Oh man those snack well devil food cakes were SOO GOOOD.
Yes the 90s were less safe, and cities were still struggling from the massive white flight and drug epidemics from the 70s/80s. Divorce was also more common, as was teen pregnancy. Popular music in the late 90s also largely sucked (my hot take is the first half of the decade was an underrated golden age)
But I think you brush aside the negative impact of social media/tech . .being a kid (at least a kid who was LMC and above) was more fun because those in-person social connections are SO crucial for our mental well-being (adults were happier too). Yes it's nice not having land-lines, being able to check in with folks at the drop of a hat, and not go to a World Book to obtain some random information.
But if I had a choice, would I rather raise my kids in the 90s then today? Yes.
Not to mention the domestic political landscape was not nearly as anxiety-inducing.
I grew up in the sixties and seventies when things were not safe at all, but we were much less aware of how much danger lurked. In my area, there was not one, but two, serial killers active, for example. The sheer amount of predatory activity that was directed at kids was insane - teachers made suggestive remarks, our local priest was known to have a thing for boys, and we had a kid in the neighborhood who haunted the playground and nearby woods exposing himself. The domestic political landscape was as anxiety-inducing as it is today - maybe worse. There were two political assassinations within four months of each other, various civil uprisings (one in my city), pollution and crime, and, of course, Watergate.
Yet, you'll find many folks waxing nostalgic for raising kids in that era, or at least for growing up in that era. People will argue that it's much worse to raise kids now. I'm not sure I can be convinced of that, even with my personal happy memories of those times. I was a kid and it was all ice cream to me.
It's all a roundabout way of saying I think the nineties were definitely an improvement on the seventies, but they weren't by any means nirvana. It's just that things have slowly improved but our memories don't allow us to grasp how much better things get until decades later.
I was all ready to be cranky about your piece, but you got to the social connection stuff at the end, so well done. I would say the internet and phones, technology in general, have been a bargin we didn’t fully understand when we accepted them. Good job capturing that. I find its so much harder to lead a balanced life today. Balanced in terms of how you spend your time, how you eat, how you parent. The 90s were the last time the defaults in life helped you succeed, now they need to be managed so you don’t fail. My parents didn’t have to manage my media time, I could watch cartoons, then they were over, I could either go out and play or watch the 700 club. Easy choice. Subcultures could exist but couldn’t get too out wack from reading a monthly zine. Life wasn’t recorded. It was harder to fuck up too epically. If you took naked pictures they’d need to be developed and shown to randos, so you didn’t do that. Also with crime it was getting constantly better after 91. So yes it was way worse, but it felt good to see it improve, now we see the opposite and feels bad. But its a slope of the line problem, not the level of the line. Also we were very unified politically in the 90s, that started coming apart (I blame Newt and Rush), but only for people who were political junkies, for everyone else it felt much more like adults were incharge and had the nations best interest at heart.
I just go back to the 90s had better defaults. Not perfect. But you really didn't want to watch media all day. Hardcore porn was hard to find aquire, but you could get a playboy. The kids had sex more, because they were hanging out in person. Hanging out in person was the norm. Way more parties. My parents never once arranged a play date for me, we did not do organized sports. Sometimes we'd call each other first, but not always. Resturants were expensive but I could always afford a slice of pizza, and you paid in cash, so it was easy for kids to have some on hand and use it.
I remember '90s media making a big deal about helicopter parents and overbooked kids, so I find it interesting that people are using it as a comparison between the '90s and today. Maybe it started back then and has gotten progressively worse since?
For my part, we didn't do the playdates and organized sports either, and I'm grateful for it. It wasn't totally totally spontaneous because I grew up in the suburbs and my parents generally had to drive me to friends' houses, but we'd talk about it at school or over AIM and then ask to be taken there. The idea of my parents scheduling a time on my behalf to play with a friend is completely bizarre to me.
Yeah I think some different experiences. I started highschool just as the 90s began. Also grew up in a very dense place, lots of crime, but also didn't need my parents to drive me as much. Helecopter parents wasn't a thing at my socioeconomic level. Also AIM was a post college thing for me.
I was aware that some of my peers had a tight schedule full of extracurriculars, but I was and remain to this day bitterly opposed to structuring my life that way, and my parents never pushed for it. They wanted me to get good grades (as in mostly As and Bs, not 4.0 GPA or anything), stay out of trouble, and go to college; beyond that they were pretty hands off.
