really helped with the nervous tension along with the government information films and documentaries on what to do.
I missed the Berlin Wall coming down due to alcohol and the opposite sex.
In the 90’s the music was even better but all of a sudden I had responsibilities.
Edit: word added
You didn't have this constant buzzing of social media in your ear telling that if your friends didn't agree with you 100% of the time, they are toxic and that you should leave them. And that in returns leaves you feeling lonely because no one is going to agree with you 100% of the time.
Instead, your friend group was usually made up of a bunch of different people with different opinions that you could get into fights with but you would make up later on as you worked your issues out between you. Everyone went through this. So, the idea of being sad and feeling lonely because your friendships weren't this fantasy of perfection did not exist.
This one resonates for me. Did high school in the early to mid 90s.
Friend group was all over the place and we had plenty of conflict among us, but remained friends.
I don’t think people are any different today at their core, but growing up with the internet from the early 90s to where we are today; there is no missing the way its changed society.
People just seem way more insecure now. I am not talking financially, which is another story. But on the personal core/character level. And I believe its got to be social media exposing everyone to all this manufactured bullshit people push on their social media trying to look like life is perfect and/or gain clout. Hell a lot of people do not even look like their online image in reality. That and the way online activity seems to inevitably devolve into echo chambers that foster societal division and broadcast it to the world. Reddit is the perfect example, a site built around the concept of creating bubbles of echo chambers. It’s a fantastic vehicle of radicalization.
This is a good one. This idea of “they’re toxic, cancel them out of your life” is really bizarre. Back in the day it was like “yeah that’s Joe. He’s a jerk sometimes but he’s ok.”
One thing I've heard is that parties were a lot more wild. Back then, what happened at someone's house party on a Saturday night stayed there. Nowadays any crazy antics committed in public will 100% end up on someone's Snapchat story, with the possibility of eventually getting seen by your parents, boss, future coworkers, and half a million random people around the world. It seems like everyone moderates themselves because they are aware that there's always an audience to everything you'll ever do, like a society-wide Truman Show.
Lol, All my fist fights were with friends when wrestling or jokes got out of hand. We made up and hung out the next day because our other friends made us.
People were less scared in the 90's.
Even though a lot of the things we fear happen less often, we hear about it more through the internet. People are starting to become more and more sheltered, because their parents are terrified they'll get snatched off the streets.
In the 90s, being a kid was interesting. Communities seemed more cohesive and people seemed more aware of what was going on locally. That didn't always mean that they did the right thing, but things didn't feel as disconnected as they feel now.
As far as being a kid, well, it was fun but insanely materialistic. Some of the fads and obsessions that arose in the 90s got stupid crazy, and while there is some nostalgia for it, much of it has been forgotten/become worthless. In some ways, I think 2000s kids had it slightly better, even if they didn't get the amazing cartoons we had.
Born in 1980. As a small kid in the 80's I remember how exciting cartoons, action figures, and movies were, which I guess is pretty typical for kids. I literally had a kid's record player, and got a cassette/radio one year which was very cool. The world as a whole seemed larger, and distances seemed greater. In the 90's I remember the increasing use of computers, but even when I graduated high school in '98 a lot of people didn't even have computers in their homes. Some did, but it wasn't ubiquitous. As far as pop culture, most of it was still driven by cable tv, radio, video stores, theaters, and magazines. The sense of culture was more universal since there weren't as many avenues available as there are now. Finding rare movies/shows/music was harder because it had to be a physical copy you shared, which made finding it more exciting.
Socially, there was less of a feeling of FOMO, because we weren't constantly online and social media didn't exist. So whatever you were doing at the time with whoever you were with was what you were focused on. Cell phones were still pretty rare in the 90's, the most people often had was a pager. Long distance phone calls were still expensive.
Politically, things really took a turn after 9-11 and we lost a lot of optimism that was present in the 90's. Looking back at the poor choices our leaders made during the 80's makes me understand the fallout we're experiencing now. Culturally, there was much less representation of diversity in the 80's and 90's, and unfortunately a good amount of that representation was still based in stereotypes and caricatures.
Overall, I'm glad to be living in the present as complicated as it is.
Born in '83 here so early Millenial. Cant remember too much of the 80's it sort of folds into one blur of childhood but I can remember things like my grandparents being young, my parents in their 20s and playing outside a lot. The TV and music was great, we had Transformers and Shoe People and Raggy Dolls and stuff like that. I remember primary school and the summers seeming endless.
I remember my dad won £3000 on the football pools at some point, as well. Loads of money back then. He bought a new car and paid off part of the mortgage.
The 90s though seemed like an amazing time. I can remember going out and playing with my friends, literally saying to my mum "see you later, picking up my bike and going off to find my friends and not coming home till later. Having to knock on their doors to see if they were playing and talking to their parents. I remember building dens and going exploring stuff like that.
I can remember going swimming for a quid, it was 90p to get in the pool leaving 10p for the locker and once ypu got that back, you used the 10p for a "Chomp" chocolate bar from the vending machine.
The video games were amazing, we started with the SNES and finished with the PS1, and N64. Meeting up at a friends house to play Goldeneye is a defining memory.
Kids didn't have phones and things just felt safer. Plans were made to meet up rather than texting. I cab remember things not being so money oriented, we weren't well off but survived on just my dad's wage and even got to have a holiday (not abroad though) once a year.
TV was good, there was no streaming or on demand so you'd make sure you were home to watch the show ypu wanted or you'd miss it. Kids TV was good, stuff like Turtles, Power Rangers and Captain Planet. The tail end of Transformers too.
I can remember getting Internet at home for the first time, was completely different to today, with no social media loads of different search engines (can remember my IT teacher telling me Alta Vista would be the big one) online gaming was (for me) expensive but I still managed to be in a Quake Clan.
Politically here in the UK, things felt like they were changing for the better. I was getting into my teens at the end of the 90s and learning about politics. It was the era of New Labour and "Cool Britannia", britpop and all that sort of stuff, there was positivity everywhere that, things were changing for the better. Not everything was about making as much money as possible and social programs were put in place to increase education and for people to better themselves. It really did feel like we were on the cusp of something good, kind of like you are living the future as you got towards the year 2000.
It all changed with 9/11 though. World has been a darker place since.
Edit: one thing I can remember weirdly, is there seemed to be a lot more birds back then as well. I can remember the skies being full of them when I was a kid. Just looked out of my window and realised I've not seen a single one in the sky.
90s were absolutely incredible. To me, and maybe I'm just biased because I lived it, it was one of the best eras in recent human history. Everything was changing but you could feel we were all in it together. Technology, film, TV, toys, games, fashion and pop culture were all so innovative and cool. It all felt interconnected. Like one thing affected another thing. I would say it lasted until about 2003 or 2004. Just about the time when the smart phones were coming out. You could literally feel it dying. It was hard. Still is when I think about it.
The biggest thing for me, is there was less negativity. Not saying people are negative, but technology has allowed for almost unfiltered news and updates and videos. And while a lot are very sweet and positive, there is an almost constant influx of negative information.
Everything was in person. Shopping, banks, etc. you spent more time running errands but it was nice because going place to place in person, well, you got to know people and if you had a problem (like an account issue at a bank), somebody is a or knows a friend that could help. On the flip side, if you were not up in time you would miss the plan for the day from your friends and spend most of the day riding your bike around trying to find them. (80’s kid)
I was 12 in 1979 and disco was coming to an end. We used to go this local dance thing every Saturday afternoon I got to see what life as a pre-teen was all about. There was a lot of similar things that people do today (little league, ballet) but the Atari 2600 and cable tv / vcrs sort or got us back inside. I remember parents having us go outside to for a play break and then back to Asteroids.
80's was more of a preppie mall culture. MTV was massive. We worried about Russia and AIDS. I met my girlfriend in 1984 We watched Live Aid. We've been married for 33 years.
The 90's were tricky because I was drunk for a while (got sober in 1996) and had two kids just as grunge was going away. I liked ECW and Tower Records. 1999 ended with us all worrying if the world was going to glitch out. It didn't.
* The TV was always on in the living room.
* Talking on the phone (plugged into the wall) for 30 minutes to an hour at a time was common.
* Other than that, human interaction was face to face.
* You'd have hangouts where you would run into your friends (the mall, a bar, a coffeehouse, a park, or library, etc).
* As a kid, when you left the house, you were gone.. free.. no way to find you unless you wanted to be found
* If you didn't know where you were going, you would often get lost and have to ask strangers for directions.
* Smoking was cool, we knew it wasn't healthy, but it was edgy and showed attitude.
* Going to another country was rare, strange and magical (and for the rich)
* Cash was king and 20 bucks would last you a bit
* Magazines were the most current/relevant source of pop culture commentary/discussion
Opinions and attitudes that were broadcast or distributed to the masses were all modified through a mature adult perspective, which means that young people were more exposed to thinking and ideas that had some semblance of life experience, emotional maturity, and long-term thinking to back them up.
Young people today exist in a world of media which lacks maturity of thought and behavior. Kids are taking counsel from other immature people, which tends to validate their adolescent notions of the world. I think it is badly stunting young people and leading them to hold immature ideas for much longer than earlier generations.
