Toxic 90s nostalgia

[Lowrolller]

Is anyone else finding articles like this one https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/feb/03/bridget-jones-is-a-welcome-reminder-of-a-much-more-comfortable-era a bit too much?
I also experienced this era, a simlar number of years into life as the author, but I always feel marginalised when I read them. I didn't have this easygoing yet perfect job, or boyfriiends that know cabinet ministers, or a job situation that allows you to continually mess up and drink as much as you like while still having enough to be financially secure. I agree life is evern tougher right now, but its like its saying to anyone alive then - this was your one socially sanctioned window for happiness, there's no point trying to be happy now, its all doom and decline, all the time ramming their perfect Richard Curtis film 90s down the throat of anyone who wasn't in such control of their circumstances.

Support for anything was cut to the bone due to austerity measures!

OP says: I wonder if people like the author even realise how hard life is when you are young with no money, contacts and the weight of the world (plus the horrendous you've got to have a good time now because by the time you're 30 the rest of your life will be dreadful) marrative.

I feel like young people today would be like, 'Hold my beer!' reading that. Maybe add in about unaffordable rents, student debt coming out of the their ears, the toxicity of the internet, rising mental health issues, megolamaniac world leaders and the climate change crisis.

I was living in the South, working for a big corporation throughout most of the 1990s and have to say that Bridget Jones pretty much sums it up (aside from the cabinet ministers that is).

We had 'Ask Jeeves' in place of Google and Netscape for a browser. There was no filter on the net so you could be browsing and happen upon the most horrific things but the community forums were far nicer (i village for one).

I was in my twenties and poor though, so renting, and eating apples and jam sandwiches mainly. I couldnt afford to colour my hair and got the bus everywhere and money was a constant worry but there was so much to do and see, towns and cities were vibrant and cleaner and there was real hope in the air. Rent, food, drink and entertainment were cheap, so you could live quite well on an average income. From memory, at the start of the 90s, I earned around £5,000 a year and by 1999, I was earning £15,000.

I remember clothes cost a fortune but even from places like New Look, they were lovely and well made in natural fabrics.

I was twenty something and in a house share so life was inherently simpler. My standard of living was a hell of a lot lower.

I mostly remember the good times. But there were some really bad times as well if I think about it. Plenty of angst and ennui and just thinking the country was going to shit. It wasnt all partying and listening to oasis. In the first half of the decade the country was controlled by the Tories under an austerity agenda so there was a lot of discontent and frustration.

I seem to remember there was a wave of 70S nostalga at the time😂

I have very fond memories of the 1990s but I was only 15 in 1999, so a lot of it is just fondness for childhood. I was the perfect age for the Spice Girls, Buffy, Dawson's Creek, Blur/Oasis and the All Saints/B*Witched girl bands. I don't associate any of it with clubbing/gigs/free university tuition/cheap house prices.

Yes, very true. If life has taught me one thing, it's not to be too quick to judge people. So much is beyond our control. We have no say over our parents, our siblings, where we live, who is in our class at school, or the random horrors and traumas that can occur. We also have no say over genetics. If you are tall and slim and beautiful, life is so much easier. Same goes for personality. I was a low-energy, hyper-sensitive, melancholic introvert with very poor social skills. For someone like that, adolescence and 20s are incredibly painful and difficult.

That said, I do miss a few things about the '90s. The main one is that there were fewer people. I still live in my home town, and boy has it gone downhill. It's so much more crowded. In fact, parts of it are now dirty, overcrowded warzones. I also wish the countryside could go back to the way it was. Since the 1990s, my local woods have been hacked down to make way for a new estate, and a second massive estate has been built at the other end of the village. The traffic is far worse. We've been told the main road into town is going to have 500 new homes built along it as well. That road is choked with traffic now, so what is going to happen when an extra 500 cars are added?

Compared to the '90s, the world seems noisier, more crowded and more competitive. I wish I could wave a wand and make all the disgusting new build housing estates disappear, that's for sure.

Agree. The destruction of the countryside to make way for houses and road due to our ever expanding population in the last 20 years breaks my heart.

Interesting the point upthread about parenting being 'immature' back then - my parents seemed to act like teenagers well into their 30s back then. Big social circle, constant visiting, friendships and love affairs were EVERYTHING, lots of drinking and smoking and waccy baccy. Cheap flats, free uni, easy dole money, tiny banger cars and affordable fuel. I definitely felt like a complete afterthought and don't act like this myself. We were poor but i feel like being poor now is on a different level. Less quality of life.

Sadly I think it’s been hugely more overt in recent years.
The whole trans cult/movement has trampled - very overtly - over women’s and girls’ rights and protections.
Women-objectifying porn is so easily available via the internet.
Incels.
The Rochdale child rape gangs allowed to continue with impunity because, well, they were just dirty slap*ers leading these adult men on after all. They were children and teens who were horrendously abused FFS! But female ones from not great backgrounds so they don’t count, apparently.
I could go on, but I won’t …I’m depressing myself!

