The 90's were awesome mostly because that deacde ecompassed the entirety of my high school and college experience. I first experienced kissing, driving, sex, alcohol, parties, pot, rock concerts, and rated-R cinema all in that decade. How could any other decade ever compare?
This is a fantastic piece that articulates well what I have thought and argued in some cases to people for years. The 90s were great - because we were stupid sheltered kids! Now we're adults aware of all the problems in the world. And yet life today, despite all its problems, is vastly better in many regards! But I do agree, the longing for the "before times" probably speaks more to our ambivalence to the domination of social media today and how we wish we could go back to a pre-Facebook age.
This is a fantastic piece that articulates well what I have thought and argued in some cases to people for years. The 90s were great - because we were stupid sheltered kids! Now we're adults aware of all the problems in the world. And yet life today, despite all its problems, is vastly better in many regards! But I do agree, the longing for the "before times" probably speaks more to our ambivalence to the domination of social media today and how we wish we could go back to a pre-Facebook age.
This is a wonderful post, and I'm glad Slow Boring published CHH.
I was around in the 90s, and I was very optimistic about the country as a whole, for the following reasons:
-Crime was going down, and the cities in particular were getting a lot safer. I lived in NYC. At the beginning of the 90s, white people generally would not cross 96th Street on the Upper West Side on foot. For years there was a guy named Larry(?) who terrorized everyone around 96th and Amsterdam. People generally took a cab or the subway to Columbia up at 116, which was OK. But during the 90s it somehow got nice moving up from 96 and down from 116, and the forces of Nice met around 110th in the late 90s.
You could walk anywhere. Parks that had been filled with garbage and needles somehow turned back into parks.
-There was a tech/economic boom, and I guess it was partly illusory, but it sure felt real at the time.
-The budget deficit was going down, and we actually ran a surplus in Clinton's late years. Then came the 2000 election, and a big tax cut, and then 9/11, and we've never looked back. Right now colonizing Mars seems more doable than a budget surplus.
Not debating any of the stats. But rather than Divorce/Marriage rate relativity as a measure of family decline, I wonder about births into single parent homes - and the correlation to bad stuff, like deaths involving guns. Parenting is hard work. Even a poor helper can help some. No?
Speaking in my role as a dillettante sociologist: the idea that young people have expectations based on their suburban childhoods (a pool in the backyard, vacations, etc.) is something I've been pondering for awhile. My fear is that unreasonable expectations lead many into adopting an attitude of blame for everything in society that doesn't work the way they expect it to. Trump knows exactly how to exploit this—the latest example is today's NYT headlines: "Trump Calls Officials Handling Los Angeles Wildfires ‘Incompetent’")
I grew up middle class in a small town, and everything pretty much worked (partly because everyone hid the bad stuff going on behind closed doors.) The police came when called. Teachers were good, kids worked at school, doctors, dentists and vets were immediately available and affordable. There was plenty to eat (we even had a standalone German butcher.) People had nice houses on single incomes (okay, double incomes for the teachers.) We were vaccinated against childhood diseases so for the most part only adults died. We had cars and endless gas. Who even needed backyard pools and vacations that involved flying somewhere.
Things just got better for subsequent generations. American infrastructure, not the physical side but also our social/legal/financial/political infrastructures, is a miracle never before achieved in human history. But of course our incredibly complex society is prone to failure, especially when it comes to unexpected and extreme circumstances— less-normal weather, recessions, pandemics, climate change, fires, etc. This is a no-brainer for those of us who pay attention. Yet the incredible success of the American dream leads large portion of hoi polloi, who have never really encountered hardship, to believe that their smooth lives will continue forever.
Locally I've been ineffectively trying to talk my fellow Portland redditors the out of an attitude of "hostile blame" since Covid. They've gone from blaming the police (first for doing too much and then for not doing enough), to the mayor and other elected officials, to the homeless, for everything they don't like about city life. I'm convinced that most of these redditors must be kids who grew up in the suburbs, moved to the city because it's cool, and are now dismayed because the city, well, has problems (except for the Voodoo doughnuts, ubiquitous weed and night life.) My generation (NYC, 1970s) took it in stride, developed street smarts and became social justice warriors 😇...
It never occurs to these kids to be curious about how city life has always been all over the world, or about how people from different walks of life throughout history have managed to struggle through plagues, invasions, famines and war. Instead they go from whining, to blame, to hate, and ultimately to dehumanizing their neighbors. Trump knows exactly how to handle these people. Throw in a few scary conspiracies, and once they're addicted to blaming someone else, racism and tribalism soon follow.
