Everything was in black and white.

Not 90s but the 2000s in the middle east (keep in mind the same technology was released here at a similar time but adoption was slower due to prices and companies at the time not knowing how to market their products in non-western markets)

I have older siblings and younger siblings and I want say me and my friends in the same age group exist in this weird transitional generation. We are too young to have embraced the optimism and hope of the older generations but we are too old to have just accepting the current status quo as how we found the world to be.

As a child I have used the entire progression of the telephone. I have used landline, dumb Nokia phones, blackberry, smart Nokia phones, and Samsung smart phones. I remember watching both satellite TV and YouTube Minecraft let’s play as a kid. My dad used to take family pictures using both a film camera and a digital camera. I remember when we had to go out I would schedule the VHS recorder (or whatever it’s called in English) to record my favourite cartoon tv show.

But what I believe is the most impactful aspect is the politics. I can clearly remember the Arab Spring (a series of revolutions in 2011). I was too young to understand it at the time but I sure have felt this feeling hope, optimism, and freedom in everyone around me just to realise when I grew up that we’ve lost.

Also LLMs and AI became a thing while I’m in the middle of university so I have seen how the concept of education slowly change from who learnt the skills better to who can make it the fastest with least tokens spent.

I’m also an introverted nerd so the moment I had internet access I was totally invested. I have seen how it turned from wholesome (and totally not wholesome) forums, chatrooms, and personal blogs, to these gated gardens, to brainrot and then AI slop. And I miss just hanging around uninvited in a small niche online community and talking to people.

I think what would resonate with my age group and some older folks is the feeling and promise that certain things and the future will be ours when we grow up, just to loose it all before we had the chance to.

I was wearing an onion for a belt, as was the fashion at the time.

Better in a lot of ways

Imagine life with no internet, no cell phones, and personal computers were both very rare and very few people knew how to use them.

Get offa my lawn

late 80s here. We had a nice world before 9/11. there was hope.

Analog. I didn’t have the internet until my last year of college (and i didn’t have a celphone until 2013). I grew up completely outside. My parents had no idea where i was until the sun went down…every day. I spent my childhood skateboarding, and wasn’t allowed to play videogames, or eat at McDonalds.

We walked to school in the snow. Uphill. Both ways!
Now get off my lawn!

Jokes aside, I think one thing we had pretty good was not having to live in constant fear of every stupid thing we did likely being put online immediately. And there not being an “online” where your mistakes would haunt you forever. I did a lot of stupid stuff in my late teens and early 20’s. And there is thankfully very little evidence of any of it. Kids these days don’t often have that luxury. We’re all young and stupid at some point. As you get older, that stupid stuff should be something you and your friends laugh about over beers, not something you fear a current employer is going to find at the top of the results when they google your name.

That said, the easy access to media and information is insanely cool. If I want to learn about the mating habits of marmosets, there is likely an in-depth Wikipedia article with way, way too much information. And it’s likely up to date and well edited. Compare that to whatever blurb might be in the encyclopedias at your local or school library, plus anything you could dig out of the periodicals and microfiche, and it’s not even in the same universe of information availability. Sure, there’s a lot more to sift through online. And it’s getting easier and easier to get lost in a sea of misinformation. But, you still stand a much better chance today of finding more, faster, than what we had back then. It’s funny to think back about instructors making a big deal about not using Wikipedia when it first came out. Now, it’s likely recommended as the first stop in researching something.

Also, I have a fucking computer in my pocket with more processing power than the entire world had available when we sent men to the moon. And I can use that computer to communicate with nearly anyone in the world instantaneously. And that computer can access that insane wealth of knowledge I just mentioned above. Again, almost instantly, from most places I am likely to be. I can be taking a shit in the woods and reading up on marmosets fucking while chatting with someone shitting on Twitter. It’s the goddamn future over here.

The Internet was slow and weird (in a good way).

The food wasn’t great.

And the music was distressingly square.

One of the things I miss the most about the 1900s is that people didn’t expect you to be reachable 24/7. Even though cellphones had been around since the 80s very few people had one. That meant that most people could only be reached through the family landline. If you didn’t answer people would just assume you were out of the house, thus unreachable. That all started to change in the 2000s when cellphones became common place. Now days I feel like everyone expects me to pick up when they call, and if I don’t they expect a better excuse than “I don’t feel like talking right now.” As a very introverted person who often needs a lot of alone time, it sucks, and sometimes I really wish I could go back to a world without cellphones.

