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MelodicBerries  virtus junxit mors non separabit  1yr ago (freddiedeboer.substack.com)   3928 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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I kept waiting for the interesting twist, where he interogates his nostalgia or comes up woth an actual theory of why the 90s were great, but the entire post is just a series of country music cliches about how life was so much simpler back in the day, drinking your dad's stolen booze and losing your virginity in your friend's old Dodge. Like, yeah Freddie, I also had a lot of fun in high school and think modern youths are a sad, weak, degenerate imitation of my own generation's greatness. Such is the opinion of literally every person over the age of 30 since Cicero complained about all the long hair and jewelry Clodius and his friends were wearing.

He's just arrogantly saying "no, but dude. Seriously. The 90s really were that great," and then making the same exact list of "lost" teenage experiences his parents probably complained about. Even his recognition and rejection of the idea that he's just feeling the same generational nostalgia everyone feels once they hit a certain age is cliché.

I usually find Freddy DeBoar insightful, even when I disagree, but this is peak millenial hipster navelgazing and he should be embarrassed.

Am I missing something here? Is there an insight hiding sonwwhere after I started skimming that rises above the lyrics of a Brad Paisely song?

I've got a couple of specific buckets:

  • If you just take a quick glance at toys available to kids in the 90s, they honestly are obviously superior. Take a look at Super Soakers - I mean holy shit. You can make the argument that today's Nerf offerings are excellent, and I'd agree. But you can and should mostly play with these inside. Water guns force you outside.

  • For video games and general technology, the 90's were "good enough" and that's a powerful state to be in. Your imagination had to fill in blanks with pixelated skyboxes. To make it to secret areas in a game, you had to know someone or buy a guidebook. The girl you were chatting with on AIM could look like anyone. Your walkman wouldn't last forever, and only fit one disc or tape. When you wanted to ask a question about Santa, you couldn't just google it.

  • Food hadn't completed its evolution into a fully-synthetic product. GMOs were still an emerging technology. Taco Bell was still cooking their own refried beans in-restaurant and frying shells fresh each day, Pizza Hut still had handmade dough.

  • This edges into the late 80s as well, but I don't think many people would disagree that 90s cars represented a huge stylistic improvement over their immediate predecessors. In many ways, modern cars still aren't as fast or beautiful.

I'm focusing on things here because nailing down a superior culture is so difficult. Of course parents weren't hovering as close and you could use a bike to get to your friends house. Of course you could be a little wilder when people weren't recording your every move. Of course it was a little bit easier to take your first drink at a younger age. Of course face to face interaction was still the best way to date and get things done.

But I think that's tougher to quantify at best, and a bit too obviously cyclical with previous generations' take. Kids these days may be a collection of asexual wimps but I also think there's less physical bullying, which is cool. They've had access to an enormous amount of history and data from an earlier age which is important. I dunno, I could do a better job being a devil's advocate but it's mostly beside the point.

My theory re video games is that because the graphics were still limited in 1990 to early 2000, you had to focus on making the game itself fun. Morrowind had to be a really good rpg because you couldn’t sell it on the basis of graphics— they weren’t that good. And that’s true of shooters and platform games as well. It was either fun despite the graphics or it wasn’t going to make it.

Kids these days may be a collection of asexual wimps but I also think there's less physical bullying, which is cool.

What if these things are connected? What if there's a tradeoff?

Bullying hasn’t gone away either. We may also be seeing a trade off between physical bullying and cyber bullying.

Something about the immediate and stark reality of an unsupervised playground seems to me to be painful but brutally honest in a way that is a microcosm of actual life in future meatspace.

(For reference I was in HS and university in the 90s. I’m not a gamer, I like 70’s 2-channel audio, and i don’t have twitter, so for me “online” is work, bills, and escapism. I don’t “live” here the way I think many younger people do)

I can’t imagine how terrible cyber bullying must be by comparison to what we had to endure in the 90’s for people who are invested in virtual life. Online the social signals are so complicated and the separation or anonymity imposed by screens brings out the worst in people. If this is a microcosm of the developing future societal order - social credit and AI - I feel somewhat sorry for those who don’t know what life was like before all that.

Also - the 80s were an awesome time to be a little kid.

I share the same concern, actually. I was fortunate enough to experience both physical and online bullying. Both were deeply humiliating, but at least with the former I could have theoretically done better standing up for myself.

Forcing people to risk getting their ass kicked when being a piece of shit is important.

My original comment, though, was trying to convey that for all the woke crap zoomers have swallowed hook line and sinker, I think that there's a lower tolerance for "dumb" bullying. I'm reminded of 21 Jump Street where calling someone a fag for dressing well isn't considered acceptable anymore. I miss being able to call people that name, but I also won't bemoan the loss of some of it.

honestly coulda added a Matrix reference there - was predicted that we peaked in the 90s (in the US anyway)

I think the whole theme is an examination of how, even knowing that he looks at Boomers who say the same shit about the 50s/60s/70s as morons, and at Retvrners who say the same shit about the 15th/17th/18th as schizophrenics, he still can't help feeling that way about the 90s. The denouement fantasy 90s, of going to all the cool places and doing all the cool things with all the cool people, is the capper; that's how we always idealize a time period. People rarely feel nostalgia through a Rawlsian Veil of Ignorance; maybe Gibbon. We rarely think "On average, people in time period X had it best." Or "I would be most likely to wind up ok in time period x."

We either think, "it would have been cool to live in the 60s and go to Woodstock and hang out in the Haight and do drugs and have love ins with pretty girls." Or we think "If I as an individual, with my unique skills and tastes, were transported back to the 50s intact, I would crush it."

We never think "What if I go back to the 60s, but I'm an ugly guy born in a trailer park working a dead end job in a cardboard box factory, I never get a good education or hear much about the world because my religious parents keep me from most media, I only vaguely hear about Woodstock and the Haight after the fact."

When we time travel, we always imagine ourselves in the thick of the action. Which most people weren't. Freddy's "Friends" piece that's being argued about further down is kinda asking the question: should media present an aspirational normative view of cool people as cool people should be? Or should it present the average person who has only a vague interest in politics and events?

Freddie would argue yes, based on his follow-up, but YMMV.

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