How socioeconomic status factors into that is something I'm eternally curious about but not quite confident enough to make a pronouncement on. I have a feeling that there may have been a bit of a mismatch between my parents' mindset and the socioeconomic level we were living at (they were raised by working-class parents, but they themselves were definitely not working-class by the time I was growing up). In late middle school and into high school I began to realize that more than a few of my peers actually were aiming for perfect grades and a portfolio of extracurriculars that would impress a prestigious university, but the realization crept up on me because it was not part of my personal world. When I was small (especially before I entered the gifted program followed by selective-admission public high schools), the helicopter thing was neither unheard of nor universal, but maybe it was actually more common than my memory would have it.
Perhaps you’ve heard of some popular 90s print publications like Playboy, Playgirl, Penthouse, Hustler, Oui, Juggs — not to mention the “back rooms” of every mom and pop video rental store?
I don't see many negatives in terms of socialization in real life between our kids who grew up in the '90s/'00's and today. I think you nailed it in that people younger, in their teens and twenties today, really do seem to have fewer IRL experiences.
Quality and quantity of your output continue to amaze me.
Old Boomer here. I brought up kids in the 90's and here's my reality:
1. The stock market crash of 1988 put a bad taste in everyone's mouth regarding the "go-go 80's" that reflected the worst of conspicuous consumption, so the trend for those of means in the 90's was "quiet luxury". It was considered terribly gauche and crass to signal you had money, so CHH's observation about 90's parents downplaying their economic status is spot-on.
2. No parent I knew in the LA suburbs or NY suburbs (lived in both places in the 90's) let their children wander around without supervision until they were in late-middle school. My observations here in my NY suburb is that the gangs of gangly teens crowding into the neighborhood Starbucks have neither increased nor decreased. Not sure if the "kids were free to roam" memory is accurate. Perhaps in much more middle-America small towns it was true but I'd bet that hasn't changed all that much either.
3. In the 90's all playdates were orchestrated by parents. Popping over to someone's house was either experienced by close neighbors or are manufactured memories borne from TV sitcoms where characters magically appeared at the front door when the plot line needed them.
That's my take. All anecdotal, but nevertheless supportive of CHH's thesis.
As someone of your childrens' age, who grew up in Mid-Atlantic I-95 Corridor suburbs but not New York -
1. Is an interesting angle that I wasn't aware of. To this day I have no idea how much money my father was making back then, but we were always comfortable and for better or worse I've spent my adult life trying to approximate that standard of living on my own.
2. Late middle school seems to track. I'd go to other kids' houses across the cul de sac or down the street in the same neighborhood on my own, but it wasn't until around 8th grade that I'd go further than that by myself on a bicycle. But...
3. I don't remember my parents orchestrating hangouts with my friends for me. I had to ask them for permission and a ride (I went to a magnet school, so my school friends often lived outside the neighborhood), but the idea of doing something together started with us, not the parents. I wonder whether there's something we can observe from how different people and places did this in different ways?
Oh, I see! Up to that age, I think we just played spontaneously (and not usually directly supervised) with the neighbor kids... who weren't always my favorite people in the world, but that's who was there. Aside from a couple of cases like my dad's coworker who had kids roughly our age and with whom we would occasionally do a thing as families, my parents simply didn't have a network of other parents around the area whose kids they could conceivably arrange for us to play with, beyond whoever happened to live next to us on our street. Where did you make those connections when you were raising your kids?
Before my first was school age, I lived near friends I went to college with and they had kids around the same age. Once school started, she would tell me who her friends were and I could contact the parents. Then I had a second and moved across the country. Cousins were weekend playmates for the first. My second was much younger than the cousins and we didn't live in a proper neighborhood, so I sent him to preschool at age two strictly because he needed socialization. That's where he met a little boy who he had many playdates with (and is still friends with! In fact, he came to my son's wedding!)
I believe it, but I think a lot of that is covered in the final part of the article. The best thing about the 90s isn't that it was safer, the food was better, or people had more money. The best thing was probably the fact that people were more connected and more social, and phones/covid have screwed us in that regard. But the good news is we don't need to time travel to get that back. Seriously, it's the phones. it's the loneliness. That's most of it. (Although in the article you'll see I do agree on housing being more affordable in the 90s)
I agree with this, but because people weren’t phone addicted, and were less lonely, and were happier, I think the 90s were pretty great! I’d happily trade the improvements in safety/food/etc. for the social life of the 90s. And I don’t think you can simply discard the phones, they’re here to stay, along with the isolation they bring. It’s paradoxical to think “I want to keep all the progress we’ve made in most areas but discard the progress we made in this other area”, because sadly, it doesn’t work like that.