We all wore onions on our belts, which was the style at the time.

More srsly by the 1990s we were about as internet addicted as we are now. There just weren’t smartphones, so you were offline when you went out of the house away from your computer. You usually did have a voice cell phone, initially analog (AMPS) but later digital with SMS messages. Also, when you were online, the web didn’t suck as badly as it does now. There was less bandwidth for megabytes of javascript bloat, etc.

It was the free-est, most affordable, and happiest days that the world will be in my lifetime.

Quick on the bathroom note… Meeting groups was wild. “Okay, everyone’s gonna be at the food court at 2.” And if you didn’t make it we’d hang out and wait until the group decided you’d died or something and we’d hear about it in school in a couple of days.

Also, getting loser drunk in front of your friends was a learning experience, not a thing that would circle the school forever in video form.

Instead of doomscrolling, I read the newspaper. Having to go out and get it was a nice little nudge towards sociability.

I would hang out at a cafe in the city, reading and having coffee, and inevitably, someone I knew would come along and have a chat, maybe get a cuppa, tell me about something crazy, etc. Like a group chat in real life. We would never really organise to meet there, you would just turn up if you felt like it.

The paper itself being curated was good, too, because while it was definitely skewed by its corporate masters, or the inclinations of its editor, the stories had more time to be well-written and well-sourced within those constraints.

With experience, you could read between the lines to infer what wasn’t being said, or know that something was missing and to check by other sources. Since everyone else was reading similar things, you could sometimes talk about the issues in more depth, without having to explain the basic facts.

Oh, and most people agreed on those basic facts.

Also, people were casually racist and sexist and bigoted, and lots of things we care about today were not even acknowledged by the majority as being problems.

A friend of mine got gaybashed (there’s a term you might need to look up, hopefully) and it was like he’d just suffered an accident. People just shook their heads and muttered sympathies, like it was an inevitable result of being gay in public, instead of a brutal fucking hate crime. That sort of thing didn’t even make the news unless the guy died.

I had a bike that I would ride on the side of the highway to get to town and spend the $8 I got for my allowance on some soda and whatever toy struck my fancy at the Eckerds. Sometimes my parents would let me rent a video game from the Blockbuster, which would always be Chrono Trigger. On Friday nights we would go to Pizza Hut and I would get a plastic cup that was a tie in to whatever kids movie was out at the time. Usually I’d have some Book-it stars to turn in to get my free personal pan pizza, which was always pepperoni.

There always seemed to be a fair at the fairgrounds. When I was old enough, I started working the parking lot in exchange for a free ride bracelet, and then I’d go in and ride The Zipper till I puked up my nachos. My friends would all meet me there, though we had no way to communicate where we’d be, we always found each other. Sometimes there would be a girl I liked, and I’d walk next to her and make small talk and that would be good enough.

I didn’t watch a lot of TV. Sometimes a show like Sliders would come along and the family would all settle in to watch it, but for the most part, visual entertainment wasn’t a big part of my life. There were free weekends where you’d get premium channels like HBO or Showtime and I would use blank VHSs to record movies. Some of them had 8 hours worth of recording time on them, so you’d have to label them with really small writing so you could read Captain Ron, Ghostbusters II, Backdraft, and Power Rangers Movie. I read more than I watched, and I played outside more than inside. Goosebumps and Animorphs over The Hardy Boys and The Babysitters Club. Encyclopedia Brown is still the goat, though.

The Florida summers were hot, and the winter’s temperate. I wore shorts with cargo pockets because no one really cared, and I could carry extra stuff that I always seemed to have a reason to drag around.

Church was something you did because it’s what you did, but no one really took it that seriously. That would change in my teens, but for most of my childhood it was really just something to do on a Sunday to have an excuse to socialize. I used to volunteer to clean up after the whole bread and wine thing we did once a quarter because the bread was fresh and the wine was welch’s grape juice, and I could eat all of the bread and drink all of the juice. My pastor liked black people.

We had swimming classes, which were put on by professionals that, when I look back on it, were probably 16 year old kids with their lifeguard permits. I remember someone jumped into the pool and landed on a girl that was swimming under the water, and her collarbone broke. That was the only time those 16 year olds were put to the test. We just kept swimming while Christine was taken to the hospital.

All in all, it was different, but the same. I have good memories, and bad, and some that make me feel a certain kinda way. I don’t wish I could go back, but I’m happy I got to enjoy them the first time around.