I came across a quote online from a book that I think encapsulates how @90sRetroFan feels about their era perfectly:
“History is hard to know, because of all the hired bullshit, but even without being sure of “history” it seems entirely reasonable to think that every now and then the energy of a whole generation comes to a head in a long fine flash, for reasons that nobody really understands at the time—and which never explain, in retrospect, what actually happened. … There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning. And that, I think, was the handle—that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting—on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave.
So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.”
Essentially, this whole passage can be boiled down to the tagline of our Counterculture Era thread: “when western civilization was meant to have died peacefully”
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Even though I was born right at the second millennium, so the post-9/11 world is really the only world that I truly know, and this book quote is referring to the counterculture of the 60s, I sometimes keep myself awake longer than I should be by going on a 90s kick. Honestly, this current era well and truly terrifies me. There’s something so isolating about how the internet has managed to fit itself into our society. Almost every place that human beings used to congregate in the flesh is now dead or dying because of the internet. Even monuments to western consumerism like malls are in zombified, decrepit states almost everywhere. The functions that these places used to provide can largely be accessed through online services. The grocery store is really the only place that people actually go to on a regular basis anymore, and even then, grocery stores were never used for interacting with people. Things are only going to get worse as VR technology improves. There will soon come a time where not only will we spend most of our time in total isolation, but even when we do “leave the house”, it’ll be for virtual environments surrounded by virtual people
Sometimes, I wish that we were all born at the same time, going to the same schools. Doesn’t even have to be in the 90s, although it’d be pretty sweet for all of us, including the 2000s babies, to relive 90sRetroFan’s youth. If the best of us had all been given the chance to grow up together and support each other, I have no doubt that tens of novels could have been written about what we would’ve gotten up to, and I probably would have cherished those memories my whole life.
But the reality is that life often robs us of romantic lives and leaves us with bland or even terrible youths. My reality was that I spent my youth almost completely alone save for the biological family that I didn’t ask for, because I found it hard to socialize like everybody else and always felt misunderstood. I can’t really describe in words how much it hurts my heart sometimes when I think about how I’m here, in this world that sets such low expectations for how people should be and how life should be, instead of in that world that I sometimes experience every once in a while, where I’m having a dream that I don’t wanna wake up from. I don’t really know any of you on a personal level. We’re all just text tied to usernames at this point. But my interactions with the people here have been more meaningful than almost every real life interaction I’ve had in my entire life.
@90sRetroFan, and the others, thanks for being here. I’m not so sure I would’ve made it here and came to the same conclusions about the world, had that website not been written
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