The 90s weren't great for most people, but they were the peak of hope and optimism for many people.
Education, telecommunication, and trade relations were developing so quickly it was "sensible" to foresee humanity living in a utopia soon.
Then baby bush goes back to the middle east, domestic surveillance expands internationally, but most importantly the internet disillusions most people that they are living in a progressive world.
How many genocides are currently happening? How quickly are sea levels going to rise? Why, exactly, are so many people dying from cancer at the same time that processed foods become so popular?
The tobacco scientists were LYING!?
Ask and the search engine answers.
Talk to international forum friends: people tell you about their lives manufacturing your comforts in China, Jamaica, India, and so on.
It rapidly became clear from the outset of social media that tech titans also champion commodification and privatization of personal and public information rather than using that information to benefit society at large.
Things weren't getting better in the 90s, but before everybody was talking to each other and sharing their experiences, many people believed things could get better.
People seemed a lot better off in the 90s, music, TV, and culture was better and more varied. Now there isn’t the same level of investment.
Further to that everyone seems to have “the fear” over numerous things.
Saying that though, we have had a lot of progress over rights and acceptance, particularly surrounding racism and the LGBTQ+ community.
It's worth noting that your boyfriend would have been 15-25 during the 90s, pretty great time to be a young person but nostalgia will certainly play a part.
Just as an aside, I make it that your boyfriend is 50 and you're 25 at the oldest?
You won't look back on the 2020s the same way in the same way Europe doesn't look back at the end of the 1930s in the same way.
As someone born in the late 60s, I also feel like the 90s were a period of great optimism for social, economic, and political change for the better. The fall of the Soviet Union gave us the promise of stepping back from the edge of nuclear annihilation and the world felt like it was generally getting better. The super powers were ending their proxy wars in many countries and it seemed like peace and prosperity were on the horizon.
The world.changed for the worst in the early 2000a with the 9-11 attacks prompting decades of war in the middle.east. The costs.of those wars affected most of the world negatively and brought about the rise of the super rich oligarchy we see in many countries today.
I honestly do not see us returning to a period where the bulk of the world's population has a positive future ahead of them.
I was born in Mainland China, although I wasn't born yet in the 90's, I'm pretty sure poverty was worse back then.
80s 70s
Don't even talk about it lol,
the more you go back, the more Maoist it was and... idk what the hell they were doing, I heard stories from my maternal grandmother about them randomly taking people and putting them on a stage and do... stuff? like declare them "counter revolutionaries" and stuff like that, and some people died... (I later learned that it's called a "struggle session")
A lot of hunger. My parents must've barely has food, because my mom keeps telling me that there is only I think its called 番薯 (sweet potatoes) to eat when they were hungry, and she keeps telling me that I'm very "lucky" and that I should stop complaining and "be grateful" because there is so much more variety of food now that she didn't have (I'm can get very picky when I was a kid so mom didn't like that).
My dad told me this slogan they said: 浪費係極大嘅犯罪 (Waste is a massive crime) I mean that just shows how the food situation was back then.
My mom is a hoarder... like a full basement full of useless stuff.
Also like eats every scrap of food, sometimes ignore expiry dates. Probably just learned behavior from childhood.
90s USA also would be very much more racist against Asian immigrants.
Also I think before the opening up and reforms, people couldn't leave China...
Also no internet.
Y'all westerners had internet since 90s?
I didn't get access all the way up to 2010 when my family left the country. So the "golden age of the internet" never really applied in China I don't think.
People just went from 0 internet to now everyone on Wechat... unfortunately they have a firewall tho :/
TLDR: Depends on the country. Some countries have a much darker history and there isn't anything to be nostalgic about when its just poverty and hunger back then.
Unemployment and despair started in the 90s IMHO. It can be nostalgia speaking though.
Up to the 80s you could have a job for life, cocaine, naked women on TV every day, neon colors everywhere. My experience of the 90s was depressing grunge music and faded colors. Again, nostalgia I guess.
The real vibe of the 90s wasn't some idea of perfection - there were still injustices and problems everywhere - it was that most people believed and saw evidence that every part of life was getting BETTER. When you saw a problem or injustice, you could actually believe, with good evidence, that that problem was only a couple decades away from being dealt with and gone. The faith that human ingenuity was supreme and we were all more or less on the same "ever upward" trajectory was incredible. We're probably centuries away from anything like that again, and it's devastating.
You didn't experience the 70s, did you?
90se pretty cool, though I was just a teenager through it all.