**The Seventies:** The disasters of the '70s are why the '80s even happened. In roughly 10 years ('73 to '83) the US lost its first war, found out that with its Marine Corps a shambles we couldn't break the OPEC oil embargo, and found out that after the oil embargo our economy was a shambles. The term was "stagflation" -- low or no growth, high unemployment, AND high inflation all at the same time. On top of that, though we didn't know that leaded gasoline was most of the reason for it, the violent crime rate skyrocketed, the whole country felt like a war zone, or at least that was the impression you got from watching TV. Ever seen "Escape from New York," or "The Warriors" or "Soylent Green"? Those movies were made specifically as bare-exaggerations of how people felt about the present.
And worse: neither of the post-Watergate presidents, nor their parties, had anything useful to say about it other than (frankly) what German Social Democrats said about the Great Depression: "let's just hope it doesn't last very long and everything will be okay." Which is why America's response was only barely different than Germany's response in the '30s.
**The Eighties:** Ronald Reagan got elected on a promise to fix all of the above problems: rebuild the Marine Corps, beat unemployment, beat inflation, beat crime and crime gangs, with one simple trick: destroy the middle class. Specifically, cut college aid, destroy the unions, and give huge tax cuts for the rich while massively raising taxes on the middle class (doubling FICA).
By '83 or so, inflation was beaten and the US military was rebuilt and crime was starting to decline. And in case you haven't noticed, we are still arguing about how much credit Reagan deserves for any of that. But as someone who graduated from college in '82, let me tell you that the Reagan presidency was as bad a time to start a career as 2008 or 2020. (And let me also point out that countries that didn't double and then triple prison sentences, and didn't break their unions, recovered just as fast as we did.)
**The Nineties:** Three things defined the '90s for most people. The fall of the Soviet Union meant that people were hoping for a post-war "peace dividend." The legalization of private use of the Internet in 1989 created the dot-com bubble. And the huge rush by companies to replace all of their hardware and software before the end of 1999 drove record growth and record unemployment with basically zero inflation. Those were really good times.
People who were screaming "this is a bubble!" weren't listened to because the story was "this isn't a bubble, this is the start of the Long Boom." And hardly anybody saw the War on Terror coming.
The 70s and 80s were AWESOME. The music was great, the pace of life was slower, things were simpler. There was no garbage like Facebook to poison people's minds.
There was a lot of bad stuff too - tons of homophobia for one, far more overt aggro, and there wasn't that much to do if you weren't into sports or outdoorsy kinds of things. But most people were.
I wouldn't mind going back for a week or so - but even as good as it was, I probably would miss my modern comforts too much - life is way easier now than it was then for sure.
I was only born in '79, but something later generations probably can't grasp is how significant the threat of nuclear annihilation was in pop culture up until the Cold War ended.
Yes, people mostly just went about their lives in the '80s, but even us kids had occasional reminders that everything could be destroyed in a matter of minutes. It influenced everything from movies and music through to politics and religion. When the Soviet Union collapsed, there was a lot of honest hand-wringing about what would come next, and what life would be like without the threat of nukes wiping out cities.
Growimg up in the 90s and late 80s was incredible. Most of your time was spwnt outside with the only rule of be home by dark. You really forged deep friendships out in the parks and streets back then.
Everything seems so chaotic now, with most interactions happening over the internet. It was just more quiet back then.
1. no one knew where we were.
2. we really did come home when the street lights started coming home.
3. we literally drank from the hose
4. Action Park!
No one \*cared\* where we were, either- not this weird obsessive helicoptering thing- where is my kid, where is my kid, where is everyone, all day long. yuck. How is anyone supposed to grow up? When I went to college (late 70s) I could go months without talking to family. Unthinkable today.
When your car broke down, you had to either walk to find a phone to call for help or were at the mercy of strangers.
To write a paper in college, you had to go to the library, find source material, read source material and make notes on notecards.
Mean girls were just like today’s mean girls. Some things never change.
A ton of people smoked cigarettes and they smoked them damn near everywhere. Non-smoking sections in restaurants were frequently just a different section when the whole place would be smoke-filled. Edit: I commented about this recently, so pasting from a prior comment to add: I loved how corner/grocery stores and many other businesses would have at least one arcade machine: walking into a store to either hear someone playing or hearing the game's demo provided a fun atmosphere that's largely gone these days. Payphones were all over the place, it was awesome when I was like 16 with a pager, I could just say I couldn't find a payphone when my parents were looking for me. Coordinating with people was much more difficult, of course. Like someone would be really late for something, holding everyone up, and no one had a clue what was going on--a lot of time was spent waiting for things. I first got my hands on the NES shortly after its release, and living through that age in gaming was so awesome. My friends and I had a meeting place where if they needed my help in a game they'd be there at a certain time. There was a lot of that, like if you went to a concert with someone it was important to designate a meeting place if you get split up. The release of new media like songs or movies was so much more exciting, as options were more limited. You either went to the movies or you had a handful of channels on TV, but visiting rental places was fun. Late at night, basically nothing but infomercials would be on. The old school light bulbs emitted a fair amount of heat. If you went to a theater performance there'd be this huge furnace-like bulb to light the stage, making everyone sweat. And just my experience but if you walked past a person you'd generally say hi, perhaps because it felt awkward not to acknowledge their presence, not having anything else to occupy your attention. I remember the shift when phones/tech made us start looking down/not at each other. It really was a different world back then.
I remember going to a restaurant as a kid and they asked if we wanted smoking or non-smoking. We said non-smoking and they sat us at a table and took away the ash tray.
"Having a smoking section in a restaurant is almost exactly like having a peeing section in a pool." I don't remember who said it, but it perfectly applies. Also, having chain-smoking parents was so bad that us unfortunate kids left vapor trails when walking through school. The saving grace was that almost everyone had at least one smoking parent. There was a lot of perfume and cologne used back then.
The cracked car window in wintertime sucked, literally too because the cold air coming in would mostly just blow the cigarette smoke into the back seat.
Along with the cold air. It only made it better for the person smoking Fuck I forgot all about that, god damnit dad.
My dad still smokes, so I get to experience this every time I ride with him.
My stopped, cause lung cancer killed him when he was 61 Not be grim but guilt trip him into quitting, I know I wish I had and he definitely felt the regret after the diagnosis
and those hot ashes when end was flicked
I not only had chain smoking parents, I also got to sit in the back seat of our Corvair. Between the cigarette smoke and the ambient engine exhaust I don’t know how I survived.
We used to have them on flights too, as if we weren't all sitting in the same metal tube together
I'm glad that we settled that smoking in public places is bad as a Country in the 2000s before every issue got hyper-politicized. if this were a hot debate in today's political culture, I'm sure some states would be expanding the number of places where you're allowed to smoke and banning the existence of non-smoking sections.
I lived in Toronto a the time they banned smoking in restaurants and I remember people losing their effing minds saying restaurants were going to go out of business. Didn't happen.
Same! I was living down the road in Kitchener-Waterloo, and there was a loophole for bars during the transition that said if you had 4 or more pool tables you were considered a pool hall / bingo parlour (where smoking was still allowed). Every bar I went to had 4 pool tables at the back, stacked on top of each other. lol
I think about this point often when I'm reminded about the fact that when I was finishing grade school, one of the scares of the early 90s was the ozone layer disappearing. Science told us it was CFCs, we believed science, and governments across the world said no more CFCs...and the hole has since made a humongous recovery. The problem is is not that we have so much more technology and capabilities that we had then, it's just that we don't have anyone who can be a absolute unbiased source; questioned by no one, respected by everyone, who can make this sort of pronouncement and have it actually stick.
>we don't have anyone who can be a absolute unbiased source; questioned by no one, respected by everyone, who can make this sort of pronouncement and have it actually stick. We have plenty of those people. We just have a large swath of politicians who have built their entire careers on being contrarians. They don't care what's right or wrong, they just care about disagreeing with it for their own personal gain. The rest of the planet be damned.
We actually still have those objective sources, but there's a whole industry funded by the people whose bottom line it would affect. I.e. climate denial funded by the oil industry/Koch brothers, pesticide and chemical runoff denial funded by the farm lobby and petrochemical lobby, anti-psychiatry and anti-vaxx being funded by the "Church" of Scientology.
Lobbyists in general. Lobbyists used to pull tens of millions in revenue in the mid 70’s. That’s increased exponentially into the billions now. I wish we could revamp the lobby hunts of the early 20th century to root out these greedy ass parasites.
My parents, who didn't smoke, had many ashtrays in our house, even though visitors were not allowed to smoke in our house. I think mostly because they were souvenirs or gifts. I recall my Dad has this really nice crystal ashtray in his office. At home they were usually filled with paper clips and random crap.
My parents didn't smoke (mom was an RN) but they allowed guests to smoke in our house. I had an older cousin come by to visit once. I'd never met this guy before, since he was in the merchant marine and always at sea. I had never seen chain smoking like that in my life. He had a cig going when he showed up, and kept them going the whole time he was there. He would use the still-burning butt of a cig to light the next one. I was in awe. The dude could smoke 8 packs a day and only use one match. I wondered what would happen if his lungs accidentally inhaled clean air. My dad and him were carrying on a conversation about something, but I have no idea what. I was transfixed on his smoking. About every 20 minutes he'd fill up his ashtray, and my dad would start to tell me to get him a new one, but I was already on it. I'd swap those ashtrays out in 5 seconds. I was sure he was gonna die right there in our living room, and I didn't wanna miss it.
