>>5982034
Also an '89 here. What I miss most is the zeitgeist. There was a window I can remember feeling in the air in the mid 90s that the world was finally going to settle down. The USSR had fallen, the space program was ongoing and we were going to the stars, the USA was the only superpower left on Earth, and even race relations were at an all-time high. Then we got 9/11, the dotcom bubble burst, endless war in the Middle East under (widely believed at the time) threat of WMDs and anthrax in your mailbox, Obama turning every issue into a racial one, massively and progressively dystopian local intelligence policy "to protect us", and in the middle of that malaise we got normies onto the internet in 2007 with iPhones, Twitter, and the mass adoption of social media.
The technology today doesn't even compare to back then, but all our losses in that time are much much harder to quantify. I know I was just a kid back then and I'm sure the world wasn't quite so rose tinted for people that were already adults in the 90s, but I can tell you that all my friends' families owned their own houses and their dads went to work and their moms took care of the kids and we all played with everyone in our neighborhoods because there was no easy out to just doomscroll another six hours for simulated social contact.
I don't think I'd call the era innocent, but our current situation certainly makes it feel that way.