Video games and computer tech, which were important to me, seemed like the most amazing thing ever. Technology just kept getting better so quickly every year and video games kept pushing the limits. We went from playing basic NES games to games with 3D graphics, voice acting, and cinematic storylines. It was incredible. I mean we went from playing stuff like Super Mario Bros 3, Final Fantasy 1 and TMNT 2 to Metal Gear Solid, Half Life, Final Fantasy VIII, Gram Turismo, and Silent Hill. All in the same decade.
Them you had TV and pop culture. Some of the best stuff came out or really came to it's peak in the 90s. Stuff that people still talk about to this day. Seinfeld and Friends come to mind, and certainly a lot of cartoons, especially Disney and Warmer Bros stuff.
That all may seem vain, but again I was a teenager then. That stuff all seemed cool to me. The 2000s and on all seemed like it was trying to recapture that magic, but couldn't quite do it. They had their own great qualities, but it just didn't feel like it had the same level of awesome.
Yeah I forgot to mention music too! A lot of iconic stuff from that era.
My boyfriend, who was born in 1975, [..] I wasn’t even alive in the 90s
Please tell me you are trolling. A man 25 years your senior is a creep.
Oh man...
Do you really think a brand new account named "miss undergraduate" who makes posts about how they're in their 20s and dating someone their father's age isn't being honest?
Why?
Do you think OP is really some creepy old pathetic guy who wants people to tell him the age range is too big so he can pretend to be his dream victim and role play how much she'd love him?
You really think someone would do that? Just go on the Internet and tell lies?
You're being groomed.
You started dating him before your brain was even done maturing. We're still kids at 25, despite what laws say.
It isn't nonsensical tho, it's science. The thing about brains, that is.
It's true but irrelevant. Just because your brain has not finished maturing doesn't mean you cannot paint a fence, built a house, write a book, fly a helicopter, or have an actual fully mature adult relationship with another human being. It's just something people say to justify the ick that THEY feel.
Wow. Get fucked.
It was great but that has less to do with the 90s and more to do with the fact that I was a kid then.
In Australia you could buy a house for 2 or 3 years average salary. Now its more like 10 or 12.
I was a teenager and didnt think much about the future of the world, wars, or climate change.
Buying a house in three years sounds bonkers, from a bizarro world.
After the Soviet Union fell people were talking about 'the end of history.'
For people who'd grown up with shelter drills and atomic devastation on a daily basis it was an amazing time.
I was a pre-teen in the 90s, so life was pretty cool and great; well could be because I didn't know anything bad that was happening around (the first conflict that I witnessed was the Kosovo War); School was okay, but the afternoons with friends and my trusty gameboy, yeah that was nice.
I was born a few years later in the Rural US. It was definitely a different time and I do feel like there was a lot more optimism in the US. Things felt less polarized. There was a big sense of working together to fix the ozone hole, conserve nature, stop acid rain, and more. The Berlin wall fell and the USSR broke up. Without the iron curtain and ona fledgling internet, it was possible to talk to people a world away.
We're British
important point lol, 90s sucked in eastern block https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_cross_(demography)
also a couple of east asian countries like at minimum japan, south korea, taiwan were proper tinpot dictatorships until 90s
Japan was going through the worst hangover in history, known affectionately as the lost decades
As somebody almost as old as your BF, yes and no. Part of it is nostalgia. I love the 80s and 90s in general, because that's when I grew up.
The world changed afrer 9-11, both on a local level and on a world level. The people are less tolerant toward others, autocracies and fascism are in vogue now in many western countries (including mine, sadly) and there are some major crises looming that we did not have in the 90s.
So yes, even when trying to take nostalgia into account, the 90s were better.
We had a nice TV station that played music videos. I think it was called MTV.
I think of the ninties and I think about a list celebrity overdoses. I think it's when over prescription of opiates was pretty rampant which helped lead to some of our problems today.
That said, housing was a lot more affordable and prices weren't as bad.
Idk if it was honestly good.
Maybe he's just trying to recapture his youth.
Enjoy yours while you have it.
Now that we're back on the verge of nuclear annihilation (at least us, weak Europeans, if I'm to believe the official propag... news I would say that, no, they were not that great. They were naive years, at best.
I remember that 'end of history' idea of back then, and how many young people my age (I'm a little older than your boyfriend) were more than willing to believe that non-sense marketing garbage... The exact same people that are now old and in charge of the shitty, and most probably shittier than it ever was during the cold war, situation we're now in.
Edit: music and musicians were worth listening to, without any algorithm ruining the experience and there were still a few movies released that were not entirely chastised/neutered.