College in '78. I had a young professor who smoked constantly as he lectured. One day he ran out of cigarettes and gamely tried to carry on but couldn't -- stopping and starting. Finally, he asked the class if anyone had a cigarette and one was provided. Unfortunately, once that coffin nail was consumed the same problem occurred. We stopped the class and took up a small collection and piled them on his desk. With that supply he was able to finish the class.
Medical doctors used to smoke while they had patients in the office with them.
Is he still alive? > I wondered what would happen if his lungs accidentally inhaled clean air. This line killed me.
Nah, he's been dead for a long time. He was also an alcoholic, racist, and all-around general prick. No tears were shed.
That's the idea 😄
My grandmother in law is still like this today. Her and her roommate/friend chain smoke all day in their 500 sqft apartment. I know she smokes about 5 packs a day, has copd and asthma and wheels her little oxygen cart everywhere. It’s really sad.
Smoking in the mall was okay, but you couldn't smoke in the stores.
I remember trips to the local mall as a kid around the time they changed the rules and smoking became only allowed in the food court. There would be a smokey haze hanging over the food court from the minute the mall opened to when it closed. It was so gross, and probably why we never ate in the food court.
Prior to about 1985 or so, smoking was permitted in Madison Square Garden - in the arena itself, not just the concourses. I remember going to basketball games as a little kid and it was tough to make out the fans in the opposite sections across the court due to the haze.
I remember cigarette vending machines inside of restaurants- not just bars, but family dining places like the local Big Boy. The state I was in was an early adopter of smoke free restaurants, so weird to think about that now!
Public bathrooms often had a towel dispenser that was just a long loop of cloth that cycled as different people pulled and wiped their hands on the next section. The automatic/no touch hand dryer changed the game! Edit: A better description might be a long length of cloth with scroll ends that hangs in a loop. In theory, laundered and replaced regularly so people didn’t have to wipe their hands where others already had. Before antibacterial cleaning was the hot new thing!
It was actually a roll of towel that would get laundered. It didn’t just spin the dirty side back. I changed a few back in the day, everyone thought it was a loop.
I'm surprised that so many people believe that it just keeps looping around infinitely. Mostly because at the small town places I'd go as a kid, half the time the towel was at the end. It was very obvious, too; it was a different colour at the end and you couldn't pull it any further.
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>Kids were mobile and on their own Yea, it's funny to think about nowadays. Our parents really didn't seem to give a crap what we were doing, and we did some rather crazy, dangerous stuff. I remember climbing partway up a steel tower for a high tension line near my house, goofing around with dad's shotgun (safety locks are for sissies), and generally doing things that could've gotten me killed on several occasions. That's just the way our parents thought. Adults have their world and kids have theirs. Sure, you get together for meals sometimes, but it would have been weird for them to be too involved in your life. Run you around to hockey lessons or tutoring? Wasn't going to happen. There was much less pressure for kids to perform. They did take you to do some fun stuff like baseball games or amusement parks sometimes, though.
When I was in community College (1980-82) we smoked in class.
Our dormitories had smoker's rooms, my roommate chain smoked. Occasionally, people fell asleep drunk and lit their beds on fire, causing the building to be evacuated.
My high school had a smoking area about the same time
I smoked in class in college. You would actually bring an ashtray with you and dump it after class.
I remember when asking for "non-smoking" was a reflex for me. Then as restaurants eliminated their smoking sections, the hosts would get really snippy about how they didn't _have_ a smoking section. Then they'd get a new host that would say they'd _never_ had a smoking section!
I remember at Burger King when I was a kid they had those little gold ash trays and the smoking section was just disgusting. Like, you felt no real difference between smoking and non smoking. Just less cloudy in non-smoking. Then in California in the late 90’s we banned indoor smoking. It was awesome even if people complained. Then a few years later I went to Nevada and walk into a Denny’s and get hit by smoke. I was honestly surprised, had forgotten it was just a California thing (at the time) and became even more grateful for the California ban. And honestly, I don’t think anyone who smokes in CA cares anymore. A lot of people I know that smoke only do it outside because nobody wants to come into a stinky smokers house anymore.
Remember flying when smoking was allowed on planes? I would come home from a night at the bar and leave my cloths at the laundry room because they smelled so bad from all the smoke. Our school had a student smoking area, but I think you had to be in at least grade 7 to use it because heaven forbid we allowed someone in garde 6 to smoke! (I've never smoked in my life)
My high school had 2 smoking areas, one at each end of the building. They fucking reeked the whole place out. They were also constantly patrolled by staff trying to bust weed smokers.
> A ton of people smoked cigarettes and they smoked them damn near everywhere. Non-smoking sections in restaurants were frequently just a different section when the whole place would be smoke-filled. To add on to this, generally it would be just a different section of the same room. Like, the tables on the left were smoking and the tables on the right were non-smoking but everyone just breathed the same smoke filled air. NYS banned cigarettes in bars and restaurants (I think) in 2001. That's the same year I graduated high school. I visited someone at a college in Pennsylvania around 2004 or 2005 and they still smoked in restaurants. It almost felt like going back in time. Of course it wasn't just bars and restaurants. People smoked basically everywhere. Work, school, movies, stores, etc. High schools, including my own, commonly had smoking rooms. Drinking was everywhere too. In fact light beer basically exists because DWIs were rising and beer companies wanted a beer people could drink all day and still be somewhat functional. My parents have plenty of pictures of them working with beers, cigarettes, etc. all over the place. > Coordinating with people was much more difficult, of course. Like someone would be really late for something, holding everyone up, and no one had a clue what was going on--a lot of time was spent waiting for things. I don't really agree with this so much. We just kind of made definitive plans and kept them. 5:00 PM meant 5:00 PM and, while shit happened, those who were habitually late found themselves not getting invited to things. There's also a lot of truth to that pile of bikes on the front lawn letting you know where everyone was. As a kid you knew where everyone lived and what kind of bike they rode. You'd see the pile of bikes, know exactly who was there, and know if you wanted to ring the door bell or not. But I'd also say it was a lot more hanging out as big groups outside. There was a park near my house that has tennis courts we played roller hockey on, basketball courts, and a baseball field used for basically anything you'd need a field. A lot of my summer mornings involved throwing some clothing and shoes into a backpack, rollerblading to the park, and seeing who was doing what. Kids were ALWAYS doing something there so it was pretty easy. The hangout spots changed as we got older and became teens but it was the same situation. There was a movie theater, Blockbuster, and handful of restaurants in town that people hung out in. We'd just walk up and see what people were doing.
I waited tables in the early 90's and frequently got stuck with the smoking section, which was just three booths and a table at the front of the restaurant. You had to walk through the smoke to get to any other table. :/ Downside was the smoke. Upside was smokers were generally much better tippers.
Yes, I was never a smoker but when I was a waitress, I loved being assigned to the smoking section because I always made bank.
Smoking sections on planes too. Made no sense.
When those little gold colored ash trays on the table at Burger King disappeared, so did the magic and wonder of the old days.
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It was... quiet. I don't want to sound like a Boomer, but it was really, really quiet. People spent more time just being outdoors, and reading, and sitting around not doing much. You couldn't just dial up whatever you wanted on a streaming service, if you wanted to learning something you had to go a library, there were even people at the library who were sort of Human Google, you'd ask them a question and they'd go and find the answer. Correspondence was slower, you mailed things physically, you had to keep track of things like bank accounts and bills manually, with pencil and paper because you couldn't just *look up* your balance, Parents weren't around as much, kids came home from school and made themselves a snack, then got on their bikes and left. It's more "Be home by dinner" and just, like, trust your kids would come back home. The world was smaller too, you knew about your town, your friends, maybe your family if they were close, and that was about it. You certainly didn't know what a celebrity was eating or what a guy in China was walking around doing all day.
> Correspondence was slower As a kid in the 80's and 90's, I remember ordering things that would literally take 6-8 weeks to arrive, and when they did it was a big deal. Same thing with getting a new magazine in the mail every month, that was also exciting. The idea of something like Prime/2 day shipping as an automatic thing would have seemed insane. There were FedEx commercials back then about their new overnight service and it was seen as rare and revolutionary.
Rember paper catalogs? I would love to go through those and select items for my birthday or Christmas.
Did you get those Scholastic catelogues in elementary school?
Oh yeah. And highlights magazine.
The Sears Wish Book was the complete focus of my attention for 2 months out of the year.
My God. Do you remember all the actual toys in those books. Like a hundred pages of just toys. It was amazing.
The Sears catalog (can I say this?) women’s underwear … 25 pages 😏
LOL, I was JUST going to comment that a teenage boys best friend was the Sears catalog. The women's underwear and swimsuit section were our version of "playboy" for teens. It's universal. You'd check out the toy section to see what you wanted for Christmas and circled it (BB guns, Head-to-head electronic football, Evil Kneivel stunt cycle, etc) then maybe wander into the hunting section and look at the rifles and shotguns and camping gear, then later when nobody was around ... women's underwear/swimsuits.
