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This is from an online posting I saw today…
90’s kids are the generation of nostalgia, because so much technological advancement happened in such a rapid time frame when we were growing up. We can clearly remember having technologies that are now obsolete, like going from a huge corded phone to a small computer in your pocket - just within our formative years. It is a major thing, and it sparks a nostalgia for our seemingly ‘simpler’ childhoods because so much rapid development makes it seem like it was a lot longer ago than it actually was.
Just to add on to that, our childhood wasn’t even technology based. We grew up knowing of chalk, skateboards, jump rope, street hockey, playgrounds, bug and butterfly collecting, etc. Slowly technology took over our lives and now there are hardly kids playing outside in the summer. We can clearly remember our childhood as it was, and now we can see the clear line between it. We were the generation right smack in the middle of it all. Our parents were of non-tech, and our children/young siblings will be all tech.
Not to mention, ours was the last generation that grew up with all those bright promises of ‘work hard, go to college, and you’ll have a successful life’… only to find those hopes abruptly dashed when the housing bubble burst and the economy crashed. Millennials have grown up expecting that disappointment, because for them the problem has been there since day one.
So 90’s kids aren’t just nostalgic… we’re bitter. And we ache for those days when we could still think the world was boundless and full of the opportunities we were promised since the first day of kindergarten.
---Seriously, this post sums up completely for me how it felt to grow up in the 90’s, being raised in this ‘false bubble of reality’ as I now like to call it. We were told if we just work hard and go to college that the world would just open up to us and we could all have the American dream. Now we find ourselves saddled with tons of student loan debt, and there are no good jobs to be had. The typical ‘entry level’ and service type jobs are all taken up by old people who didn’t save for their retirements. You’re lucky to even find a minimum wage job these days, and the minimum wage is not a living wage - it is a starvation wage. Meanwhile the rich and elite of society blame us for all these problems, saying we just don’t “work hard enough”, or call us lazy or moochers when we have to rely on government benefits just to feed ourselves and get by.
This feeling of nostalgia/bitterness is a large part of my depression. I feel like I was raised with a certain perception of reality and how the world worked – and it was all a big fat lie. Or, at the very least, I was raised with a sense of permanence to prosperity, and that is not the case at all.
So now I’m struggling to redefine myself, and figure out how I can fit my life and dreams/aspirations into the way the world REALLY works. I feel like I have no idea what I am doing. Like a literal babe in the woods – just stumbling blindly around, with no one I can turn to for advice or help. It’s terribly lonely and disheartening.
Thanks for listening.
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"When you trust yourself, you will know how to live." -Goethe
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