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MelodicBerries  virtus junxit mors non separabit  1yr ago (freddiedeboer.substack.com)   3922 thread views

It's So Sad When Old People Romanticize Their Heydays, Also the 90s Were Objectively the Best Time to Be Alive

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The nights were pregnant with pre-millennium tension; we ran riot because we had been promised a new century to become adults in, because we were sold on a vision of rebirth through numerology, and we knew what came next would be better than everything that had come before. It turned out that that was untrue, and we never got over it.

Go look around at the way the world looked in 2002. Everything looked like shit. The fashion was worse. The music was worse. The country was worse.

A lot of people are mentioning 9/11 as the main material event that must have been what changed the overall feel and marks the end of the broad 90s. But I think there's something to what Freddie says here about goofy numerology putting something in the air that a lot of people felt. Even if we know rationally that it's arbitrary, it feels interesting psychologically being the last decade of the millennium, about to tick over to triple-zeroes and something new, Y2K. When that passed without incident (as it was bound to), some magic feeling was lost, and we just continued on with boy bands, survivor / american idol reality tv, frosted-tips, whatever.

I think the last faint echo of something like this mass psychology was in the run up to 2012, with the mayan calendar ending doomsday stuff, on the heels of the financial crisis and great recession, occupy wallstreet, the last of peak-oil doomerism before fracking, etc. People could indulge in some more dark fantasies of living in interesting end-times that are about to transition to something different, until january 2013 when it was time to go back to mundane reality.

I remember people predicting mass riots and blackouts, that the Y2K saving efforts of software engineers had been for naught. I spent hours in december practicing blowing away pixelated ducks on the super nintendo in preparation.

Then absolutely fucking nothing happened for 2 years. I was willing to give the cool new future a little bit more time, but 9/11 honestly did just crush my hope for the future. All we got was mass surveillance and a forever war.

For folk numerology, consider the year of perfect hindsight, 2020, and its successors: “2020 won” and “2020 too”. We were hoping this year we would finally be “2020-free,” but it turns out it’s just “2020 3.” Maybe next year we’ll find out what 2020 was for…

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