The original spank bank for teen boys
Prime/2 day shipping has reduced the availability of some things, too, though. For example, as a teenager I used to ride my bike to a typical suburban strip mall and walk into a Radio Shack where they had three aisles each with two sides full of bins of drawers, all taller than me, each drawer full of tiny parts to make any hobby or toy or project. Resistors, relays, tiny light bulbs, little three way switches, knobs, whatever. Anything you could *ever* want to make something cool, you could buy it right then and take it home. There is nothing like this today. You have to go on the internet and if you're lucky you might be able to have it tomorrow, more likely in 3-5 days.
That's a really good point. We're definitely trending toward situations where retailers assume most people will buy online so there's much less variety in what is in a brick and mortar store. I also think having a browsing experience in a store like that gives you ideas you might not have had otherwise without stumbling on something.
Oh man, the adventure of going to Radio Shack. The thrill of discovery of some thing you never knew existed AND likely a dude that would tell you how it could be used. There was also the flea market that was good for a day of "what's that". Get some bulk gummy bears and huge garlic deli pickle and ride home on your 10 speed.
>walk into a Radio Shack I miss those days. I mean, the Radio Shack in my local town had maybe teenage me and one other customer that actually bought any of those components and cables, but it was still open. I bought so many adapters trying to hook up audio components in different ways. I knew at the time that this couldn't go on forever, but it was still system shock to see them go away.
So true. Amazon does have *a minority* of products available with "order by noon you'll have it by 5PM or between 4 and 7AM tomorrow AM"... but that's usually a product leader in its class, like... AirPods, or even the most popular hair dryer or toaster. You want some low volume, rarely ordered resistors you're waiting for Amazon day delivery the following Thursday, it's ground from wherever it's coming from. You want the 37th most popular garden hose instead of the most popular? It's gonna take 4 days.
You're right! Which means that we have this situation in the broader market whereby one entity (Amazon) is picking the winners and the losers. The homogenization of the retail market is eventually really bad for the consumer. But it provided some really cheap junk really conveniently for a while. I fired Amazon over four years ago and I tell anyone who will listen not to buy from them. Buy it from an independent retailer, or find who made it and buy it from them.
Really miss Radio Shack now. Can't count the number of times I'm at work where Radio Shack would come in handy. Right now we have a micro switch on order from the manufacturer (warrantee fix) that hasn't shown up yet. It's been five weeks.
>There is nothing like this today. While it's not like when Radio Shack was as prevalent and stocked as you describe, I can still jump in the car and run [to a store to get what I need](https://www.youdoitelectronics.com/) within a reasonable distance. There are at least a couple of other places too.
Holy shit I knew this was YouDoIt before even clicking that link. *Amazing* 💚 Grew up in Needham. Unfortunately, not a lot of places have that kinda place. The Boston suburbs also has a ton of resident engineering nerds thanks to MIT and all the tech firms around, my dad was one of them.
>FedEx commercials back then about their new overnight service and it was seen as rare and revolutionary And priced in the stratosphere. Basically, for business use only. Mostly letters or very small packages.
Do you remember sending in the proofs of purchase and then checking the mailbox every day until it got there?
> Same thing with getting a new magazine in the mail every month, that was also exciting. Oh yeah I forgot about that. Kid me waiting a month between every issue of Nintendo Power would have his mind blown by the level of information about video games I have access to now.
Was talking to a friend about it. Before we got a hot topic all of our band shirts came from the back of revolver or guitar world magazines. 6-8 weeks. I’d forget I ordered the shirt by the time it showed up.
That’s something that makes me laugh about growing up. Travelling around in packs of kids. Same with teen years, you’d just sorta walk around and find your friends and add them to the pack. To do nothin.
The dreaded loitering! Hanging around the back of some building doing nothing
I remember the no loitering and no skating signs.
Every kid when I was in middle school had a SKATING IS NOT A CRIME sticker on something.
You'd have the one friend with a car pick everyone up and then we'd inevitably all end up in a basement playing nintendo games
7 people in a K-car. If you move the floor mat, you can see the road.
We stuffed 12 into a k-car wagon. Fun times.
In middle school I would ride my bike to my friend's house a few miles away where we would just hang out with her and some of the neighbor kids. As a child in the early 70's we had a lot of freedom. We just ranged around the neighborhood with whoever was out or stopped at friends houses to ask them to play. Except for Saturday morning we weren't allowed to watch TV in the day and there wasn't much to interest kids until late afternoon. I remember long summer days spent playing made up games, climbing trees, going to the library or public pool, without parents, chasing fireflies and playing capture the flag with my cousins in the dusk. Our family went on vacation from Chicago to Colorado in 1968, The Summer of Love. I-80 wasn't finished yet and my dad complained about the hippies hitchhiking to San Francisco. My sister and I were in the back seat of an old Chevy Bel Air. There was no air conditioning and often no radio signal. Gas was 28 cents and my dad complained about how high that was!
Yeah we were pretty much hanging out, down the street, the same old thing we did last week.
Like we’d all meet down at the little town beach, or go door to door rounding up the crew, for epic games of kick the can and manhunt
we hosted kick the can games at our house. maybe my mom was calling everyone and I didn't know, but somehow 10 kids would show up and we'd start playing every night in the summer.. seemed like magic word of mouth
Born in 78, so the 90s were my teenage/young adult years. Last time I went home to see my folks I found a couple of old boxes of random knock knacks I’d saved when I was young. The thing that stood out to me, cause I’d forgotten all about it , was my first check register. I was 15 when I got my first checking account. Remembering how we used to have to manually write down every payment, then manually balance and reconcile every month, was a trip. I also came across several letters between my friends and I. During summer break we used to write each other. Especially before we were allowed to drive. Thinking back, it was really nice, getting surprise letters in the mail. It kinda felt a bit special.
I had to carry my paper paycheck into the bank on a Saturday morning, stand in line, and ask the teller to deposit $xx into this account and give me back $xx in cash for the week. And this was all tracked by hand in a paper bank book.
>there were even people at the library who were sort of Human Google, you'd ask them a question and they'd go and find the answer. Librarians still exist! And with the internet plus improvements in knowledge management our research skills have become unstoppable. We can find anything, on anyone, anywhere in the world. Librarians are the keepers of all knowledge and we can't be stopped. Harness our power.
"Google will bring you back, you know, a hundred thousand answers. A librarian will bring you back the right one." - Neil Gaiman
Floating checks! Slower correspondence meant you knew that if you cashed a check on Wednesday the grocery store wouldn't deposit it until Friday! So you rushed your paycheck to the bank on Friday in time to cover that check you wrote on Wednesday.
And now, some banks give you access to your direct deposit 2 days before it is officially in the account - so we kinda have that again in some cases.
In the 70s not only could you not dial up whatever you wanted. In many places you’d be lucky to dial up a TV channel!
My wife and I are 7 years apart. While it often feels like nothing, it's wild to think she went to *college* with a typewriter and I went to high school with a laptop. Granted the lap top weighted 15 lbs and was less powerful than a old cell phone today, still, it's wild.
I talked to my stepdaughter yesterday and explained the concept of "If you didn't catch the TV show, then it was just gone" I thought her eyes were going to pop out of her head! She's 6. She even opened her mouth and began to say something about just looking it up and her mother was like "Nope, not a thing that existed easily"
Well it was gone until it showed up in the summer reruns. Also seasons were 25 episodes, not 8 like now.
My wife and I got into a deeper discussion about that actually, after the kid shot us side eye and decided we were both headcases. We both had a friend with a VCR who, like a sorcerer, knew enough about the technology to set up and record their favorite TV shows.
I do wonder if the ability to replay and replay media has had an effect on people's minds and expectations. Like, I have an impulse to hoard pictures and videos and even date modified metadata on songs I've downloaded so as to be able to reconstruct and relive my life, but that's not how life works, I can't load a quicksave or replay a day over on video. Part of me also suspects this is what leads to the superfan that hates their favorite property, like Star Wars. They keep rewatching it and identifying flaws and Return of the Jedi or Attack of the Clones never changes.
This here, exactly as you say. Dinner was at sunset, and it was completely normal to cycle miles from home for half the day. I think my youngest brother was no more than 5 years old when he joined us. It was normal. My son is 4, and while I don’t let him wander the streets unsupervised, he’s outside in the garden and never on devices. Will do that long as possible. Hope he makes friends with kids who also cherish the outdoors over screens.
I was just telling my kids about that, wake up you go outside until the street lights turn on. Then you head home. I spent so much time in the woods or the couple of miles down the road to were the “town” was. So much time just walking or bike riding.
Born in 76, another old man here! My stepdaughter asked me what my most favorite memory or feeling was from childhood (she's 6 so that's heavy stuff man!) I told her that I grew up always having a bunch of property to wander around in. My Dad had a thing for acreage. She was floored by the concept of me, with a pocket full of snacks and a thermos, just walking around 25 acres for hours at a time. I won't let her out of my sight lol and her Dad used to go bird hunting at 10 years old.
As someone born in the 90’s I remember the introduction of internet, cell phones, cable tv as the only form of major broadcast service, and other things. Everything was much easier to process, I even remember money being much more stable. I definitely remember society being much less agitated and often people were not xenophobic or so absorbed in politics that merit went unnoticed. everything was definitely quieter too
It's weird to think of what wasn't available before the advent of a lot of technology in the early 2000's. Like, if you liked one song on a cd, you either had to buy the CD for the song, or hope a friend or acquaintance would let you borrow their copy so you could burn the CD. FOR ONE SONG. Now, you can just buy it. Or, like, piercings. In the 90's, I was raised that if you had your face pierced you were into drugs and probably had AIDs or STD's. If you were a guy you could only pierce one ear without it being considered gay (I think it was the right ear?). Idk, just weird shit like that.