Is it all nostalgia or just the 90s? The 60s and 70s have been celebrated for ages.

It definiltly was more relaxed. I worked in a bank and there were regular 2 hr pub lunches. Bosses bought you drinks then you went back to the office and shuffled paper . Those were the days! 😂 I didn’t get a phone until 1999 and it wasn’t a camera phone so luckily little evidence of those lunches.

Oh f**k off.....

This is possibly the most ignorant comment I have ever read on this or any other website:
'I do not want to be rude but find that people from the U.K. had a lot more than families like our cleaner that came in the nineties and did much better than any working class person I know. Part of it I feel is precisely that people born working class feel robbed and hopeless in going ahead and blame the richer people. Well, let’s said that the cleaner I know has a few properties now and her kids were educated at university level with perfectly good opportunities. Not handed in a silver plate but the opportunities were there if you wanted to."

Where to start? Firstly, some working class non immigrants do well against impossible odds. Do you know, do you even get today what "doing well" looks like when, for example, you have an alcohol-addicted parent you have to parent yourself, if you grew up in care without the cushion of family property and support, or if you had parents made mentally ill themselves by the struggle to survive? Doing well is not "owning a few properties". Doing well is surviving, despite a system that continually tells you everything is based. on merit so your struggles are all your own fault, just as of course the Bridget Jones' flat in London and trendy job successes are all 100% their own and would have happened even without the supportive parents. Perhaps you tell yourself this because to entertain any other narrative would be to open the door to the possibility that there might be something outside pure unadulterated 100% stand alone brilliance behind everything you have in life, Note this is not the same as saying that none of a successful middle class person's success is down to them, nor that none of the problems of a working class person are their own. But where is the arbiter that you can scan over a person's life and say, ok, I'm going to add on 30 points for growing up in care, deduct 10 points due to attending a private 6th form college, add on 20 as you had to interrupt formal education to care for an ailing parent? Where is. this magic tool that automatically and entirely fairly evens up the scales of privilege and throws out a score in life based on a non existent level playing field? Any right thinking person knows this doesn't exist. Your comment suggests that just because you have encountered people who have come from abroad, possibly also from disadvantaged backgrounds, that suddenly the only thing standing between someone for whom life has been constant struggle , someone who might occasionally benefit from someone calling their modest (compared to Bridget Jones) material comforts evidence of a bloody hard earned success, is the will to so. The opportunities were there if you wanted them. Oh ok so anyone alive at this time who hasn't Bridget Jonesed their life just didn't want the opportunities. They saw them, took a look at them and thought, no, not for me. Appalling

@bigkidatheart so was I! Right down to the publishing company job and the Daniel Cleaver character! (Actually there were a few of them!)

I think the films are brilliantly observed but of course draw on hyperbole for effect!

I’m going to happily continue like Bridget for the rest of my life… because she’s relatable. She tries her best and it backfires, she does stupid stuff but does learn from it.

It’s meant to be a comedy! And very much of it’s time! Dear God we need a laugh in 2025!

Incidentally I spent much of last summer getting up to stupid ‘Bridget’ like shit because I’d just survived cancer and frankly needed to not take life so bloody seriously! (Although I didn’t get stuck up a tree - just locked out and having to be rescued a few times by dear friends!)

Ah @greengreyblue exactly! The infamous two hour lunch break in the pub… Whoops! The work got done. No one died. 😀

To add to a point up thread, what people often forget about Bridget is that she’s solidly English middle class. Her flat will probably have been bought for her by her parents, she’s dating men in law and publishing (rather than, say, one of the waiters from the restaurant opposite) and just look at the parents’ houses…Not to mention that garden party!

In a way, Bridget Jones was more a continuation of the Sloane Ranger Handbook ‘English way of life’ theme than anything particularly groundbreaking.

Trainspotting was set in the 80s.

I was telling my year 9 DD re Leah Betts yesterday. We had a similar incident recently near us, and it just about made local news. But nothing compared to the coverage of Leah Betts, which was so impactful at the time . So tragic that it is now scarcely remarked on.

Also, "owning a few properties" shouldn't be seen as a sign of success, it's hoarding housing that is being paid for out of the wages of struggling young people who according to that poster are too superficial and lazy to take opportunities and better themselves.

It was only easy in as much as I was younger, fitter, more naive and had zero responsibilities for a lot of the 90s.

The big difference between then and now is the cost of housing, although our first mortgage had an interest rate higher than today's and we could only get a mortgage at 3 times our joint salary (which was piss poor I might add).

Edited to add: weight has always been an issue and Rene Zellwigger and her putting on weight for Bridget Jones was teeth grindingly irritating. So was the film generally.

"Well there's a reason why there's not really the same nostalgia for trainspotting. People want cosy, not grim."

I dunno....Trainspotting was very much part of Cool Britannia, had an amazing soundtrack (I defy anyone not to be uplifted by Born Slippy) and when T2 came out a few years ago it was firmly pitched at those with nostalgia for the first film (multiple callbacks to key scenes, the reworking of Choose Life etc...).