To miss the simplicity of the 90s/early 2000s

[Wazza89]

I was discussing with a friend yesterday how much simpler life was was in the 90s/early 2000s. Don’t get me wrong, I definitely enjoy the perks of Netflix, Messenger, etc. But things were just more laid back.

When my younger sister turned eighteen, her and her friends got their lips done. They all looked almost identical. 😂 I remember when any form of cosmetic surgery was only reserved for celebrities. Not that it was right, just that there was less pressure and money in regards to our appearance.

My aunt told me how her daughter-in-law spends over £200 on her children’s birthday parties - the cake, the balloon arrangements, and the costumes. I don’t live in an affluent area at all (it was actually one of the poorest areas in the UK a few years ago) and the school DS goes to has a lot of funding for disadvantaged kids. Yet most the parents I see (and their kids) wear Nike or The North Face. Loads of mums get their hair and nails done regularly and there is absolutely nothing wrong with that (I’m a bit jealous, to be honest 😂), but I’m worried about the insane amount of
pressure young girls are under to keep up appearances.

One of the mums was talking about the cake she had specially made for her DS and the lavish birthday party he was going to have. I actually felt guilty that my DS had a Colin the Caterpillar cake complete with balloons and a banner from Poundland. It was acceptable when I was a child but now it seems increasingly uncommon.

Sometimes I wander whether I’m stuck in the past and I’m worried DS will be left out by his peers. Anyone else?

Another one who remembers awful bullying in the nineties for not wearing the right labels in high school. Also being ginger and wearing glasses.

Blind eye turned to older men having sex with underage teenagers. Casual racism and pressure to take drugs on contrast to "living your best life".

I think every generation does this. I often think back to times gone by; be it the war, Victorian age, and even further back than that, and I think- what did people DO?! Like in the evenings. I can't imagine my whole existence being about surviving; eating, sleeping and working. We've progressed, and the expansion of our leisure pursuits as complicated as they have become are a huge part of that. I understand the desire for simplicity, but as someone who quite thrives on being busy and is quite aspirational, I couldn't live in a previous time (and that's even before discussing women's rights etc)

Which part of the 90s were the rose tinted glasses wearers living in? Paying 75,% of my take home pay on the mortgage when interest rates went through the roof. So one night was beans on toast, next night ramen noodles with a handful of frozen peas. Was working in IT support too, so there was plenty of tech about, may have been using Altavista instead of Google, on the HP (hire purchase, not Hewlett Packard) home computer from Rumbelows, but some of us were starting the tech revolution... times were anything but simple!

*"But all the teens I know are so emotionally mature and law abiding now"

But we all pretended to be like that then*.

You make an excellent point! My parents probably would have said the same about me back in the day.

@Lifeisnteasy

" That said 90s parenting was something else - my parents didn’t seem to worry about me catching a train to school and wandering through town to get there when I was 11. I was allowed to get the train into town on the weekends and hang out with friends all day when I was 12ish. Looking back they had no clue where I was "

My DC both take public transport to school ( DS catches a bus or cycles and DD gets a train) and they go into town to meet friends at the weekend using their weekly tickets. They have done this since they started secondary school as do most of their friends. I don't understand why that's a bad thing,

There’s so much from the 90s / 00s I loved, but I wouldn’t bring them back for love nor money. For all the social media pressure and bizarre influencer shit now, there’s a hell of a lot of 90s intolerance and ignorance that’s slowly dying a death, albeit not fast enough. The racist, ableist, homophobic jokes people “got away with” then aren’t something I’ll miss.

@Laquila

I suspect this has been said already (haven't RTFT) but surely every generation looks back with nostalgic rose-tinted glasses at their childhood, as life and society both get ever more advanced/complicated. Unless you had a really miserable childhood, it stands out as a time of less worry, responsibility and complication for most people, so it's natural to yearn for it somewhat. But some things have changed for the better - we can now easily and quickly educate ourselves on all kinds of things in a matter of minutes; we can connect with family and friends in other countries so easily; we can understand other people's lives and experiences so much more readily.

Absolutely. But I think there wasn’t just a fashion shift after about 2008, there was a shift in the fabric of teenage life due to the internet and social media. It wasn’t just a case of clothes and music changing, but the pace of life, expectations, general mindset.

In the 90s/early 2000s we were very good at waiting - if we wanted to speak to a friend we had to wait to see them at school, if we wanted to watch a programme we had to wait until it was shown at a certain time, if we wanted to read a magazine we had to wait for it to come out, etc. Now, everything is available at the touch of a button, which is good & bad - and there seems to be a massive overload of information, which is why teens now seem to get so hung up on not just major current affairs (stop the war etc), but micro aggressions, complex subjects like gender identity, enormous introspection. Fashion is also changing more quickly - like year on year, as opposed to every few years plus.

I’m not saying times now are worse overall (actually, maybe I am 😉 ) and I know if I was transported back to 2000 right now I would be itching for Netflix and WhatsApp. But that’s part of the problem isn’t it? In a way an extreme detox might be good for me.

[quote AngelsWithSilverWings]@Lifeisnteasy

" That said 90s parenting was something else - my parents didn’t seem to worry about me catching a train to school and wandering through town to get there when I was 11. I was allowed to get the train into town on the weekends and hang out with friends all day when I was 12ish. Looking back they had no clue where I was "

My DC both take public transport to school ( DS catches a bus or cycles and DD gets a train) and they go into town to meet friends at the weekend using their weekly tickets. They have done this since they started secondary school as do most of their friends. I don't understand why that's a bad thing,

[/quote]
I didn’t say it was a bad thing. But I didn’t have a mobile phone then, nor did my parents really know who I was hanging out with or where roughly I planned to be. It just isn’t a scenario which seems to be acceptable to most parents of 12 year olds these days.

