IRL in the '90s (new series overview)

Back in the late 2000s and early 2010s, when the '80s revival was raging, a large part of my writing was focused on that trend, but putting a lot of separate pieces together into a more coherent sweeping vision of what was going on.

That led to my discovery of the link between crime rates and an outgoing social mood, and vice versa, falling crime and a cocooning social mood. I elaborated this over several rise-and-fall time periods, from those of the 20th century, as well as much earlier rising-crime eras (late 1300s / early 1400s, late 1500s / early 1600s, and late 1700s / early 1800s).

Use the sidebar to navigate through my posts from late 2009 through 2012 or so. Or leave a comment asking about a specific topic, and I'll try to remember if I covered it. Or use google to search this blog on your own.

I was never a huge fan of the '90s, either at the time, during the '80s revival when a handful of people tried to include the '90s as well, or even now when the Zoomers are trying to launch a '90s / y2k revival. However, the '80s have been revived to death by now, and I've written everything I can about that period. So I might as well focus my attention on the '90s — both to recreate the zeitgeist, and to understand the dynamics behind what made it the way it was.

During the work on the crime-and-cocooning cycle, I was already talking a lot about the '90s, as an example of a falling-crime / cocooning environment. But that was always on a downer side of things, counterposed to the exciting '80s just before. And putting down the '90s was a way to take part in the '80s revival of 10-15 years ago — and now the only revival going on is for the '90s and y2k, so I can contribute to another nostalgia wave, by playing up the '90s (while still be honest).

And by now, I've also discovered the 15-year cultural excitement cycle, as well as the 30-year cycle, whereby each 15-year cycle alternates between a high-energy version and a low-energy version. Along with the crime-and-cocooning cycle, that will help to explain the '90s pretty well.

I will be focusing more on IRL, daily life, and social contexts. It's not going to be a nostalgia trip of mass-mediated pop culture. To the extent that movies, TV, video games, etc. show up, they will be as part of a vignette about how people related to each other. The focus will be more on the video rental store than what movies people checked out. I'll do some posting about the aesthetics themselves, but only if they're largely forgotten (including by today's revivalists) and would really jolt your memories back to that time (such as the wacky colors and patterns on bed linens).

The perspective is from a very late Gen X-er, which is necessary because Millennials were helicopter-parented from infancy and don't remember much of IRL, due to being insulated in a mass-media / pop culture bubble, which their paranoid parents rationalized as being better than letting them roam around outside and potentially interact with Bad Influences unsupervised. But Gen X was still free of helicopter parents, and continued living as latchkey kids, throughout the '90s.

As always, I reject technological determinism and won't be blaming / crediting the internet for anything in the '90s. In fact, one over-arching theme will be how little of a role the 'net played back then. Life didn't get sucked into the terminally online mode of tech until social media took over during the 2010s. The 2000s and Web 2.0 were a transition between the offline and online eras, so I might also cover the early 2000s along with the '90s.

Nor will I be covering political or economic dynamics — this is a strictly social and cultural zeitgeist approach. The most I can say is that, in Peter Turchin's "fathers-and-sons" model of civil unrest / rioting / etc., the '90s were a calm valley — in between the turbulent peaks circa 1970 and 2020. It was one of the least politicized periods ever, and anyone who did try to politicize things was immediately shut down by everyone else as a politically correct whiner and killjoy.

The "end of history" added to that sense of de-politicization. The only empire to rival America, Russia, had begun imploding, and there were no other empires that had even begun to expand, let alone reach maturity. It had nothing to do with capitalism, communism, or any of that superficial stuff. It was strictly about imperial rivalry, and we were suddenly the last empire left standing — and we had not yet had our knees wobbled by the failed wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, nor the never-ending 2008 Depression.

This was not as strong of an effect on our zeitgeist as the domestic political cycle (minimum of civil unrest), because the international picture only strongly affects us if it's close to home, and the Russian sphere of influence has always been distant. But it was one of those minor factors that I probably won't write about any further.

To recapitulate the forces at work, the '90s saw:

- Falling crime rates (peaked in '92).

- Cocooning social mood.

- Low-energy excitement cycle (1990-2004, unlike the high-energy cycles of 1975-'89 and 2005-'19).

- A restless phase ('90-'94) and a manic phase ('95-'99) in the excitement cycle (and a vulnerable phase in 2000-'04). The '90s proper did not have a downer / emo phase, although y2k did.

At the most general big-picture level, I would capture the essence of the '90s as the most boring decade ever. But others would interpret it in a glass-half-full way as the most cozy or low-key or just-straight-vibin' decade ever. When I try to think of how I felt at various times, the recurring impression is of a lull, a void, a vacant non-space that is hard to go back to through your own recollection (unless you remember everything, like me), and the nostalgia feels like taking a trip to nowhere.

How do you vividly evoke the world of the Decade From Nowhere? I'm sure this will be far less engrossing and memory-awakening than my exploration of the '80s, but then that seems to be the appeal for the '90s revivalists — that it was not a sensory overload, social overload, political / economic overload, or even technological overload.

In fact, to get more immersed in that mood, I'm writing this series on my y2k set-up, whose defining feature is the beige / light gray color palette. The PC tower, the CRT monitor, the mechanical keyboard, the rollerball mouse, the speakers, and the disk case. It is absolutely mind-boggling to me how this blandest of computer rigs has been all the rage for the past several years. What's so fascinating about beige?

But that's just it — people have grown tired from over-exposure to the super-sleek black or pure blinding-white colors, the very high-contrast RGB streamer lights, and the rest of the aesthetics from the high-energy cycle of 2005-'19. They want to take things down a notch, to the beige computer, forest-green Subaru, Gregorian chant, baggy sweatshirt Nineties.

Exactly as the literal '90s people were reacting, after the intense cycle of 1975-'89 — time to take things down a notch for a little while. From bright pastels, synth, and gay, to heavy earth tones, Unplugged, and lesbian.

Let's end with one of the most iconic songs of the '90s, which ought to resonate all the more strongly in the current climate of nostalgia for a less corrupted time.