The concept of “selling out” – and the degree to which that notion altered the meaning and perception of almost everything – is the single most nineties aspect of the nineties.
The enforced ennui and alienation of Gen X had one social upside: Self-righteous outrage was not considered cool, in an era when coolness counted for almost everything. Solipsism was preferable to narcissism. The idea of policing morality or blaming strangers for the condition of one’s own existence was perceived as overbearing and uncouth. If you weren’t happy, the preferred stance was to simply shrug and accept that you were unhappy. Ambiguous disappointment wasn’t that bad.
If a society improves, the experience of growing up in that society should be less taxing and more comfortable; if technology advances and efficiency increases, emerging generations should rationally expect to work less. If new kids aren’t soft and lazy, something has gone wrong.
Part of the complexity of living through history is the process of explaining things about the past that you never explained to yourself. So many temporary realties, distantly viewed in the rearview mirror, will appear ridiculous to any person who wasn’t there.
The nineties were not an age for the aspirant. The worst thing you could be was a sellout, and not because selling out involved money. Selling out meant you needed to be popular, and any explicit desire for approval was enough to prove you were terrible.
For reasons both explicable and debatable, Xers complained less pedantically than the demographic they followed and less vehemently than the demographic that came next.
People watch cable news as a form of entertainment, and they don’t want to learn anything that contradicts what they already believe.
Anything experienced through the screen of a television becomes a TV show.
I have a colleague who feels anyone over the age of twenty-one caught reading a Harry Potter novel should be executed without trial, but that strikes me as unreasonable; the fact that they’re written for British thirteen-year-olds probably means they’re the right speed for 90 percent of American adults.
The nineties were a golden age for metropolitan newspapers and glossy magazines, yet most copies were destroyed or recycled within a month and never converted to digital files. It was a decade of seeing absolutely everything before never seeing it again.
In the nineties, doing nothing on purpose was a valid option, and a specific brand of cool became more important than almost anything else. The key to that coolness was disinterest in conventional success. The nineties were not an age for the aspirant.
Modern people worry about smartphone addiction, despite the fact that landlines exercised much more control over the owner.
That, more than any person or event, informed the experience of nineties life: an adversarial relationship with the unseemliness of trying too hard.
It was, in retrospect, a remarkably easy time to be alive. There were still nuclear weapons, but there was not going to be a nuclear war. The internet was coming, but reluctantly, and there was no reason to believe it would be anything but awesome. The United States experienced a prolonged period of economic growth without the protracted complications of a hot or cold war, making it possible to focus on one’s own subsistence as if the rest of society were barely there.
Now the 1990s seem like a period when the world was starting to go crazy, but not so crazy that it was unmanageable or irreparable. It was the end of the twentieth century, but also the end to an age when we controlled technology more than technology controlled us. People played by the old rules, despite a growing recognition that those rules were flawed. It was a good time that happened long ago, although not nearly as long ago as it seems.
A person native to the twenty-first century can’t really reconcile why anyone would pay $13.25 for twelve fixed songs that could only be played on specific high-end electronics serving no other function; the majority of all recorded music can now be instantly accessed anywhere for less than $10 a month.
Now the 1990s seem like a period when the world was starting to go crazy, but not so crazy that it was unmanageable or irreparable. It was the end of the twentieth century, but also the end to an age when we controlled technology more than technology controlled us.
Football combines two of the worst features of American life,” wrote conservative baseball scholar George Will. “It is violence punctuated by committee meetings.
Among the generations that have yet to go extinct, Generation X remains the least annoying.
The primacy of a landline connection dictated how life was lived, with such deep-rooted universality that its role in shaping humanity was virtually unconsidered. It was the single most important feature of every home, and nobody cared.
Modern people worry about smartphone addiction, despite the fact that landlines exercised much more control over the owner. If you needed to take an important call, you just had to sit in the living room and wait for it. There was no other option.