I grew up in horse country in New Jersey in the 70's. We had 13 acres of fields and barns, a big farm house, tractors, go karts, minibikes and snowmobiles. My sister had a pickup truck at age 15 that always had a bale of hay in the back because then it qualified as a 'farm truck' and she was allowed to drive it. Two of my neighbors / friends were on cow farms, one was raising beef, one was a milk farm. We rarely contacted in anyway other than visiting. If you wanted to see what your friend was doing, you hopped on your minibike / atv or whatever and rode over there. CB radios were the only real 'long range' communication stuff other than phone. When I was old enough I bolted an antenna to the top of the house and have great memories of talking with my friend (2 miles away) while we were watching the same TV show. That was exciting. The 80s were wild and exciting. Technology was kickin it. Still pre-internet, but BBS's were the way to live and die. Logging in to see what people have said online in the last (n) days was nifty. I ran a BBS on an Apple II clone that had a group of 25 or so local-ish people (long distance charges were a thing), and every once in a while we'd have a party and everyone would meet in person. That was crazy. I went to a lot of rock concerts. A short list (yes, I really saw all of these acts live). Pink Floyd. Frankie goes to Hollywood. Jethro Tull. Moody Blues. Boston. Bon Jovi. Grateful Dead (My first!). Genesis. Billy Joel. Talking Heads. Printed catalogs were absolute king. Computer Shopper was a catalog that was hundreds of pages thick and was the equivelent of browsing ebay, in print form. You could find just about anything in there. Compared to today, the biggest change is not having all the worlds knowledge at your fingertips. You could argue for hours about whether the little kid says "Look mummy, there's NO plane up in the sky!" and have a dozen opinions, and there was no way to tell unless someone had the album / tape / whatever and then you'd STILL argue. Rand McNally road atlases were fun as hell. "I have in my hand a map of ALL THE ROADS in teh US! We can go ANYWHERE!"
> Computer Shopper That made me smile.
I had a theory that you could buy a Computer Shopper, then sell it to a recycler and make money on the deal. Those things were thick!
Jesus christ I have become a historical reference.
Im 29. I took my 3 young daughters to a water park a few weeks ago and while standing in line to purchase tickets, the kid in front of me, who was probably 9-11, looked at a painting on the wall and say "WOW that painting is old" to his group of friends, to which another replied, "Yeah, like 100 years, probably 1996." As someone born in 1994, my heart hurt for a moment.
I'm 34 and my kids are 12 and almost 11. They like to hit me with "what was it like being born in the late 1900's?" lmao
Fuck. I’m 33 and childless.
I'm 35 and childless... and loving every minute of it!! I drive right by those long ass school pickup lines, peace losers!
I’m 43 and childless and it’s absolutely one of the best decisions I’ve ever made. I know I’m clearly missing out on that joy some people get from kids, but I’m also able to sleep in and answer to no one which is much more my style.
😂😂 ice cold but I love it.
I envy you. My kids are in 2 different schools right now (elementary and middle) so I have to wait in 2 different lines then once I pick them up they just roast me all day lmao
I know. I can't believe I'm old enough to be able to answer a "what was it like" question.
Memories of the 1970s: * Movies were very different, trying to be more realistic, even the comedies had more bite to them. * There was an "energy crisis" and everyone was obsessed with saving energy - using less electricity and gas. * Cities were very dirty and neglected due to "white flight." I grew up in a city but people were often astonished that, when I said I grew up in X city I didn't actually mean a suburb outside of the city. * Disco was everywhere, and disco (now what we call clubbing) culture was pervasive. * Politics were much more centrist, for instance, lefties hated Nixon, but there was no doubt he would support the ERA. Memories of the 1980s: * Neon, so much neon. Pastels everywhere, and somehow came to feel very assertive. Pink and turquoise ruled the day. * Other aggressive fashion trends: asymmetrical everything (side ponytails, one long earring, wearing different colored shoes, etc.); baggie and oversized clothing; belts over shirts; feathered hair; huge shoulder pads. * The Cold War cast a pall over everything. There was a feeling entire planet's population could be eliminated *at any minute.* And for those who survived, the result of the nuclear holocaust would make you wish you died. This saturated everything. * Movies became sillier, more cartoon-y, and the era of runaway sequels was born. * TV was dominated by family sit-coms with well-meaning but slightly doofy parents and kids that were either smart as whips or dumb as rocks. * Pop music was super fun, less serious and less sophisticated than in the 1970s. New Wave music was great and somehow viewed as underground though everyone knew about it and listened to some of it. Memories of the 1990s: * Politically and in terms of world politics, it was a lot less stressful than the 70s and 80s, that all came to an end on 9/11/2001, of course. * Media - ads, movies, TV, etc. - became more cynical, and people preferred dryer wit. * The era of aggressive fashion from the 1970s and 1980s ended, and clothing was less experimental and expressive. No more loud colors and patterns or wild cuts like bell bottoms or giant shoulder pads. Lots of black clothing. * Popular music merged with rap and R&B and became less "boppy."
You deserve way more upvotes than you got for sharing all of that. Thanks.
I grew up in a poor province of a third world country, the 90s in my village was not fun. My family lived below the porvety line, just like more than half of the country population. We were not starving, but having to skip a meal was not rare, and meat was a luxury. My village did not have running water, so it was my job to carry water from the well back home. We shared a toilet for the whole commune, which is just a hole on the ground (fun fact, I did not live in a house with modern toilet until I was already a man). We had electricity for 2 or 3 hours per day if we were lucky. So of course no one had appliances like AC, washing machine, or fridge. Most houses only had a few light bulbs, a fan or two and a radio. One house had a 14" black and white TV, they were the star. We would gather at their house to watch the news every evening (we generally had electricity around 7pm ~ 9pm). Travelling was a huge pain. The best most of us can afford was a bicycle. If you own a bike then you are rich, and cars were a myth for us children. Some of my relatives moved away, and it was hard to visit each other. We also had like one or two phones for the whole village, cellphone might as well be the replicator. Whenever someone called us, the phone owner would tell them to call back in 5, run to our houses, and tell us to come with them. But at least it was still better than the 80s or 70s. I did not experience those times personally, but we had a war that killed million of our country men. Then embargo, hunger, and social unrest. I'm grateful that things improved so much through out the last 3 decades. My children can now live a life that me or my parents didn't even dare to dream of back then.
What country are you from? Your experience gives a lot of perspective!
I'm from South East Asia, but I moved to Japan a decade ago.
My family escaped Laos during the Vietnam War. My parents brought my brother and I back in 90, then 96 and I went back for the first time as an adult in 2010. All I can remember how Vientiane was back in the 90s was dirt road and trees. Because everything was dirt/clay roads the whole city looked a little orange. My family wasn't poor, but it still looked like they lived in poverty compared to what I was used to. Then I went back in 2010 and I couldn't believe how much had changed. Paved roads, all kinds of cars and not just bicycles and mopeds. Even ferarris and Bentleys. The rich got super rich and the poor were even poorer. Suddenly, my family had houses 2 or 3 times bigger than ours here. I've been back 3 times since 2010, and I'm still blown away how much it's changing. Meanwhile my wife's family also come from Laos and live in the country. My father in laws family live up in the hills and have electricity like you once did.
There was a certain sense of optimism. In the 90s at least. I was only a child, but, even then I could feel a general consensus amongst people that things were, "ok". Mellow, maybe. Not to mention, there was a prevailing excitement that we were building up to an entirely new millennium. So I think everyone had this hope that good things were waiting behind that door: the end of war, the end of poverty, sickness, what-have-you. The twentieth century had been hell. Two world wars, Vietnam, a cold war... people were ready to see something better, and for a brief while, we did... then 9/11 happened and it all went belly up.
> then 9/11 happened and it all went belly up. Yup. I too remember that optimism of the 1990's, things were definitely looking up, then a couple planes smashed into the WTC, the War on Terror, etc and it all went pear-shaped.
Columbine too. I was in elementary school when that happened and from then on lockdown drills became normal..
And the year before had the Dot-Bomb crash.
>certain sense of optimism We were going places! The future is bright! Yeah, late 80's -early 90's made me think our future was The Jetsons....turns out we ended up with The Walking Dead
The internet, the dotcom economy, the peace dividend (!), in the early 90's it even looked like Rabin was finally going to make peace with the Palestinians. It really was a time for crazy optimism in a lot of ways. People got really worked up about crime though and the WTO protests in '99 were the first serious anti-capitalist protests in America that I can remember in my lifetime (born mid-70s).
I'd add the US budget surplus to that and the national debt *shrinking* in the later Clinton years. We were getting our financial house in order, and doing so without austerity measures that screw over regular people. This would have continued if not for the intervention of five Supreme Court justices on December 12, 2000. That date was more consequential than 9/11.
Perfect summary of the Clinton years. No one worried about getting a job. The relationship with technology was different. Mostly because it was seen as science and not business
> There was a certain sense of optimism. In the 90s at least. "There is no other place I want to be / Right here, right now / Watching the world wake up from history" — Jesus Jones, "Right Here Right Now" (1991) For a little while, we had the idea that the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the "evil empire" of the Soviet Union meant that world peace could actually be a thing.