90s was the last true childhood. Kids allowed to play independently, tvs with limited shows, no internet pits to fall into as a youth. That was much better.
I'm on an interior decorating streak, and as I run down product listings on Amazon et. al. to find bath mats in exactly the size, color and texture I want, the right hook or shelf for this weird little corner in my house, and so on, it keeps striking me that nothing like this could be done and homes could not look remotely like mine does 30 years ago. You went to the store and bought what they had on the shelf. If you really wanted to try hard, maybe you'd flip through your JC Penney catalog and order something over the phone, but my hazy recollection is that there was much less variety overall. Doing something with your decorating that didn't slot neatly into the zeitgeist would have taken a great deal of time and effort and focused intention. What this means for society depends on your priorities, but I have to say I really like my brightly colored 21st century house that I've decorated just so!
I think eclecticism is at the root of most reasonable, healthy behavior, so I can't imagine a better response to all of this than asking people to think about what it is they actually like about the '90s, and then just do those things in a present day context.
In addition to everything else you've said, which I 100% agree with, I'm going to add maybe a weirder one - having a home phone. I've seen a thinkpiece or two about it before, so I won't claim this as an original thought, but I think there's something to being able to call a place, rather than just a specific person, hold the handset and just talk to someone without multitasking something else. My parents and grandparents are to this day primarily landline people, when I call their house I might get either of them, and they'll pass the phone around so I can talk to whoever else happens to be there. In childhood I thought phones were kind of annoying, but after growing up and noticing how transient people's living spaces often feel, I want these physical communications fixtures that contribute to a sense of place. These days, you can get a VoIP account for cheap and hook up any stationary phone you want over the Internet. I recommend it!
Land lines, great point. Grandparents, aunts, uncles, friends used to call the house and kids would pick up, and you'd talk. Now we have to schedule facetime with Gigi. Also a landline is needed if kids are old enough to be home alone, but not old enough to get a phone, say between 10 and 14. So it might make sense to have for parents of tweens.
I still do that today, if I'm at my parents' house and I recognize the number when the phone rings! Obviously there were downsides to needing to ring a house to talk to anybody at all, and trying to figure out where people were, but I think having a separate phone for your house alongside your smartphone is severely underrated. Very much in the spirit of bringing things we like from the past into the present without embarking on a quixotic effort to RETVRN.
As a personal aside, I almost always keep my smartphone on silent because I don't want to inadvertently carry it into a public place and have it start making a bunch of noises, and I know I'll forget to switch it back and forth. I also only have one of them, and when I'm home it gets deposited somewhere and usually does not move around the house with me, so I find it useful for people to be able to get my attention RIGHT NOW through another means when appropriate.
When people visit, I need to let them in the gate for the building, and if I don't know exactly when they're going to arrive, sometimes I'll be in the kitchen doing dishes or something and won't notice right away if they just send me a message saying they're here. If they call my landline, bells start ringing all around the house and I can't possibly miss it. Same with other time-dependent situations, like if people are in the neighborhood and want to stop by, but will move on if I don't respond soon enough. I hate being put on the spot, but I still love a certain amount of spontaneity, so a world of "hey we're down the street, mind if we come over in a bit?" is the sweet spot for me, and the phone setup helps.
The Phones are definitely the worst part of now-times, and as much attention as cyberbullying gets, I don't think it's acknowledged enough how much worse in-person bullying was in the 1990s. This was before anti-bullying campaigns and schools would never recognize asymmetry in conflict, that someone was the aggressor and someone was the victim. It was straight up cool to be mean in a way I don't think it is anymore.
As I am locked out of commenting on the guest post because I'm not a subscriber to Matthew Yglesias' Substack, here's my 2c worth on the 90s:
As someone who has worked in the media for the past 30 years I am very nostalgic for the 90s due to my field of work being decimated by the rise of social media. This is like a cart maker being nostalgic for the pre-mass motor car era but there were obviously far more opportunities in the media in the 90s. Having said that I love sites like Goodreads where anyone can post a book review and reviewing isn't restricted to books pages of printed publications where only elite reviewers commissioned by elite editors can opine on an author's work.