The rest is just a few more impressions from my little Reddit bubble:
Reddit's Delta sub also has me venting. It's only 20% out of 80% posters, but there's always some passenger who wants to blame the airport and the airline for weather delays because frequent flyer or not, they are somehow surprised when bad weather screws up their trip and that they maybe they could've planned for this. (These guys are hopefully getting shamed into more positive and resilient attitudes.)
On the other hand, the apartment subreddit seems to be a different social class. These youngsters are just looking for advice for dealing with truly difficult living conditions. Their expectations are not as lofty—these people are just looking for help with the normal stuff of low-income life: exploitative landlords, unconscionable rent raises, noisy neighbors, mold, roaches, etc.
Looking back it is actually crazy how much news DIDN'T travel back then. There were multiple tragedies in my hometown during the 90s, all related to unsupervised children, that I didn't hear about until the 2010s. These stories all would have went viral now. You just didn't pay attention to that stuff back then. Watching local news broadcasts from the 90s - they really covered more local affairs and less tragedy and crisis. Less national stuff too. It's almost like people WANT to go back to not knowing everything that is out there, so that they can finally let their kids roam outside again, and finally re-establish trusting community relationships and close local ties ... but they just can't let go, and they don't know how to safely put the blinders on a little ...
A trainpilled YIMBY? You just keep getting hotter.
“Growing up in the ‘90s, many of my friends’ parents were divorced. At my child’s school in 2024, zero parents are divorced. And this stacks up in the data. The divorce rate is not, by any stretch of the imagination, ‘skyrocketing.’”
The US in increasingly coming apart. Divorce is much more common among people with bottom-half levels of education and income.
The “divorce rate” is actually tricky to measure. But It’s possible that the divorce rate is actually higher among the bottom-half than it was overall in the more integrated 90s. Which would mean bottom-half folks saying their divorce rate is skyrocketing would be correct, while you would also be correct about the overall divorce rate.
“People ate fat-free chips that gave them explosive diarrhea.” I literally once sharted a, I shit you not, literal glob of undigested fat in the 1990s. Sugar is poison. I’ll give you that. I do wonder about the impact of 30 extra years of hormones in our meat, and antibiotic and antifungal resistance through overuse, and innovations in processing and preservatives.
Compared to most decades, the 90s were in fact quite good. We had no major wars, a strong economy, new technology, and so little drama that we had to impeach the president over a tawdry little affair just to keep things interesting.
I’ll grant you that some things were not great. Some things have improved since then, some things have gotten worse, some things have stayed the same. Some forms of nostalgia are based on untrue beliefs. But it was a good decade in America and nostalgia is mostly justified.
I wonder whether a big part of it is that humans perceive quality and relative not absolute terms. The 80s and 90s saw such a rapid changing wealth and quality of life versus the 70s, but I suspect people are remembering that difference.
Loved the piece and hard to argue with it from a statistical perspective. As someone who grew up in the '90s, though, one thing that strikes me as a key difference is the general sense of optimism that people had then as opposed to now.
For example, in 1999 I was in a college seminar discussing the Augustan Period of the Roman Empire, which was thought of as a Roman Golden Age. Our professor asked the class whether we considered ourselves to be living through a Golden Age, and about half the class (including me to be honest) raised our hands. Imagine the same question today - no one would consider for a moment answering yes, even though as Noah Smith and others point out, it's arguably the best time in human history to be alive.
Now, this was a selective private college whose students were mostly affluent (although I was there on scholarship), but there was a palpable sense that things were just going really well in the late '90s, despite some of the dark undercurrents like Waco/Oklahoma City. Part of the nostalgia for that period is less a desire to relive it than to get that feeling of optimism back.
The 90's were awesome mostly because that deacde ecompassed the entirety of my high school and college experience. I first experienced kissing, driving, sex, alcohol, parties, pot, rock concerts, and rated-R cinema all in that decade. How could any other decade ever compare?
This is a fantastic piece that articulates well what I have thought and argued in some cases to people for years. The 90s were great - because we were stupid sheltered kids! Now we're adults aware of all the problems in the world. And yet life today, despite all its problems, is vastly better in many regards! But I do agree, the longing for the "before times" probably speaks more to our ambivalence to the domination of social media today and how we wish we could go back to a pre-Facebook age.
This is a fantastic piece that articulates well what I have thought and argued in some cases to people for years. The 90s were great - because we were stupid sheltered kids! Now we're adults aware of all the problems in the world. And yet life today, despite all its problems, is vastly better in many regards! But I do agree, the longing for the "before times" probably speaks more to our ambivalence to the domination of social media today and how we wish we could go back to a pre-Facebook age.