Every generation looks back and says how great things were in their day.....
The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households

Socrates.

Though i did like the 90s, i travelled & work was easy and well paid in Telecoms

But i do miss the certainty we seemed to have pre Brexit pre Trump and pre CV.

Always another war on the horizon now, even sent a navy boat with the French!!!

I dunno I think people always look back with rose tinted spectacles to a time they believe was "simpler". I've lost count of the threads on here from people banging on about how great the 80s were. I lived through the 80s and they weren't all that great.

The cosmetic stuff is worrying, but none of our mums were pumping botox into their faces, desperately trying to hang on to their looks, competing against other women. Its a shallow, hollow old world we live in now.

@thepeopleversuswork just you wait soon it'll be about how wonderful the lockdowns were, how they took us back to simpler times etc. A false history (for many), like the war, people look back as if it was a time of great unity but much like Covid it was a time rife with inequality and social unrest.

just you wait soon it'll be about how wonderful the lockdowns were, how they took us back to simpler times etc. A false history (for many), like the war, people look back as if it was a time of great unity but much like Covid it was a time rife with inequality and social unrest

Controversial viewpoint but I highly doubt if covid appeared in the 90s it would have resulted in lockdowns, for a variety of reasons, cultural, political, economic and scientific.

I remember the late 90s and early 2000s also as a period that felt quite uncertain and at times scary: Columbine, 9/11, the Iraq war... But in many ways it really feels like the start of the modern era (to me at least). Those events still impact us today, but so do other events that happened around that time: the creation of the euro, the rise of right wing parties like the BNP, but also more socially progressive changes like the legalisation of same-sex marriage in the first few countries. And of course the roll out of mobile phones & the internet, and the emergence/growth of online chat rooms, MSN messenger, Myspace; the first ipod and thus the beginning of the end for CDs; as well as the start of the reality tv era with Big Brother. I know some of these are parts of larger/longer processes, but I think it's crazy to think how much happened around the turn of the millennium and how that still shapes our lives today.

@ShiftingSands21 I said something similar to my DH the other day, can't imagine what the pandemic would have looked like without the relentless news cycle, apps, press conferences, remote learning, home working etc- it's hard to believe it could have been done to the same scale back then.

@BeyondMyWits

Which part of the 90s were the rose tinted glasses wearers living in? Paying 75,% of my take home pay on the mortgage when interest rates went through the roof. So one night was beans on toast, next night ramen noodles with a handful of frozen peas. Was working in IT support too, so there was plenty of tech about, may have been using Altavista instead of Google, on the HP (hire purchase, not Hewlett Packard) home computer from Rumbelows, but some of us were starting the tech revolution... times were anything but simple!

But now we are forced to participate in tech In the 90s, it was in the workplace a but not pretty much essential for running your banking, for example, or paying for a car parking space.

Some things are different now, but it still varies a lot. I made my nephews train birthday cake using the same Jane Asher recipe my mum made my brothers from in the 80's, the party was in the local church hall with sandwiches and party games, a child from the 70's wouldn't have been shocked. Not everyone buys into consumerism. I do have gel extensions due to weak nails, my one treat

PMSL at the 90s and early 2000s being the 'good old days' - but I'm very, very glad my children were small back then. No screens, no internet (that they knew about). Everything we did was human-centred. Playgroups, library, park, etc, etc - and real people, not people stuck on their bloody phones. We used to take the DC to restaurants etc and actually interacted with them (card games, hangman, noughts and crosses on a Pizza Express napkin, etc). We read, endlessly. It was all good.

I still don't have a phone, because I have no desire to lead a virtual life. I prefer to have a real one.

BTW, you can bank and park without the internet!

@Luckylau

I was just thinking the same. Every child activity now seems to be an expensive experience - I couldn't find anywhere a simple Santas grotto.

Yes I remember being a kid and the aquatic shop (the one that sells tanks and goldfish) in the indoor market used to kit out the back third as a grotto every December. Full on chintzy foil streamers and the shop owner dressed as Santa. And it was a big deal as a kid to go there.

Now, round here, it's all "rooftop brunch with Santa" a top a Georgian building in the city centre for £312 a head, and the indoor Market has been flattened to make way for a Nandos.

Lifeisnteasy "I know if I was transported back to 2000 right now I would be itching for Netflix and WhatsApp"

Interesting. I still buy DVDs and I don't use WhatsApp or any group chat service that could be fixed on my phone.

I'm hard pushed to think what I'd miss if sent back to 2000 ....can't think of anything....certainly I think my current life would be easier if transplanted to then. That's not to say my life is terribly hard but I hate a lot of the daily stuff we have to do.

we can now easily and quickly educate ourselves on all kinds of things in a matter of minutes; we can connect with family and friends in other countries so easily; we can understand other people's lives and experiences so much more readily.

I'm not so sure this is true, maybe the family part.

But looking things up on the internet is not the same as either being educated or understanding other's lives. And all the research suggests that people feel far more disconnected and lonely than in previous decades. Many more say they have no friends.

Rape, violence, and drug use were more common in the 90s, but I agree that there wasn't the same amount of social pressure. But if you don't use social media you don't see it, so it's largely optional.