Ah, the 90's. Bill Clinton raised taxes, which eliminated the deficit, which made interest rates go down.....My biggest problem in life was wondering which company which was trying to recruit me had the best stock option package.

There are a few things which have gotten better. Gay marriage. Marijuana legalization. But Entshitification is real and for the last 25 years has been relentless.

Like Synthwave

The 90s were incredible. The Matrix had it right when it mentioned in 1999 "peak of human civilization".

* Music was incredible

* Movies were amazing, enough to go to the theater 12 times a year at least

* Homelessness was pretty much non-existent

* People were friendly and had time for strangers

* Employment was 10x better than today, and not by today's way of counting (which don't count group x y and z)

* Jobs actually made people feel needed and going to work was an incredible feeling for your soul.

* Very few people were on drugs 24/7 like they are today

Our biggest problem was probably Alcohol, which has actually dipped today (but probably because people are on pot instead)

If I had $200 Billion I would literally give all of it to be a teen again for ten years from 1990 to 2000 again.

There are still lots of us alive who have experienced this. And to us, X-files felt high tech for the time. This was a time period when I think people were just waking up to powers of computers and technology, in particular alien tech, due to the incalculable complexities of ideating and creating magical electrical boxes - microprocessors. How could humans be capable of doing this, after all?

One poster already mentioned Matrix, but games like Alpha Centauri and others had also explored socioeconomic themes of power laws and what massive sweeping changes entail.

You can still get the 90s and 2000s experience to some extent. It hasn’t truly left, but society has moved on so it is a rather isolated journey and somewhat limited. But you won’t get MTV or any of that nowadays sadly.

For me, my car is a mid 2000s model so the way I listen to music is to buy CDs. I haven’t stopped. That part of 80s/90s hasn’t gone away, but it doesn’t really feel nostalgic either because it’s normal. To others of course, especially newer generation, they don’t even know we had to rewind tapes manually sometimes because the device would fail to do it properly.

The larger thing we lost is the internet. There’s no “90s internet” that someone can do without doing some stupid geocities/angel fire meme site. I don’t have an answer to this.

I was there and I can tell you that it was genuinely better times.

The 80s and 90s were peak western civilization.

Tech was exciting, futuristic.

Politics - whilst certainly always grubby and adversarial - had not descended into lies and manipulation and misinformation and attempts to destroy the democratic systems.

People talked socialized read books.

Dating hadn’t been turned into a high volume marketplace in which no one is ever satisfied and everyone is always upgrading.

The environment and global warming were an issue for sure but not like now.

Here's another, next-level of nostalgia.

https://gilliananderson.ws/webarchive/about/favmusic.html