A Gen-Xers lament. You ‘90s kids don’t know what you’re talking about:
[Verse 1]
New York, I love you, but you're bringing me down
New York, I love you, but you're bringing me down
Like a rat in a cage, pulling minimum wage
New York, I love you, but you're bringing me down
[Verse 2]
New York, you're safer and you're wasting my time
Our records all show you were filthy but fine
But they shuttered your stores when you opened the doors
To the cops who were bored once they'd run out of crime
[Verse 3]
New York, you're perfect, oh, please don't change a thing
Your mild billionaire mayor's now convinced he's a king
And so the boring collect, I mean all disrespect
In the neighborhood bars I'd once dreamt I would drink
[Verse 4]
New York, I love you, but you're freaking me out
There's a ton of the twist, but we're fresh out of shout
Like a death in the hall that you hear through your wall
New York, I love you, but you're freaking me out
[Verse 5]
New York, I love you, but you're bringing me down
New York, I love you, but you're bringing me down
Like a death of the heart, Jesus, where do I start?
But you're still the one pool where I'd happily drown
[Chorus 1]
And, oh! Take me off your mailing list
For kids who think it still exists
Yes, for those who think it still exists
Maybe I'm wrong and maybe you're right
Maybe I'm wrong and maybe you're right
Maybe you're right, maybe I'm wrong
And just maybe you're right
[Chorus 2]
And, oh! Maybe mother told you true
And there'll always be somebody there for you
And you'll never be alone
But maybe she's wrong and maybe I'm right
And just maybe she's wrong
Maybe she's wrong and maybe I'm right
And if so, here's this song
This is a wonderful post, and I'm glad Slow Boring published CHH.
I was around in the 90s, and I was very optimistic about the country as a whole, for the following reasons:
-Crime was going down, and the cities in particular were getting a lot safer. I lived in NYC. At the beginning of the 90s, white people generally would not cross 96th Street on the Upper West Side on foot. For years there was a guy named Larry(?) who terrorized everyone around 96th and Amsterdam. People generally took a cab or the subway to Columbia up at 116, which was OK. But during the 90s it somehow got nice moving up from 96 and down from 116, and the forces of Nice met around 110th in the late 90s.
You could walk anywhere. Parks that had been filled with garbage and needles somehow turned back into parks.
-There was a tech/economic boom, and I guess it was partly illusory, but it sure felt real at the time.
-The budget deficit was going down, and we actually ran a surplus in Clinton's late years. Then came the 2000 election, and a big tax cut, and then 9/11, and we've never looked back. Right now colonizing Mars seems more doable than a budget surplus.
Not debating any of the stats. But rather than Divorce/Marriage rate relativity as a measure of family decline, I wonder about births into single parent homes - and the correlation to bad stuff, like deaths involving guns. Parenting is hard work. Even a poor helper can help some. No?
Speaking in my role as a dillettante sociologist: the idea that young people have expectations based on their suburban childhoods (a pool in the backyard, vacations, etc.) is something I've been pondering for awhile. My fear is that unreasonable expectations lead many into adopting an attitude of blame for everything in society that doesn't work the way they expect it to. Trump knows exactly how to exploit this—the latest example is today's NYT headlines: "Trump Calls Officials Handling Los Angeles Wildfires ‘Incompetent’")
I grew up middle class in a small town, and everything pretty much worked (partly because everyone hid the bad stuff going on behind closed doors.) The police came when called. Teachers were good, kids worked at school, doctors, dentists and vets were immediately available and affordable. There was plenty to eat (we even had a standalone German butcher.) People had nice houses on single incomes (okay, double incomes for the teachers.) We were vaccinated against childhood diseases so for the most part only adults died. We had cars and endless gas. Who even needed backyard pools and vacations that involved flying somewhere.
Things just got better for subsequent generations. American infrastructure, not the physical side but also our social/legal/financial/political infrastructures, is a miracle never before achieved in human history. But of course our incredibly complex society is prone to failure, especially when it comes to unexpected and extreme circumstances— less-normal weather, recessions, pandemics, climate change, fires, etc. This is a no-brainer for those of us who pay attention. Yet the incredible success of the American dream leads large portion of hoi polloi, who have never really encountered hardship, to believe that their smooth lives will continue forever.
Locally I've been ineffectively trying to talk my fellow Portland redditors the out of an attitude of "hostile blame" since Covid. They've gone from blaming the police (first for doing too much and then for not doing enough), to the mayor and other elected officials, to the homeless, for everything they don't like about city life. I'm convinced that most of these redditors must be kids who grew up in the suburbs, moved to the city because it's cool, and are now dismayed because the city, well, has problems (except for the Voodoo doughnuts, ubiquitous weed and night life.) My generation (NYC, 1970s) took it in stride, developed street smarts and became social justice warriors 😇...