Music - again big personal bias due to age but it was a great decade for music. But the CD, the dominant format for accessing music in that decade, was a huge rip-off and the digitisation of music today means so much music from all eras is so much more accessible.
Food - yes today there are far more healthy options and awareness of sugar and carbs, heavily pushed by the food industry late last century, being bad and good fats actually being healthy and filling.
Finally, yes as some commenters on Matthew Ygleisas' Substack noted, smoking was still relatively normal in the 90s. Sure you could no longer smoke in most offices and workplaces but I recall a couple of senior dudes in my media workplace in the late 90s walking around with a pack of cigarettes in their shirt pocket, ready to open for their cigarette break. A lot of the advertising sales staff smoked (stressful job), the editorial people not so much but more than today - smokers were virtually non-existent at my last couple of media jobs.
I am sooo greatful I was born in 2005. Seems like the perfect intersection of not being a tiktok kid but having the opportunity to grow up with the world at my fingertips and the chance to learn anything at any time.
A) The Internet was fairly ubiquitous by the late 90s (again, I'm largely referring to middle class folks and above), and there were websites for pretty much any interest/topic, sans any of the toxic partisan nastiness that's commonplace today. Also there were no pop-ups or ads on every page . .imagine!
B) Also as a kid, I- on my own volition- would bike to the local public library (this would've been right before that aformentioned initial Internet era) and would just spend hours going through books of all sorts. Now just typing that sounds like some mythical wet dream of any parent of a elementary school age kid circa 2025.
I feel this way about being a Peak Millennial. I got to grow up with desktop computers and the early Internet, at a time when being around computers a lot (especially as a very young person) meant incidentally absorbing a fair bit of information about how they actually work, but I also remember what the world was like before computers were a given, which I consider to be highly valuable context.
Oh man those snack well devil food cakes were SOO GOOOD.
Yes the 90s were less safe, and cities were still struggling from the massive white flight and drug epidemics from the 70s/80s. Divorce was also more common, as was teen pregnancy. Popular music in the late 90s also largely sucked (my hot take is the first half of the decade was an underrated golden age)
But I think you brush aside the negative impact of social media/tech . .being a kid (at least a kid who was LMC and above) was more fun because those in-person social connections are SO crucial for our mental well-being (adults were happier too). Yes it's nice not having land-lines, being able to check in with folks at the drop of a hat, and not go to a World Book to obtain some random information.
But if I had a choice, would I rather raise my kids in the 90s then today? Yes.
Not to mention the domestic political landscape was not nearly as anxiety-inducing.
I grew up in the sixties and seventies when things were not safe at all, but we were much less aware of how much danger lurked. In my area, there was not one, but two, serial killers active, for example. The sheer amount of predatory activity that was directed at kids was insane - teachers made suggestive remarks, our local priest was known to have a thing for boys, and we had a kid in the neighborhood who haunted the playground and nearby woods exposing himself. The domestic political landscape was as anxiety-inducing as it is today - maybe worse. There were two political assassinations within four months of each other, various civil uprisings (one in my city), pollution and crime, and, of course, Watergate.
Yet, you'll find many folks waxing nostalgic for raising kids in that era, or at least for growing up in that era. People will argue that it's much worse to raise kids now. I'm not sure I can be convinced of that, even with my personal happy memories of those times. I was a kid and it was all ice cream to me.
It's all a roundabout way of saying I think the nineties were definitely an improvement on the seventies, but they weren't by any means nirvana. It's just that things have slowly improved but our memories don't allow us to grasp how much better things get until decades later.
I just said what you said!! It was so much better to be a kid then! we’re living in the worst time for children ever. Full stop.
I was all ready to be cranky about your piece, but you got to the social connection stuff at the end, so well done. I would say the internet and phones, technology in general, have been a bargin we didn’t fully understand when we accepted them. Good job capturing that. I find its so much harder to lead a balanced life today. Balanced in terms of how you spend your time, how you eat, how you parent. The 90s were the last time the defaults in life helped you succeed, now they need to be managed so you don’t fail. My parents didn’t have to manage my media time, I could watch cartoons, then they were over, I could either go out and play or watch the 700 club. Easy choice. Subcultures could exist but couldn’t get too out wack from reading a monthly zine. Life wasn’t recorded. It was harder to fuck up too epically. If you took naked pictures they’d need to be developed and shown to randos, so you didn’t do that. Also with crime it was getting constantly better after 91. So yes it was way worse, but it felt good to see it improve, now we see the opposite and feels bad. But its a slope of the line problem, not the level of the line. Also we were very unified politically in the 90s, that started coming apart (I blame Newt and Rush), but only for people who were political junkies, for everyone else it felt much more like adults were incharge and had the nations best interest at heart.