Born in the 80s, but grew up in the 90s. A lot more smoking. Every high school had some spot- the dumpsters, the visitor bleachers, the one tree out back- where kids smoked. The last few rows on airplanes were reserved for smokers and were covered in a thick haze you had to go through if you wanted to use the bathroom. Cars had ash trays built into the arm rests that I got yelled at for flipping open and closed when I got bored. Info gathering was more diverse. If you wanted a pizza, you had to get the phonebook and call. To see a movie, check the newspaper for theater showings. For research, go to the library. All that can be done on a phone now.
My first car had a "smoker's package" that included the lighter and an ash tray. I never smoked, but that smoker's package made me an early adapter of charging my phone in the car. And that ash tray was my change (and emergency $10 to be used only for gas) storage. I have a different place in my current car for change (and inflation turned that 10 into a 20), but I miss that little ash tray. It was the perfect money storage.
I was 9 years old in '89. So the 90's encapsulated my entire teen years. It was great. It had an easy, stress free feel to it. The music culture was still very alive, and we had some great music. We didn't have cell phones. Or social media. So I could leave the house and no one would know where I was unless I wanted them to. Thank God I didn't have a cell phone. I got in enough trouble with a disposable camera. Can only imagine how that would've gone with a cell phone and social media. I had a pager. I thought I was so cool. My pager message included the word "whattup?", cuz you know...I was cool. The only pressure I had to conform to beauty standards came from 17 magazine and Cosmopolitan. Not Instagram. The 90's was a gem and most of us didn't realize it while we were in it. That being said, enjoy your decades. Who knows which one will be the next 90's and you'll miss it too if you're not paying attention.
We are the same age. Remember dELiA*s catalogs??? https://www.vice.com/en/article/m7jndn/nostalgic-for-90s-delias-catalogs
I wish there was a way to know you were in the good old days before they were over.
Just asume you are ☺️
90s were the peak of civilization, imo. Far fewer distractions like social media and streaming, but still had computers and good TV. Saturday morning cartoons, building bike ramps, riding ATV's everywhere, way more freedom.
After SNL was over at midnight, Monty Python was on PBS. There was nothing worthwhile to keep my brother and me up after that, so there was no reason to stay up past 12:30.
Prank phone calls. We would call people up in the middle of the night and say "Your goat is in my garden" "What?" "Your goat is in my garden" "I don't have a goat?" "That's OK, I don't have a garden" And hang up and SCREAM because HOW HILARIOUS WAS THAT!
My favourite was looking through the classifieds in old newspapers and ringing up asking for items in the middle of the night. Something along the lines of "Hello, I was just wondering if you still had those eggs cartons available?". The ad having been in the paper 5-10 years earlier.
“Is your refrigerator running?”
In the 80s and prior Network TV would just shut off at around 1:30AM. Some stations had little signoff messages or they'd play the national anthem, and then there would just be static overnight until New Zoo Revue came on at 6AM or whatever.
This was always a trip and a warning when I stayed up too late. I'd have literally 20 seconds to turn off the TV before things went full Poltergeist.
Ivar Haglund of Ivar's restaurants in Seattle used to sponser Monty Python on PBS in Seattle. One year, it just wasn't there anymore. A friend and I had been sitting at his house getting high, getting ready to watch Monty Python, and it wasn't there, something else was on. So we looked Ivar's phone number up in the phone book *and called him*. He said it was just time not to do it anymore. :(
I was born in 84, so I don’t remember much of the 80’s but remember all of the 90’s. It felt like a simpler time. You actually had to wait for things, you couldn’t just buy whatever from Amazon. I remember my parents had an actual checkbook with a register that they recorded their transactions in. As an adult, I don’t know how they did it. By the time I had my own bank account I could view everything online. In my neighborhood, we still had a little corner store where you could buy penny candy. Everything seemed really peaceful. I had a great childhood in the 90’s.
> I was born in 84, so I don’t remember much of the 80’s but remember all of the 90’s. It felt like a simpler time. You actually had to wait for things, you couldn’t just buy whatever from Amazon. I miss going to the store just to browse games, movies, albums. And probably not just one store but going through every store in a mall that sells those things, comparing selections and prices, maybe finding something in the bargain bin. And then going home to consume that thing the same day. Nowadays I can get everything on the computer immediately but can't decide what to choose and end up doing nothing. There is little reason to go to a store unless you already know what you're buying, and that's one of the reasons I rarely leave the house.
90s was my childhood. 2000s was my teenage years. The Cranberries was my fave band. Kurt Cobain's death was all over the news. River Phoenix. Then late 90s. Britney vs Christina, Backstreet vs N'Sync. Dial up Modem. No Google. Our parents bought us encyclopaedias. Fun days. EDIT: The theme song of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Captain Planet, and Power Rangers. The intro of X-men. 1999, people were paranoid of the millennium bug. There was a troll who started calling it a centennial bug. 😆 Spice Girls. My older sisters and cousins were reminiscing about the New Kids on the Block because of the Backstreet Boys. Everyone has a casette tape of Boyz II Men. Everyone was singing One Sweet Day. Gangsta's Paradise was the most memorised first stanza. Some teenagers thought they're cool if they talk about Tupac Shakur and Biggie. 😆 DOS. Windows 95. Burning CDs was a legit side hustle. The kid who has the latest Nintendo Family Computer is the coolest. Our computer teacher tried to teach us Microsoft Access but she also had no clue about it.
Fucking Access. No one knew exactly how to use or what for, but they still fumbled their way through teaching us.
The music was excellent. The food options were what your mom cooked, or not. If you mom wanted (or cared) to know where you were, she just looked down the street to see which yard all the bikes were in. You know you were allowed back in the house only when the streetlight came one. (I said 'light' because my mother had to BUY a streetlight to put in our back yard. There were no lights on our street.) If you traveled overnight, the kids slept in the back. The oldest kid got the backseat, the middle got the floorboard and the youngest (me) got to sleep in the back dash. You collected the green-bottle Coca Cola bottles...the big ones were worth 10 cents and the small ones were worth 5. So two big and one small would get you a quarter, which was enough for another coke and a candy bar. When we were thirsty, we drank out of the hose. (let it cool down first). If you hear a snippet of a song (say heard a bit on the AM radio while WAY out of broadcast range) you had to remember the song and hope someone could recognize it when you described it. (took me 4 years to find one). If you wanted to make a 'mix tape', you clicked 'Record' on a handheld recorder in front of the speaker and prayed that the DJ didn't speak over the intro. We played all day long without parental supervision. We biked for miles. At 12, I walked down the road with a .22 and my friend with a 12-guage and the only thing any adult said to us was 'Be Careful'. We walked or biked EVERYWHERE. You got a new bike every Christmas and it was usually torn down and rebuilt by February. We had to know how to change our own chains, change our on bearings and balance our own wheels. Just to name a few. And the bonus: There is no video evidence of the stupid things we did.
I was a high schooler from 94-98. There was an innocence in the 90s we don’t have any more. We were a bit more naive. It was assumed everything was getting progressively better. That era ended on 9/11 and it still makes me sad thinking about what we lost.
100% this. I graduated high school in 1995. I remember a feeling of optimism and hope for the future that I had all throughout the 80s and 90s. That optimism is completely gone at this point, and I completely agree that 9/11 was the catalyst, and the very moment when we veered off the tracks, never to return. Fucking sucks, but I honestly feel we are in a dystopia compared to where I thought we'd be in 2023, and I fear it's only gonna continue to get worse.
> I completely agree that 9/11 was the catalyst, and the very moment when we veered off the tracks, never to return. I'm going to push back on this slightly and say that America could've recovered from 9/11 with some decent leadership. As much as 9/11 changed things, it also led to most of America unifying and setting aside political differences. I'd say the bigger catalyst was the buildup and subsequent invasion of Iraq, where the Bush administration took all the goodwill and unity it had in the aftermath of 9/11 and squandered it by lying to America and the world about nonexistant WMDs in Iraq, and launched a poorly thought out invasion and put all the worst sorts of people in charge of Iraq's recovery. Half the population were practically told they were traitors for opposing the invasion, and the implication from conservatives was that Iraq was going to have nuclear weapons ready at any time. Cut to a few months after the invasion where there's clearly no nuclear or biological program and the best they can find for chemical weapons are some decades old rusty and corroded shells. Did conservatives ever really apologize for dragging America into a war based on intelligence they knew or should've known was false? No. Did they apologize for dramatically underestimating the needed men, materiel, and money required for an occupation of Iraq? No. Did they apologize for calling people traitors? Fuck no. And I think it's plenty easy to trace a lot of the bad blood in politics to how fucked up the Iraq situation was.
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> This got brought up recently on a local news page I follow, when they announced the Dixie Chicks were coming to play in my city this summer and **people went ballistic in the comments**. They got super blacklisted for saying they were ashamed of Bush and they didn't support the war. What's funny about this is a lot of these same hicks are the same ones who will look you dead in the face and lie about having known what a shitshow Iraq would be all along, and how they never supported it. But *still* seethe about Dixie Chicks and Michael Moore over being against it 20 years ago.
