What do you miss about the 90s? (or for some, the early 2000s?)

Minestrone101

I've recently had a huge 90s nostalgia kick. I do miss the music : pop (spice girls, C & C Music Factory, Roxette), alternative (pearl jam, third eye blind, 311, Green day), punk, ska, hip hop, r & b, grunge, etc. I also miss the low tech (cordless phones, AOL and icq, email, pagers) - we had enough technology to make our lives better but not so much that it took over our lives or made our lives more complicated. I miss the icons, the shows, and the general feeling of the era.

I also miss having only a few options if you were home: take a nap, media, call a friend, or see a friend.

I also miss the early 90s when the late 80s started to merge with the 90s (hot pink , big hair), or the saying: "Uh, hey Mom, it's the 90s."

Extra mentions: raise the roof, the cabbage patch, ya think you're all that?, you're a bama, disssss, the running man, the Macarena, shooting pool meant you were a bad kid or fake ids and clubbing, the beginning of raves (never attended), the revival of breakdancing/bboying, slap bracelets and friendship bracelets, ring pops, In Living Color, Martin, Rock, Melrose Place, techno music, freak dancing, tee peeing pples houses, latchkey kids, yo mama jokes, when MTV had music videos, Terminator 2, the Matrix, Jurassic Park, Lilith Fair, the Self-Help/New Age movement, 3rd wave feminism, Bo Jackson, Deon Sanders, Michael Jordan, slacker culture, baggy jeans, hyper color shirts, FUBU, w fade, a flat top, bangs, Reebok classic and Reebok pumps, Nike airs, Timberland boots, Starter jackets

That was a nice trip down memory lane.

SunsetSnuggles

Awwww. I'm home! 😌

~ Sunset Snuggles

🦄 Enthusiast 🏞 Travel Fiend 🐘 Animal Lover

Minestrone101

@SunsetSnuggles Awww. you're still in the 90s? do they have room for one more? I'll go bowling, then throw a Frisbee outside , and then rent a movie.

PeopleLikeUs

Turntablism

Minestrone101

@PeopleLikeUs That's right. that is awesome.

hauntedhoochie

I miss my smaller waistline and fuller head of hair.

NickWk

@Minestrone101 All the above is missed. If it wasn’t something my crew was into, it was at least comic gold material.

Several camcorders always in tow, hours of footage of playing video games, pranks, stunts, and most times nothing at all. But it was the last time most of us would be together and not just in the sense of growing old and growing apart. Drugs, disease, and being at the wrong place wrong time has taken my 3 best lifelong friends from me.

I don’t just reminisce about the time, in many ways I still live in it. I’m not overwhelmingly sad about it, but I miss that time, every day

Minestrone101

@NickWk Thanks for sharing. Life and time can be both sweet and cruel . Sorry for your loss.

Joe82_

JohnR1972

@Minestrone101 - I couldn’t afford to TP someone’s house today, have you seen what TP costs today? 😂

I miss in person conversations that aren’t constantly interrupted with phones chirping and beeping with notifications of texts, emails, likes, weather alerts, news alerts, etc.

I also miss video arcades although they were already in steep decline by the 1990s. I miss Chi-Chis, the Mexican chain restaurant that went out of business in North America in 2004.

But most of all, I miss the “innocence” of the 1990s. Was there bad stuff happening domestically and abroad? Unfortunately yes, just as there was in the 1980, 1880s, 1780s, etc. However, we were not drowning in a digital river of negativity (including hi-res cell phone videos of wars, violent protests, street fights, traffic accidents, shootings, etc.) from the time we woke up until we went to sleep every day.

In my opinion, it is one thing to be aware of bad stuff going on locally where you have SOME degree of influence to make a bad situation better. It is an entirely different thing to constantly see bad things going on 1,000 to 12,000 miles away that you have little to zero power to influence.

I’ll get off my soap box now and resume my search for an Amish community that is accepting new members. I’ve been letting my beard grow out for the past 2 months so I will fit in a little better😊

Minestrone101

@JohnR1972 All true. and have you tried Amish fried chicken? it's crazy!

Also the 90s can have Armageddon and Titanic back. lol I'll take good will hunting and rounders. okay, I'll rewatch Titanic in the right mood. lol okay, I like Armageddon too, but not wild wild west.

JohnR1972

@Minestrone101 - My favorite 90s movies were Office Space, Braveheart, Heat, and The Matrix. However, after posting my comment above, I am kind of in the mood to watch “Dances with Wolves” this evening and reflect on a time period I have never experienced where life was truly harsh and rugged… but simple.

JohnR1972

@Minestrone101 - and YES! I have tried Amish fried chicken. There is a little town called Oldenburg which is just off I-74 about half way between Indianapolis and Cincinnati. There is an Amish restaurant there with the world’s best fried chicken. I am pretty sure it is fried in lard. I haven’t been there in years but that is about the only fried food I would eat today (most restaurants fry in seed oils which I completely avoid). Now I am hungry for fried chicken 😂

CuddleDuncan

I kinda missed the 90s, I was at work.