I just go back to the 90s had better defaults. Not perfect. But you really didn't want to watch media all day. Hardcore porn was hard to find aquire, but you could get a playboy. The kids had sex more, because they were hanging out in person. Hanging out in person was the norm. Way more parties. My parents never once arranged a play date for me, we did not do organized sports. Sometimes we'd call each other first, but not always. Resturants were expensive but I could always afford a slice of pizza, and you paid in cash, so it was easy for kids to have some on hand and use it.
I remember '90s media making a big deal about helicopter parents and overbooked kids, so I find it interesting that people are using it as a comparison between the '90s and today. Maybe it started back then and has gotten progressively worse since?
For my part, we didn't do the playdates and organized sports either, and I'm grateful for it. It wasn't totally totally spontaneous because I grew up in the suburbs and my parents generally had to drive me to friends' houses, but we'd talk about it at school or over AIM and then ask to be taken there. The idea of my parents scheduling a time on my behalf to play with a friend is completely bizarre to me.
Yeah I think some different experiences. I started highschool just as the 90s began. Also grew up in a very dense place, lots of crime, but also didn't need my parents to drive me as much. Helecopter parents wasn't a thing at my socioeconomic level. Also AIM was a post college thing for me.
I was aware that some of my peers had a tight schedule full of extracurriculars, but I was and remain to this day bitterly opposed to structuring my life that way, and my parents never pushed for it. They wanted me to get good grades (as in mostly As and Bs, not 4.0 GPA or anything), stay out of trouble, and go to college; beyond that they were pretty hands off.
How socioeconomic status factors into that is something I'm eternally curious about but not quite confident enough to make a pronouncement on. I have a feeling that there may have been a bit of a mismatch between my parents' mindset and the socioeconomic level we were living at (they were raised by working-class parents, but they themselves were definitely not working-class by the time I was growing up). In late middle school and into high school I began to realize that more than a few of my peers actually were aiming for perfect grades and a portfolio of extracurriculars that would impress a prestigious university, but the realization crept up on me because it was not part of my personal world. When I was small (especially before I entered the gifted program followed by selective-admission public high schools), the helicopter thing was neither unheard of nor universal, but maybe it was actually more common than my memory would have it.
The best thing about the 90's was that terms like DILF and MILF were unknown. Damn the pornification of our culture.
American Pie came out in 1999 which I recall being the introduction of MILF, funny that was Jennifer Coolidge
Perhaps you’ve heard of some popular 90s print publications like Playboy, Playgirl, Penthouse, Hustler, Oui, Juggs — not to mention the “back rooms” of every mom and pop video rental store?
You seem to have misunderstood what was meant by “pornification.”
Internet pornography is terrorism.
Substack really needs a haha reaction
I don't see many negatives in terms of socialization in real life between our kids who grew up in the '90s/'00's and today. I think you nailed it in that people younger, in their teens and twenties today, really do seem to have fewer IRL experiences.
Quality and quantity of your output continue to amaze me.
Thank you!!
Old Boomer here. I brought up kids in the 90's and here's my reality:
1. The stock market crash of 1988 put a bad taste in everyone's mouth regarding the "go-go 80's" that reflected the worst of conspicuous consumption, so the trend for those of means in the 90's was "quiet luxury". It was considered terribly gauche and crass to signal you had money, so CHH's observation about 90's parents downplaying their economic status is spot-on.
2. No parent I knew in the LA suburbs or NY suburbs (lived in both places in the 90's) let their children wander around without supervision until they were in late-middle school. My observations here in my NY suburb is that the gangs of gangly teens crowding into the neighborhood Starbucks have neither increased nor decreased. Not sure if the "kids were free to roam" memory is accurate. Perhaps in much more middle-America small towns it was true but I'd bet that hasn't changed all that much either.
3. In the 90's all playdates were orchestrated by parents. Popping over to someone's house was either experienced by close neighbors or are manufactured memories borne from TV sitcoms where characters magically appeared at the front door when the plot line needed them.
That's my take. All anecdotal, but nevertheless supportive of CHH's thesis.