It never occurs to these kids to be curious about how city life has always been all over the world, or about how people from different walks of life throughout history have managed to struggle through plagues, invasions, famines and war. Instead they go from whining, to blame, to hate, and ultimately to dehumanizing their neighbors. Trump knows exactly how to handle these people. Throw in a few scary conspiracies, and once they're addicted to blaming someone else, racism and tribalism soon follow.
The rest is just a few more impressions from my little Reddit bubble:
Reddit's Delta sub also has me venting. It's only 20% out of 80% posters, but there's always some passenger who wants to blame the airport and the airline for weather delays because frequent flyer or not, they are somehow surprised when bad weather screws up their trip and that they maybe they could've planned for this. (These guys are hopefully getting shamed into more positive and resilient attitudes.)
On the other hand, the apartment subreddit seems to be a different social class. These youngsters are just looking for advice for dealing with truly difficult living conditions. Their expectations are not as lofty—these people are just looking for help with the normal stuff of low-income life: exploitative landlords, unconscionable rent raises, noisy neighbors, mold, roaches, etc.
Looking back it is actually crazy how much news DIDN'T travel back then. There were multiple tragedies in my hometown during the 90s, all related to unsupervised children, that I didn't hear about until the 2010s. These stories all would have went viral now. You just didn't pay attention to that stuff back then. Watching local news broadcasts from the 90s - they really covered more local affairs and less tragedy and crisis. Less national stuff too. It's almost like people WANT to go back to not knowing everything that is out there, so that they can finally let their kids roam outside again, and finally re-establish trusting community relationships and close local ties ... but they just can't let go, and they don't know how to safely put the blinders on a little ...
My brother introduced my tweens to Gushers and, man, they are hooked
A trainpilled YIMBY? You just keep getting hotter.
“Growing up in the ‘90s, many of my friends’ parents were divorced. At my child’s school in 2024, zero parents are divorced. And this stacks up in the data. The divorce rate is not, by any stretch of the imagination, ‘skyrocketing.’”
The US in increasingly coming apart. Divorce is much more common among people with bottom-half levels of education and income.
The “divorce rate” is actually tricky to measure. But It’s possible that the divorce rate is actually higher among the bottom-half than it was overall in the more integrated 90s. Which would mean bottom-half folks saying their divorce rate is skyrocketing would be correct, while you would also be correct about the overall divorce rate.
“People ate fat-free chips that gave them explosive diarrhea.” I literally once sharted a, I shit you not, literal glob of undigested fat in the 1990s. Sugar is poison. I’ll give you that. I do wonder about the impact of 30 extra years of hormones in our meat, and antibiotic and antifungal resistance through overuse, and innovations in processing and preservatives.
The '90s went from middle school to college for me. So I have a lot of nostalgia for both the '80s and the '90s.
The '90s were a mix of ruling and sucking just like the 2020s both rule and suck. That's life!
Compared to most decades, the 90s were in fact quite good. We had no major wars, a strong economy, new technology, and so little drama that we had to impeach the president over a tawdry little affair just to keep things interesting.
I’ll grant you that some things were not great. Some things have improved since then, some things have gotten worse, some things have stayed the same. Some forms of nostalgia are based on untrue beliefs. But it was a good decade in America and nostalgia is mostly justified.
Thank you so much for this guest piece. Made my day. I would love to replicate your success making connections in the neighborhood.
I wonder whether a big part of it is that humans perceive quality and relative not absolute terms. The 80s and 90s saw such a rapid changing wealth and quality of life versus the 70s, but I suspect people are remembering that difference.
Happiness = reality - expectations …
Oregon Trail travelers had to worry about cholera and typhoid, not diphtheria.
Liked, but I believe it was dysentery, rather than cholera.
All three, actually. Cholera and typhoid are each caused by one specific pathogen.
Dysentery is defined by symptoms (bloody diarrhea) and can be caused by several different pathogens, usually Shigella or Entamoeba histolytica.
Loved the piece and hard to argue with it from a statistical perspective. As someone who grew up in the '90s, though, one thing that strikes me as a key difference is the general sense of optimism that people had then as opposed to now.
For example, in 1999 I was in a college seminar discussing the Augustan Period of the Roman Empire, which was thought of as a Roman Golden Age. Our professor asked the class whether we considered ourselves to be living through a Golden Age, and about half the class (including me to be honest) raised our hands. Imagine the same question today - no one would consider for a moment answering yes, even though as Noah Smith and others point out, it's arguably the best time in human history to be alive.
Now, this was a selective private college whose students were mostly affluent (although I was there on scholarship), but there was a palpable sense that things were just going really well in the late '90s, despite some of the dark undercurrents like Waco/Oklahoma City. Part of the nostalgia for that period is less a desire to relive it than to get that feeling of optimism back.