The internet wasn't always in your pocket. It was a destination. You had to sit down at a desk, wait for a series of screeching digital groans to finish, and hope nobody picked up the landline phone in the kitchen. If they did, you were kicked offline. It was frustrating, sure, but there was a boundary there that we’ve completely lost.
I miss the nineties. Not because of some shallow "member-berries" nostalgia for neon windbreakers or overpriced Beanie Babies, but because of the way time actually felt. It moved slower. You could disappear. If you left your house to go to the mall or the park, you were simply gone. Nobody could reach you unless they found a payphone or waited for you to come home to check the blinking light on the answering machine.
The Friction We Lost to Convenience
Everything is too easy now. That sounds like a "get off my lawn" complaint, but hear me out. In 1995, if you wanted to hear a new song, you had to listen to the radio for three hours with a blank cassette tape ready in the deck. You had to be fast. If the DJ talked over the intro, your recording was ruined. That effort created a psychological bond with the music. You didn't just "stream" it; you earned it.
Nowadays, we have every song ever recorded available in three seconds. The result? Music feels disposable. We skip tracks after ten seconds if the hook doesn't hit. In the nineties, you bought a CD for $17.99 at Sam Goody because you liked the one single you saw on MTV’s Total Request Live. If the rest of the album sucked, you listened to it anyway until you convinced yourself it was a masterpiece. You had skin in the game.
The Death of the Shared Cultural Moment
We don't watch the same things anymore. It’s all fragmented into niche algorithms. Back then, we had the "Water Cooler Effect." Whether it was the Seinfeld finale or the "Who Shot Mr. Burns?" episode of The Simpsons, tens of millions of people were having the exact same experience at the exact same time.
There was a communal reality. You weren't stuck in an echo chamber of your own making. You saw the same commercials, the same news anchors like Peter Jennings or Dan Rather, and the same blockbuster movies. When Jurassic Park or Titanic came out, they weren't just movies; they were cultural shifts. You can't replicate that in a world where everyone is watching a different TikTok creator in a darkened room.
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Why the Tech Felt Better When It Was Bad
The tech of the nineties was clunky. It was beige. It was loud. But it felt like a tool, not a tether.
When people say i miss the nineties, they're often talking about the lack of "doomscrolling." The Nintendo 64 didn't try to sell you microtransactions or battle passes. You bought GoldenEye 007, you invited three friends over, you argued about who got to be Oddjob (because he was too short and therefore cheating), and you played until your eyes burned. The game was finished when you bought it. No day-one patches. No DLC. Just a cartridge and a weirdly shaped controller with three handles.
- The Desktop Experience: Computers were for "doing things," not for living in.
- The Game Boy: It had no backlight. You had to sit under a lamp or wait for streetlights to pass during a car ride to see the screen. It was a struggle.
- Encarta '95: Remember the thrill of having an encyclopedia on a disc? It felt like the future, even if it was just a few thousand low-res photos and some text.
The Fragility of Information
There was something beautiful about not knowing everything instantly. If you had a debate with a friend about who played the lead in The Fly, you couldn't just Google it. You had to go to a library, check a movie guide, or just live with the mystery.
That lack of immediate answers fueled curiosity. It made the world feel bigger. Today, the world is small. It’s the size of a six-inch glass screen. We’ve traded wonder for certainty, and I’m not sure it was a fair trade.
The Aesthetic of "The Middle"
The nineties occupied a strange, perfect middle ground. We had the benefits of the digital age beginning to bloom—email, basic websites, cell phones that looked like bricks—but we hadn't yet surrendered our privacy or our attention spans.
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Socializing was different. "Hanging out" meant actually being in the same room. We didn't sit in a circle and look at our phones; we sat in a circle and talked. Or we watched Pulp Fiction for the fifteenth time. Or we just sat there. Boredom was a real thing back then, and it was the primary driver of creativity. If you were bored, you started a band. You wrote a zine. You went outside and built something.
Real-World Connections over Digital Clout
You didn't have a "personal brand" in 1997. You just had a reputation among the fifty people you actually knew. The pressure to perform for an invisible audience of thousands didn't exist. There were no influencers. There were just celebrities—who felt like distant, unreachable gods—and your friends.
This lack of constant social comparison was better for our collective mental health. You didn't know that a random person in Switzerland was having a better brunch than you. You just knew that your toast was okay and your coffee was hot.
Misconceptions About the "Good Old Days"
It wasn't all perfect. Let's be honest.
Research from the Pew Research Center and various sociological studies on the "Digital Divide" remind us that while we miss the simplicity, the nineties were also a time of significant exclusion. If you were a marginalized voice, you didn't have a platform. You couldn't start a YouTube channel or a Substack to find your tribe. You were at the mercy of big media gatekeepers.
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The "simpler time" often ignores the fact that healthcare was less advanced, information was harder to verify, and navigating a new city required a physical map that was impossible to fold back up.
The Practical Way to Bring the Nineties Back
You can't go back in time, but you can adopt the nineties' philosophy. It starts with reintroducing "friction" into your life.
Stop using the algorithm for a day. Go to a physical record store and buy an album based solely on the cover art. Don't look up the reviews first. Just buy it and listen to it from start to finish.
Leave your phone at home when you go for a walk. The anxiety you feel in the first ten minutes is the "modern" leaving your body. After twenty minutes, you'll start to notice the trees. You'll hear the sounds of the neighborhood. You'll find that same sense of "being gone" that defined the pre-smartphone era.
Actionable Steps for a Nineties Reset:
- Analog Mornings: Do not touch a screen for the first hour of your day. Read a physical book or a printed newspaper.
- The "Single Task" Rule: When you watch a movie, put your phone in another room. In the nineties, the TV was the only screen in the house. Treat it that way again.
- Physical Media: Buy a film camera. The wait to see how the photos turned out is where the magic happens. The "instant" nature of digital photography has robbed us of the joy of anticipation.
- Scheduled Disconnection: Pick one day a week where you are "unreachable." Tell your friends. They’ll survive, and so will you.
The reason i miss the nineties is that it was the last decade where humans were still in charge of the machines. Now, the machines are in charge of us. They tell us what to buy, who to vote for, and what to be angry about. Breaking that cycle isn't about being a Luddite; it's about reclaiming your own time and your own thoughts.
Go find a copy of Jagged Little Pill on CD. Pop it in. Sit on the floor. Do nothing else. That’s the nineties. It’s still there if you’re willing to put in the effort to find it.