As someone of your childrens' age, who grew up in Mid-Atlantic I-95 Corridor suburbs but not New York -
1. Is an interesting angle that I wasn't aware of. To this day I have no idea how much money my father was making back then, but we were always comfortable and for better or worse I've spent my adult life trying to approximate that standard of living on my own.
2. Late middle school seems to track. I'd go to other kids' houses across the cul de sac or down the street in the same neighborhood on my own, but it wasn't until around 8th grade that I'd go further than that by myself on a bicycle. But...
3. I don't remember my parents orchestrating hangouts with my friends for me. I had to ask them for permission and a ride (I went to a magnet school, so my school friends often lived outside the neighborhood), but the idea of doing something together started with us, not the parents. I wonder whether there's something we can observe from how different people and places did this in different ways?
My bad! I meant small child play dates. From about 1st or 2nd grade on, the kids made the choices but the parents had to organize the logistics.
Oh, I see! Up to that age, I think we just played spontaneously (and not usually directly supervised) with the neighbor kids... who weren't always my favorite people in the world, but that's who was there. Aside from a couple of cases like my dad's coworker who had kids roughly our age and with whom we would occasionally do a thing as families, my parents simply didn't have a network of other parents around the area whose kids they could conceivably arrange for us to play with, beyond whoever happened to live next to us on our street. Where did you make those connections when you were raising your kids?
Before my first was school age, I lived near friends I went to college with and they had kids around the same age. Once school started, she would tell me who her friends were and I could contact the parents. Then I had a second and moved across the country. Cousins were weekend playmates for the first. My second was much younger than the cousins and we didn't live in a proper neighborhood, so I sent him to preschool at age two strictly because he needed socialization. That's where he met a little boy who he had many playdates with (and is still friends with! In fact, he came to my son's wedding!)
According to the data people were much happier in the 90s: https://x.com/itdept4life/status/1667017383196622848?s=46
I believe it, but I think a lot of that is covered in the final part of the article. The best thing about the 90s isn't that it was safer, the food was better, or people had more money. The best thing was probably the fact that people were more connected and more social, and phones/covid have screwed us in that regard. But the good news is we don't need to time travel to get that back. Seriously, it's the phones. it's the loneliness. That's most of it. (Although in the article you'll see I do agree on housing being more affordable in the 90s)
I agree with this, but because people weren’t phone addicted, and were less lonely, and were happier, I think the 90s were pretty great! I’d happily trade the improvements in safety/food/etc. for the social life of the 90s. And I don’t think you can simply discard the phones, they’re here to stay, along with the isolation they bring. It’s paradoxical to think “I want to keep all the progress we’ve made in most areas but discard the progress we made in this other area”, because sadly, it doesn’t work like that.
I think it's still a good exercise to be careful about over-attributing the why of people being happier in the 90s.
Congratulations!
90s was the last true childhood. Kids allowed to play independently, tvs with limited shows, no internet pits to fall into as a youth. That was much better.
I'm on an interior decorating streak, and as I run down product listings on Amazon et. al. to find bath mats in exactly the size, color and texture I want, the right hook or shelf for this weird little corner in my house, and so on, it keeps striking me that nothing like this could be done and homes could not look remotely like mine does 30 years ago. You went to the store and bought what they had on the shelf. If you really wanted to try hard, maybe you'd flip through your JC Penney catalog and order something over the phone, but my hazy recollection is that there was much less variety overall. Doing something with your decorating that didn't slot neatly into the zeitgeist would have taken a great deal of time and effort and focused intention. What this means for society depends on your priorities, but I have to say I really like my brightly colored 21st century house that I've decorated just so!
I think eclecticism is at the root of most reasonable, healthy behavior, so I can't imagine a better response to all of this than asking people to think about what it is they actually like about the '90s, and then just do those things in a present day context.
In addition to everything else you've said, which I 100% agree with, I'm going to add maybe a weirder one - having a home phone. I've seen a thinkpiece or two about it before, so I won't claim this as an original thought, but I think there's something to being able to call a place, rather than just a specific person, hold the handset and just talk to someone without multitasking something else. My parents and grandparents are to this day primarily landline people, when I call their house I might get either of them, and they'll pass the phone around so I can talk to whoever else happens to be there. In childhood I thought phones were kind of annoying, but after growing up and noticing how transient people's living spaces often feel, I want these physical communications fixtures that contribute to a sense of place. These days, you can get a VoIP account for cheap and hook up any stationary phone you want over the Internet. I recommend it!
