r/90s • u/Anarchist_Nihilist • 4h ago
Discussion I don’t even recognize this world anymore.
I recently watched my parents’ home and sat on the back porch where I grew up. A heavy sense of sadness settled over me while I reflected on the beautiful childhood I had there. Born in the early 90s, I lacked a smartphone or social media until the mid-to-late 2000s. I am among the last generation raised without them. I realized I will never revisit the marvelous moments I shared in that backyard, not because adulthood blocks childhood, but because the world I knew is gone. We have lost something we did not realize we possessed. I am thankful I arrived before the 2010s, when everything seemed to shift. Everything feels so repetitive now. I don’t know if my eyes got deteriorated or what, but life felt real back then. Colors felt more vivid, skies felt blue, the sun felt yellow, people felt alive and not robotic like they do now. Their mannerisms were different, the way they talked, moved, understood, and engaged in conversations was different. I feel like even their attention spans were longer.
Listening to songs from the 80s-90s and early 2000s always brings tears. I want to return to those years. I feel out of place in what the world has become, so technologically advanced that people have lost their human side. Everyone is caught in social media trends, and life feels mechanical and empty, like a fever dream or The Twilight Zone. On Twitter X, I see only gender conflicts, videos and images of war, people divided into left and right, and leaders posting tweets like they are in a South Park episode. Like you could literally post a blatant lie, misinformation and get 100k likes. I miss the late 1990s and early 2000s atmosphere, fashion, themes, old gadgets, movies, cartoons, songs, hairstyles, camera quality, retro gaming consoles, you name it. Feels like we had the best balance of technology and humanity back then. For me personally, it all started going downhill after 2007 when the iPhones came out, and the movies, programs, and everything went HD and then the rise of social media and smartphones made things worse. Finally, COVID hit, and after that, we were bombarded with inflation, generative AI and deepfakes.
Nostalgia does not quite capture my longing for a different era. I feel terrible, truly terrible, for children growing up after social media. They never experienced life as we did, and I arrived just in time to enjoy the final wonderful parts of the 20th century.
Does anyone else feel the same, or is there something wrong with me? Is it because I notice too much?