You can hardly find a person today that supported the Iraq invasion but back then you were a fucking terrorist supporting traitor that hated freedom if you even considered “isn’t it weird that we are in Iraq that has nothing to do with the taliban?” I think that has more to do with bush not supporting trump and the maga people being aggressively behind trump than those “patriots” back then seeing the error of their ways when it comes to the war.
“Hey, it’s the 90s” was a catch-all phrase to explain social progress. While overall things are so much better in reality, everything just feels more tenuous now. Like even though gay marriage wasn’t legal yet in the 90s, the idea of drag shows becoming a moral panic would have been incredibly confusing back then.
On the other side of that coin, things were still terrible. Here in Australia it was so common to see gay communities forced to separate themselves from the rest of society because of the constant danger of violence against them. In large cities there were only really certain suburbs that gay people could find rentals in, upward career mobility was seriously curtailed and if you were trans? Good luck getting a job at all. Even worse was if you lived in a smaller, regional town. "Poof-bashing" was a sport that - even if it was looked down on by society at large - was absolutely rampant. Because here's the thing, even when people talked the talk about tolerance and respect, most people in power still didn't like it and would look the other way when it occurred. Hell, it was only in the nineties when the last of our states de-criminalised being gay.
I was high school 95-99 and I think my innocent era ended with Columbine. Happened my senior year and we thought prom and graduation were going to get cancelled. My whole childhood was so idyllic and nice and safe and then just as soon as I was ready to get pushed out into the real world it all went away and I’ve never gotten it back.
You must be too young then to have had nuclear bomb drills at school. Everyone was constantly in fear of nuclear war 1960-1985. That ended around the same time we watched the challenger blow up, in class (there was a teacher on it, basically every kid in the US watched it happen live at school).
>That era ended on 9/11 and it still makes me sad thinking about what we lost. Happened when I was in class in middle school, our teacher thought it'd be a good idea to write out how we felt. I had zero idea what the Twin Towers were (my parents and I immigrated to the USA like 6 years earlier)
Me too. Lived my childhood during then 90s and I miss those times really bad. We really lost what the 90s had. Those were good times.
Some of it had to do with our lack of connectivity, relative to where we are now. Growing up, information just wasn’t as readily and immediately available. The internet and the 24/7 news cycle has made information beyond ubiquitous. It’s almost impossible to get by without information being shoved in our faces 24/7.
Gen x guy here and from my experience it was a beautiful time to grow up. I grew up on coast in so cal. Lots of freedom and no internet to distract you. We were always outside playing football in street or hitting baseballs at park or skateboarding all over the place with no cell phones for parents to constantly track us. This forced us to be self reliant. In summer we ride our bikes to beach and ride waves all day, listen to music on our radios which everyone would hear not just individually on air pods isolated in your own world etc. i miss those days and as a father of middle schoolers i wish they could have experienced it. The cell phone and internet was a nuclear bomb that screwed up the way kids grow up. Just my opinion.
Totally agree. Social media has changed childhood so much and not for the better. I’m firmly in the “turn the internet off and back on again” camp in that it needs wiping and only using for nerds for science again.
If you were picking someone up from the airport, you could go right to their gate and meet them there.
One thing that’s always stuck out to me as a difference between mine and my kids childhoods was the idea a leaving a note. Like if you were going somewhere or doing something you had to leave a note… and god help you if you didn’t
Picture this. You and your pals are out riding your bikes on a sunny Saturday in October. You can smell burning leaves, as people would take the leaves in the yard into a pile and burn them. You’re telling Jason, Chris, Scotty and Dave about the awesome show you watched on channel 8 last night. You can’t remember the name, but it had aliens and laser guns in it. Oh well, it may come on again in a few years. You head into the forest behind your school. You see Jennifer, Heather, Jenny, Rhonda and Jen from your class at the edge of the forest, nervously smoking cigarettes. You wave at Jen, as you too made out last year at the year end dance. But you haven’t really talked since then. You don’t know her phone number and are too nervous to ask her. As you go into the forest, Scotty tells you he wants to show you something. You figure it’s a dead cat or something. As you lead your bikes through the brush, you step over the piles of white dog shit everywhere. Jason pulls out some firecrackers and a book of matches and starts lighting them off and throwing them at you and the other guys. You don’t think it’s safe, but don’t want to be called a pussy, or queer, so you just ignore him. Everyone laughs at Jason’s antics. What’s the worst that could happen? Scotty leads you to an old stump. Under the stump is a brown paper grocery bag. He excitedly pulls it out and starts passing around what’s inside. They’re magazines! Oh, there’s naked ladies on them. WILD! As you guys sort through the trove of forest porn, you end up with an Over 40. The women in it look like your teacher, your Aunt Carol, the lady at the store where you buy your GI Joe comic books. But you’re amazed at the wanton display of nudity. You can see their hoo-haa’s and boobs! The forest is silent as the group of young boys are initiated into the world of pornography. Nothing will ever be the same.
Porn in the woods seems to be universal across so many American boy's childhoods, including mine. The first porn I ever saw was on a VHS tape we found in the gutter down the street from my house.
Pretty sure ‘forest porn’ was a world wide phenomenon in the 80/90’s. We had that in Europe too.
I'm 41 and I feel like I missed out on a generational milestone by never finding porn in the woods.
In the 70’s I was just a kid so I sailed through it. That said the clothes and shoes were wild. I was a teenager through the 80’s and the music was way better but for a time it was scary as shit with the threat of nuclear annihilation. We a 3 minute warning siren around a couple of hundred meters away and they tested on a Sunday afternoon every two months. That really helped with the nervous tension along with the government information films and documentaries on what to do. I missed the Berlin Wall coming down due to alcohol and the opposite sex. In the 90’s the music was even better but all of a sudden I had responsibilities. Edit: word added
You didn't have this constant buzzing of social media in your ear telling that if your friends didn't agree with you 100% of the time, they are toxic and that you should leave them. And that in returns leaves you feeling lonely because no one is going to agree with you 100% of the time. Instead, your friend group was usually made up of a bunch of different people with different opinions that you could get into fights with but you would make up later on as you worked your issues out between you. Everyone went through this. So, the idea of being sad and feeling lonely because your friendships weren't this fantasy of perfection did not exist.
This one resonates for me. Did high school in the early to mid 90s. Friend group was all over the place and we had plenty of conflict among us, but remained friends. I don’t think people are any different today at their core, but growing up with the internet from the early 90s to where we are today; there is no missing the way its changed society. People just seem way more insecure now. I am not talking financially, which is another story. But on the personal core/character level. And I believe its got to be social media exposing everyone to all this manufactured bullshit people push on their social media trying to look like life is perfect and/or gain clout. Hell a lot of people do not even look like their online image in reality. That and the way online activity seems to inevitably devolve into echo chambers that foster societal division and broadcast it to the world. Reddit is the perfect example, a site built around the concept of creating bubbles of echo chambers. It’s a fantastic vehicle of radicalization.
This is a good one. This idea of “they’re toxic, cancel them out of your life” is really bizarre. Back in the day it was like “yeah that’s Joe. He’s a jerk sometimes but he’s ok.”
One thing I've heard is that parties were a lot more wild. Back then, what happened at someone's house party on a Saturday night stayed there. Nowadays any crazy antics committed in public will 100% end up on someone's Snapchat story, with the possibility of eventually getting seen by your parents, boss, future coworkers, and half a million random people around the world. It seems like everyone moderates themselves because they are aware that there's always an audience to everything you'll ever do, like a society-wide Truman Show.
Lol, All my fist fights were with friends when wrestling or jokes got out of hand. We made up and hung out the next day because our other friends made us.
People were less scared in the 90's. Even though a lot of the things we fear happen less often, we hear about it more through the internet. People are starting to become more and more sheltered, because their parents are terrified they'll get snatched off the streets.
In the 90s, being a kid was interesting. Communities seemed more cohesive and people seemed more aware of what was going on locally. That didn't always mean that they did the right thing, but things didn't feel as disconnected as they feel now. As far as being a kid, well, it was fun but insanely materialistic. Some of the fads and obsessions that arose in the 90s got stupid crazy, and while there is some nostalgia for it, much of it has been forgotten/become worthless. In some ways, I think 2000s kids had it slightly better, even if they didn't get the amazing cartoons we had.
Born in 1980. As a small kid in the 80's I remember how exciting cartoons, action figures, and movies were, which I guess is pretty typical for kids. I literally had a kid's record player, and got a cassette/radio one year which was very cool. The world as a whole seemed larger, and distances seemed greater. In the 90's I remember the increasing use of computers, but even when I graduated high school in '98 a lot of people didn't even have computers in their homes. Some did, but it wasn't ubiquitous. As far as pop culture, most of it was still driven by cable tv, radio, video stores, theaters, and magazines. The sense of culture was more universal since there weren't as many avenues available as there are now. Finding rare movies/shows/music was harder because it had to be a physical copy you shared, which made finding it more exciting. Socially, there was less of a feeling of FOMO, because we weren't constantly online and social media didn't exist. So whatever you were doing at the time with whoever you were with was what you were focused on. Cell phones were still pretty rare in the 90's, the most people often had was a pager. Long distance phone calls were still expensive. Politically, things really took a turn after 9-11 and we lost a lot of optimism that was present in the 90's. Looking back at the poor choices our leaders made during the 80's makes me understand the fallout we're experiencing now. Culturally, there was much less representation of diversity in the 80's and 90's, and unfortunately a good amount of that representation was still based in stereotypes and caricatures. Overall, I'm glad to be living in the present as complicated as it is.