Land lines, great point. Grandparents, aunts, uncles, friends used to call the house and kids would pick up, and you'd talk. Now we have to schedule facetime with Gigi. Also a landline is needed if kids are old enough to be home alone, but not old enough to get a phone, say between 10 and 14. So it might make sense to have for parents of tweens.
I still do that today, if I'm at my parents' house and I recognize the number when the phone rings! Obviously there were downsides to needing to ring a house to talk to anybody at all, and trying to figure out where people were, but I think having a separate phone for your house alongside your smartphone is severely underrated. Very much in the spirit of bringing things we like from the past into the present without embarking on a quixotic effort to RETVRN.
As a personal aside, I almost always keep my smartphone on silent because I don't want to inadvertently carry it into a public place and have it start making a bunch of noises, and I know I'll forget to switch it back and forth. I also only have one of them, and when I'm home it gets deposited somewhere and usually does not move around the house with me, so I find it useful for people to be able to get my attention RIGHT NOW through another means when appropriate.
When people visit, I need to let them in the gate for the building, and if I don't know exactly when they're going to arrive, sometimes I'll be in the kitchen doing dishes or something and won't notice right away if they just send me a message saying they're here. If they call my landline, bells start ringing all around the house and I can't possibly miss it. Same with other time-dependent situations, like if people are in the neighborhood and want to stop by, but will move on if I don't respond soon enough. I hate being put on the spot, but I still love a certain amount of spontaneity, so a world of "hey we're down the street, mind if we come over in a bit?" is the sweet spot for me, and the phone setup helps.
Yeah nah. The 1990's were a great place to grow up , in Australia at least.
The Phones are definitely the worst part of now-times, and as much attention as cyberbullying gets, I don't think it's acknowledged enough how much worse in-person bullying was in the 1990s. This was before anti-bullying campaigns and schools would never recognize asymmetry in conflict, that someone was the aggressor and someone was the victim. It was straight up cool to be mean in a way I don't think it is anymore.
As I am locked out of commenting on the guest post because I'm not a subscriber to Matthew Yglesias' Substack, here's my 2c worth on the 90s:
As someone who has worked in the media for the past 30 years I am very nostalgic for the 90s due to my field of work being decimated by the rise of social media. This is like a cart maker being nostalgic for the pre-mass motor car era but there were obviously far more opportunities in the media in the 90s. Having said that I love sites like Goodreads where anyone can post a book review and reviewing isn't restricted to books pages of printed publications where only elite reviewers commissioned by elite editors can opine on an author's work.
Music - again big personal bias due to age but it was a great decade for music. But the CD, the dominant format for accessing music in that decade, was a huge rip-off and the digitisation of music today means so much music from all eras is so much more accessible.
Food - yes today there are far more healthy options and awareness of sugar and carbs, heavily pushed by the food industry late last century, being bad and good fats actually being healthy and filling.
Finally, yes as some commenters on Matthew Ygleisas' Substack noted, smoking was still relatively normal in the 90s. Sure you could no longer smoke in most offices and workplaces but I recall a couple of senior dudes in my media workplace in the late 90s walking around with a pack of cigarettes in their shirt pocket, ready to open for their cigarette break. A lot of the advertising sales staff smoked (stressful job), the editorial people not so much but more than today - smokers were virtually non-existent at my last couple of media jobs.
I am sooo greatful I was born in 2005. Seems like the perfect intersection of not being a tiktok kid but having the opportunity to grow up with the world at my fingertips and the chance to learn anything at any time.
Not to be snarky but
A) The Internet was fairly ubiquitous by the late 90s (again, I'm largely referring to middle class folks and above), and there were websites for pretty much any interest/topic, sans any of the toxic partisan nastiness that's commonplace today. Also there were no pop-ups or ads on every page . .imagine!
B) Also as a kid, I- on my own volition- would bike to the local public library (this would've been right before that aformentioned initial Internet era) and would just spend hours going through books of all sorts. Now just typing that sounds like some mythical wet dream of any parent of a elementary school age kid circa 2025.
I feel this way about being a Peak Millennial. I got to grow up with desktop computers and the early Internet, at a time when being around computers a lot (especially as a very young person) meant incidentally absorbing a fair bit of information about how they actually work, but I also remember what the world was like before computers were a given, which I consider to be highly valuable context.