11. Friends.
– open_pistachio
12. Hunter green things available in the stores. That was the “in” color then, but it’s not popular anymore and seldom available.
– llcucf80
13. A cocaine addiction. Glad I kicked that sh*t. 18 years and counting.
– Maybe_Black_Mesa
14. AOL Instant Messenger.
– squidbrat
15. A Palm Pilot.
It was an undocumented feature that it lost all the data if the battery completely died.
– WeByte
16. I had a 1996 Plymouth Neon at the time, I sold it in 01′. It’s probably in a scrap yard now.
– PortLionsKodiak
17. A PlayStation 1.
– Boydle
18. Serotonin.
– intellectualidiot
19. An *NSYNC and Backstreet Boys poster with a strong desire to marry AJ McLean.
I no longer have that strong desire.
– Erovian_MD
20. Fear of Y2K…
– beatzwellington
21. A cell phone whose battery would last a week.
– GarrettTheMole
22. My dog Snoopy. He was still a puppy then, I had just gotten him the year before. He was my best friend for almost 17 years until he died in 2015.
– eDgAR-
23. Hope.
Seriously, it’s hard to explain to people who have grown up in a post-9/11 world. Hope is the single biggest thing I miss from the 90s. After the Berlin Wall fell and the Eastern Bloc collapsed, the Sword of Damocles that had been hanging over the world since shortly after the end of World War II (nuclear war) vanished. The Cold War was over, the information revolution was here, we weren’t going to die in a nuclear war and everything was awesome!
Sure we still had some negative things going on (the Balkans wars, Oklahoma City, the first WTC attack, Waco, the genocide in Rwanda, just off the top of my head), but overall it was a period of hope and optimism for the future unlike I’ve seen before or since.
I mean, our biggest political scandal was that our president lied about a bl**job, something that seems positively tame by post-2016 post-truth standards.
9/11 really did change everything, at least in the U.S. We have lived the last 17 years involved in some war or another with someone constantly telling us we should be afraid. Afraid of terrorists, afraid of immigrants, afraid of minorities, afraid of our neighbors, afraid of people taking our jobs, afraid of machines taking our jobs. Everything now is about fear. Even our dark, “gritty” movies exude a world fearful of everything in sight.
We lost something huge in hope. And I hope we find it before it’s too late.
– peckrob
24. A great job that paid well for doing very little work, now it’s the reverse. Crappy job and working too hard.
– ilujan
25. Privacy.
– buckygoboom
23. Hope.
well said! And unfortunately, the truth.
2. Two quarters in the front tiny pocket of my jeans, in case I needed to make an emergency phone call while I was out.
I was born in 1994, so this was never the case for me but I find it kind of fascinating how small factors can change it all so drastically. Awesome comparison.