What happened to 90’s optimism? Did Silicon Valley kill it?

I miss the 90’s.

Once upon a time, life was simple.

We were optimistic.

It was a time when we were reminded to ‘please rewind’.

A hypercolour decade where syncopated hi-energy keyboard riffs underscored euphoric vocals full of reverb and I got my ace of base on while my t-shirt changed colour based on my body heat.

Now, why anyone thought that the need to broadcast your inner thermodynamics in a visual body odour heat map is beyond me but… at the time, it was awesome!

I was a Mr Big Scatman… a Mr vain new kid on the block with a scent of team spirit. I lived a semi-charmed life without a care in the world beyond what the new ‘100% Hits’ CD was going to contain. A double edition compact disc set separated by a swinging door of cheap plastic where you’d pop out the disc before putting it carefully into your DiscMan.

Groove was in my heart, my mind a runaway train and Saturday mornings were spent with Britney Spears and the Back Street Boys on Video Hits. This was in the dark ages before YouTube when we couldn’t selectively stream.

Instead, 90’s ballads (good and bad) washed over us, already curated and beyond our control. Some days, we’d even spend hours in front of our stereo system with a finger poised on the heavy record button. We’d sit in anticipation waiting to push it as soon as our favourite song came on the radio so we could record it on cassette tape. We didn’t have ‘playlists’, we had mix tapes and they required love and effort to create.

There was no Facebook, no Instagram… just hand-written notes in bright blue biro, folded carefully in complex patterns and passed with clumsy, sweaty hands.

It was a time before 9/11 where terrorism only lived in James Bond movies and your destiny was decided by a paper origami ‘fortune teller’ amongst the sweet waft of scented pens and lip smacker.

There were no iPads, retina displays or augmented reality. Instead, we had ‘Magic Eye’ where we spent hours staring at book pages, trying to relax our eye focus and see the mind-blowing 3D images hidden in colourful patterns.

They were indeed the wonder years and I was looking for my very own Winnie Cooper.

Then came the internet.

The dulcet tones and static of a dial-up-modem promised hours lost in Altavista and Netscape waiting painfully for (possibly rude) images to load line-by-line… but it was worth it right? Until someone called your landline which severed your connection!

Ahh… Nights of scrolling fluro text, flashing banners, poor resolution, Napster, ICQ and LimeWire… They were the days.

It was an age of pre-hipster pretension when beer that was just beer and nights in the park included a bottle of cheap fizz passed around as our passion popped before we moved on to an assortment of West Coast Coolers, Sub Zeros and UDLs… It was all about quantity over quality.

Things just seemed easy in the nineties.

We would be totally fine spending hours waiting at Town Hall steps for a friend running late, even though you never knew if they were in fact late or even coming at all. We didn’t have mobile phones so we never knew. That’s right… no phones.

This meant that we had to be organised and actually follow through with plans and commitments (mostly).

It was also a time where it was perfectly ok to push someone into a pool at a party without worrying that you’d ruin their $2000 smartphone.

Then suddenly, (after we all miraculously survived the Y2K bug) everything changed.

So, what the hell happened? I’m sure Alanis Morrissett thinks we outta know but, I’m not sure we really do. It’s always easy to blame technology, terrorism and war but, maybe there’s more to it… maybe not?

It seems that technology complicated life and our overall optimism took a massive nose dive.

The anticlimax of the new Millennium, 9/11, the ‘war on terror’, stock market and financial crashes, more terrorism, and an uncontrollable consumer lust as Apple released glossy new phones every September that left us feeling like our tech was suddenly old and redundant. We had to have it all and now.

Am I just a nineties kid simply reflecting back on ‘better’ times because it was my childhood or, was there a genuine optimism about the nineties that no longer exists in society as things seem to be becoming increasingly dark and more complex?

Maybe we all feel a connection with the decade of our youth because the seriousness of life seemed to be at a distance… something our parents worried about while we did indeed live the wonder years.

But… I honestly think there’s more to it.

I mean, before the dot-com boom, it was perfectly ok to hate your job and life took precedence over career. Then came Silicon Valley, start-ups and Steve Jobs who (even unintentionally) sent a message that we must be slaves to a vocational passion to ‘succeed’ in life.

Quotes like “Find something you love, then find someone to pay you to do it” started surfacing everywhere.

Sounds great! BUT… Does this now mean it’s now not ok to hate our jobs as a side-project and instead we should be monetizing our passion?

This message sounds positive in nature and makes sense on the surface. Why waste your life working in a job you hate right?

However, it’s also a very capitalist mind-set that speaks a manipulative subtext that we should all be making money from what we love and that just having a non-monetised passion and an average day job isn’t enough. Is this right? I’m undecided… but, either way, it puts massive pressure on us to succeed in our passion and commit our lives to a cause and sell our souls to ‘change the world’ for better or worse.

This dot-com boom not only put pressure on us to all think we needed to massively sacrifice to ‘succeed’ (financially) but, the very technology being developed gave us unprecedented access to the world and expanded our choices. Now, most people would think that choice is a good thing but, it can also be a massive distraction.

Often, we are kept from our true goals, dreams and ambitions not by obstacles or challenges but simply by having a clearer path to a lesser goal. We take the shitty corporate job over our passion because it’s ‘easy’ and it pays well. We never plan on making it long-term, but the stickiness of comfortability and financial stability can be catalysts for stagnation. We then suffer regret and guilt because we’re not getting paid for our passion and we feel as though we’re wasting our life.

When technology opens us up to thousands of ‘quick-win’ lesser goals, it becomes hard to stay focused (and even remember) what it is we really want.

You would think that with more options, technology and global access, stagnation would be the least of our worries but, in actual fact, it seems to have stunted our personal progression in a sense while, paradoxically, leaving us feeling unworthy if we’re not living our dream through our career and behind the helm of the next big idea.

So, what does the future hold? Who knows… Sometimes, I feel like a 90’s kid stuck in a modern, complex world, trying to navigate through the ‘motivational’ / self-help / entrepreneurial movement / successful career bullshit and just live life. If technology and the digital landscape is shaping our futures, I’d rather be a digital nomad.

All-in-all, there’s a reason that we all miss a decade that, at the time, we probably thought was uneventful and I think it’s because it was the last decade of its type to exist… at least for a while.

We’re plunging warp speed ahead into a future full of contradicting possibilities and, sometimes, it’s one that leaves me wanting to go back to a world where my biggest concern was an X-Files world; wondering if Mulder would finally convince Scully that Aliens were real…

I actually asked ‘Scully’ if ‘she believed’ once.

That’s right folks… Many years ago, I queued at the Westfield mall for hours, waiting for the actress Gillian Anderson (Scully) to sign my X-Files VHS tape. Again… totally worth it and I still have it to this day… I did never get an answer to my question.

Well, let’s all just hope that we’re on the right track and the ease-of-life in the nineties may just return soon. Until then, grab your favourite 90’s playlist, blast it, and journey back to a time when life was simple. God bless the 90s.

Did you also love the 90s? Comment below and tell me what your favourite thing is about the 90s.