Minestrone101

@JohnR1972 The last Mohican was another epic that was good. yes fried chicken is great but I hear many of the places and buffets in Pa are good. My local Amish markets senns $1 per drumstick so I buy $25 at a time lol

@CuddleDuncan They were good times. What's your favorite decade ?

natickben

Twin Peaks and The X Files

JohnR1972

@natickben - Oh yeah! How could I have forgotten the X-Files? Possibly the best TV series I have seen until Breaking Bad came along nearly a decade later.

SnugglyMel

I miss the way people used to get together and talk without having their cell phones on the tables or in their hands. I miss having a longer attention span- I feel like technology has sl@shed our attention spans and hindered our ability to focus. I miss being young and playing Ghost in the Graveyard and Marco Polo in my friend's pool, and I miss jumping off the high dive in the town pool. I miss summers that weren't so horribly hot. I miss affordable gas prices. I miss "going out" shirts of Y2K that paired with any nice jeans. I miss when 10 Things I Hate About You first came out and when Heath Ledger from the movie was still alive. I miss building snow forts with my dad and brother. I miss being idealistic. I miss Mr. Mulder (and still remember to "trust no one"). I miss baking cookies with my mom and licking the mixer thingies before we realized it was bad to eat raw egg. I miss sleepovers and silly scary movies and talking until dawn. I miss walking down the street to my friend's house to see if they could play, rather than having to text and plan it ahead 2 weeks. I miss when my friends were all nearby rather than scattered all over the country.
I miss 90's alternative and grunge!

That's enough, haha. Suffice it to say, I truly miss the 90s.

timbear50

I miss buying CDs. Actually giving someone as much as 16 bucks for 10 songs seems crazy now. But it forced me to choose carefully, and influenced my relationship with music that lasted. Some music stores had listening booths. All of them employed snarky teens that would examine your choices, and just before ringing you up, give you that look: “are you really still listening to this?” Regardless, that CD was a treasure. This would be one of around 20 CDs I could afford that year. Remember removing the cellophane for that first spin? I studied liner notes, and listened over and over again. There’s lots of benefits (for listeners at least) to Spotify, but I knew music much differently then. The medium is the message.

Katota

What do you miss about the 90s?

Lol! Mostly my age that I was in the 90s, especially towards 1998 to 2001.😆

This menopause nonsense is the pits, I tell ya! The pits!😝

Minestrone101

@SnugglyMel Ghost in the graveyard ! and TGIF shows on Friday : Family matters, step by step, full house, perfect strangers.

And pple looked Fwd to happy meals

ShaneSchrute

There’s a great miniseries podcast called Surviving Y2K. From about 6-7 years ago. Remember the Millennium Computer Bug problem? There was a growing panic that at 12:01am on January, 1, 2000 all the computers in the world would fail and ruin everyone’s life. But the world did not end that day.

Rather than do the easy thing and giggle about everyone freaking out for no reason; this podcast follows the stories of people whose lives were changed forever on that day. Even the host has an interesting story about his life changing as a result of Y2K.

It’s a good listen and has some late 90s early 00s nostalgia in there too.

Minestrone101

@ShaneSchrute I was scared. Also the book Celestine prophecy profited off of the idea that there would be a change of energy in the earth and humanity will shift towards a more compassionate and spiritual path. Nah, greed and violence is still very much alive. lol.

I was scared in 2000 in a way that I wasn't at all in 2012 w the Mayan calendar stuff.

Ironman294

Cabbage patch were the 80’s! Don’t appropriate!!!!! Lol

ShaneSchrute

@Minestrone101 I don’t blame you. There was at the time reason to be concerned. I went to the grocery store the night before and there was a nervous energy in the air as the shelves started to empty.

Now I see we’ve never been at a loss for predictions of a doomsday that passes without a problem. I’d love to make a calendar that is just filled with the wrong predictions of the end of world. I bet I could find a failed prediction for every week of the year made by a wide range of groups.

MrMarkAndrew

Our pre-9/11 world.

Minestrone101

@ShaneSchrute that's a fun subject. I might look up documentaries.

@MrMarkAndrew Yes. it was a strange year in the Maryland DC Virginia area. There was 9/11, particularly at the Pentagon , there was a DC sniper shooting random pple at parking lots, there was a college student at UMD that was found dead in front of his frat house, and around that time there was a tornado that hit umd and killed a few students.

But yes, air travel and overall safety was very different pre 9/11.

craM

Thicc skin

natickben

I miss Zima. And OK Soda.

stormydaycuddle

TxTom

Thicc skin

Ditto that.

The '90s was probably the last decade that comedy and jokes could be raw and unfiltered without being accused of being an -ist or -ism. Everybody understood is was just a joke.