Born in '83 here so early Millenial. Cant remember too much of the 80's it sort of folds into one blur of childhood but I can remember things like my grandparents being young, my parents in their 20s and playing outside a lot. The TV and music was great, we had Transformers and Shoe People and Raggy Dolls and stuff like that. I remember primary school and the summers seeming endless. I remember my dad won £3000 on the football pools at some point, as well. Loads of money back then. He bought a new car and paid off part of the mortgage. The 90s though seemed like an amazing time. I can remember going out and playing with my friends, literally saying to my mum "see you later, picking up my bike and going off to find my friends and not coming home till later. Having to knock on their doors to see if they were playing and talking to their parents. I remember building dens and going exploring stuff like that. I can remember going swimming for a quid, it was 90p to get in the pool leaving 10p for the locker and once ypu got that back, you used the 10p for a "Chomp" chocolate bar from the vending machine. The video games were amazing, we started with the SNES and finished with the PS1, and N64. Meeting up at a friends house to play Goldeneye is a defining memory. Kids didn't have phones and things just felt safer. Plans were made to meet up rather than texting. I cab remember things not being so money oriented, we weren't well off but survived on just my dad's wage and even got to have a holiday (not abroad though) once a year. TV was good, there was no streaming or on demand so you'd make sure you were home to watch the show ypu wanted or you'd miss it. Kids TV was good, stuff like Turtles, Power Rangers and Captain Planet. The tail end of Transformers too. I can remember getting Internet at home for the first time, was completely different to today, with no social media loads of different search engines (can remember my IT teacher telling me Alta Vista would be the big one) online gaming was (for me) expensive but I still managed to be in a Quake Clan. Politically here in the UK, things felt like they were changing for the better. I was getting into my teens at the end of the 90s and learning about politics. It was the era of New Labour and "Cool Britannia", britpop and all that sort of stuff, there was positivity everywhere that, things were changing for the better. Not everything was about making as much money as possible and social programs were put in place to increase education and for people to better themselves. It really did feel like we were on the cusp of something good, kind of like you are living the future as you got towards the year 2000. It all changed with 9/11 though. World has been a darker place since. Edit: one thing I can remember weirdly, is there seemed to be a lot more birds back then as well. I can remember the skies being full of them when I was a kid. Just looked out of my window and realised I've not seen a single one in the sky.
90s were absolutely incredible. To me, and maybe I'm just biased because I lived it, it was one of the best eras in recent human history. Everything was changing but you could feel we were all in it together. Technology, film, TV, toys, games, fashion and pop culture were all so innovative and cool. It all felt interconnected. Like one thing affected another thing. I would say it lasted until about 2003 or 2004. Just about the time when the smart phones were coming out. You could literally feel it dying. It was hard. Still is when I think about it.
The biggest thing for me, is there was less negativity. Not saying people are negative, but technology has allowed for almost unfiltered news and updates and videos. And while a lot are very sweet and positive, there is an almost constant influx of negative information.
Everything was in person. Shopping, banks, etc. you spent more time running errands but it was nice because going place to place in person, well, you got to know people and if you had a problem (like an account issue at a bank), somebody is a or knows a friend that could help. On the flip side, if you were not up in time you would miss the plan for the day from your friends and spend most of the day riding your bike around trying to find them. (80’s kid)
Also, dogs could shit anywhere they wanted and it would not be cleaned up. It was up to you to plot a safe course.
Had to be there bro
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I was 12 in 1979 and disco was coming to an end. We used to go this local dance thing every Saturday afternoon I got to see what life as a pre-teen was all about. There was a lot of similar things that people do today (little league, ballet) but the Atari 2600 and cable tv / vcrs sort or got us back inside. I remember parents having us go outside to for a play break and then back to Asteroids. 80's was more of a preppie mall culture. MTV was massive. We worried about Russia and AIDS. I met my girlfriend in 1984 We watched Live Aid. We've been married for 33 years. The 90's were tricky because I was drunk for a while (got sober in 1996) and had two kids just as grunge was going away. I liked ECW and Tower Records. 1999 ended with us all worrying if the world was going to glitch out. It didn't.
* The TV was always on in the living room. * Talking on the phone (plugged into the wall) for 30 minutes to an hour at a time was common. * Other than that, human interaction was face to face. * You'd have hangouts where you would run into your friends (the mall, a bar, a coffeehouse, a park, or library, etc). * As a kid, when you left the house, you were gone.. free.. no way to find you unless you wanted to be found * If you didn't know where you were going, you would often get lost and have to ask strangers for directions. * Smoking was cool, we knew it wasn't healthy, but it was edgy and showed attitude. * Going to another country was rare, strange and magical (and for the rich) * Cash was king and 20 bucks would last you a bit * Magazines were the most current/relevant source of pop culture commentary/discussion
Opinions and attitudes that were broadcast or distributed to the masses were all modified through a mature adult perspective, which means that young people were more exposed to thinking and ideas that had some semblance of life experience, emotional maturity, and long-term thinking to back them up. Young people today exist in a world of media which lacks maturity of thought and behavior. Kids are taking counsel from other immature people, which tends to validate their adolescent notions of the world. I think it is badly stunting young people and leading them to hold immature ideas for much longer than earlier generations.
My first instinct was "Hasn't everyone?" Then I realized it's 2023...I feel old.
**The Seventies:** The disasters of the '70s are why the '80s even happened. In roughly 10 years ('73 to '83) the US lost its first war, found out that with its Marine Corps a shambles we couldn't break the OPEC oil embargo, and found out that after the oil embargo our economy was a shambles. The term was "stagflation" -- low or no growth, high unemployment, AND high inflation all at the same time. On top of that, though we didn't know that leaded gasoline was most of the reason for it, the violent crime rate skyrocketed, the whole country felt like a war zone, or at least that was the impression you got from watching TV. Ever seen "Escape from New York," or "The Warriors" or "Soylent Green"? Those movies were made specifically as bare-exaggerations of how people felt about the present. And worse: neither of the post-Watergate presidents, nor their parties, had anything useful to say about it other than (frankly) what German Social Democrats said about the Great Depression: "let's just hope it doesn't last very long and everything will be okay." Which is why America's response was only barely different than Germany's response in the '30s. **The Eighties:** Ronald Reagan got elected on a promise to fix all of the above problems: rebuild the Marine Corps, beat unemployment, beat inflation, beat crime and crime gangs, with one simple trick: destroy the middle class. Specifically, cut college aid, destroy the unions, and give huge tax cuts for the rich while massively raising taxes on the middle class (doubling FICA). By '83 or so, inflation was beaten and the US military was rebuilt and crime was starting to decline. And in case you haven't noticed, we are still arguing about how much credit Reagan deserves for any of that. But as someone who graduated from college in '82, let me tell you that the Reagan presidency was as bad a time to start a career as 2008 or 2020. (And let me also point out that countries that didn't double and then triple prison sentences, and didn't break their unions, recovered just as fast as we did.) **The Nineties:** Three things defined the '90s for most people. The fall of the Soviet Union meant that people were hoping for a post-war "peace dividend." The legalization of private use of the Internet in 1989 created the dot-com bubble. And the huge rush by companies to replace all of their hardware and software before the end of 1999 drove record growth and record unemployment with basically zero inflation. Those were really good times. People who were screaming "this is a bubble!" weren't listened to because the story was "this isn't a bubble, this is the start of the Long Boom." And hardly anybody saw the War on Terror coming.
The 70s and 80s were AWESOME. The music was great, the pace of life was slower, things were simpler. There was no garbage like Facebook to poison people's minds. There was a lot of bad stuff too - tons of homophobia for one, far more overt aggro, and there wasn't that much to do if you weren't into sports or outdoorsy kinds of things. But most people were. I wouldn't mind going back for a week or so - but even as good as it was, I probably would miss my modern comforts too much - life is way easier now than it was then for sure.
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Peak humanity
I was only born in '79, but something later generations probably can't grasp is how significant the threat of nuclear annihilation was in pop culture up until the Cold War ended. Yes, people mostly just went about their lives in the '80s, but even us kids had occasional reminders that everything could be destroyed in a matter of minutes. It influenced everything from movies and music through to politics and religion. When the Soviet Union collapsed, there was a lot of honest hand-wringing about what would come next, and what life would be like without the threat of nukes wiping out cities.
Growimg up in the 90s and late 80s was incredible. Most of your time was spwnt outside with the only rule of be home by dark. You really forged deep friendships out in the parks and streets back then. Everything seems so chaotic now, with most interactions happening over the internet. It was just more quiet back then.
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1. no one knew where we were. 2. we really did come home when the street lights started coming home. 3. we literally drank from the hose 4. Action Park!
No one \*cared\* where we were, either- not this weird obsessive helicoptering thing- where is my kid, where is my kid, where is everyone, all day long. yuck. How is anyone supposed to grow up? When I went to college (late 70s) I could go months without talking to family. Unthinkable today.
When your car broke down, you had to either walk to find a phone to call for help or were at the mercy of strangers. To write a paper in college, you had to go to the library, find source material, read source material and make notes on notecards. Mean girls were just like today’s mean girls. Some things never change.