Lifestyle

4 Ways This Generation Gets Nostalgic For The 90s In Our Everyday Lives

by Brooke Van Sickle
Warner Bros. Television

Sometimes, in this digital age of adulthood, we become stressed out and overworked.

All we want to do is dive into our blanket fort, binge-watch cartoons and forget about all of our responsibilities.

We just want to go back to the simpler times before we had all of these responsibilities.

If we focus on Corey and Topanga’s relationship, we can forget about real marriage and starting a family for a while.

No matter how many Tinder dates we go on or how much bar hopping we do, we are no closer to settling down and finding the one person we want to spend the rest of our lives with.

It’s fine because we’re still trying to figure out who we are. We’re just now mastering living on our own and paying big bills. Our careers aren’t quite where we want them to be yet.

There’s no way we can fathom settling down just yet.

That doesn’t stop people from asking, though: When are you getting married? Do you have anyone special in your life?

Then we receive invites and see social media posts of everyone starting to settle down and have babies on social media. And even though we’re not ready, we still feel inadequate.

So, we would rather fixate on our favorite 90s relationships. Then, we can transport to a time in our lives when our biggest relationship worry was sharing candy with our elementary crush on the playground.

If we jam out to Britney and our favorite boy bands, we can drown out the negative news of the world.

Now that we’ve reached adult status, we’ve started to care about current events.

We have apps on our phones that update us when something happens, and people are constantly sharing articles on social media.

We even sit down to watch the news like our parents, or at the very least, watch comic syndicates like "The Daily Show" to make sure to stay in the loop in case a coworker asks us a question later.

However, most of this information is negative. We read all of these articles and start to get depressed.

When we were children, we didn’t have wars all the time. There weren’t mass shootings on a regular basis. We were floored when there was hate violence going on because it wasn’t the norm.

Now, it seems all of these tragic happenings are becoming so commonplace, we have become desensitized and detached from it all.

So, if we jam out all of the noise for a while, maybe we can forget the bad stuff for a bit. Maybe we can go to a happier time.

If we think about the landlines and dial-up Internet, we can take a pause from our crazy digital lives.

Today, we don’t go anywhere without our phones. It feels like we have cut off our arms if we can’t find our device for more than 10 minutes.

We kill time searching apps. We forgo socializing when we’re out to socialize on digital media. We are constantly in contact and know everything the moment it happens.

Yes, all of this technology is amazing and we don’t know what we did before Google told us everything we needed to know.

But that doesn’t mean it isn’t overwhelming at times. We feel overstimulated. We work on our off-hours. We have trouble sleeping because we can’t shut our minds off.

However, if we forget about our technology for a minute, we can try to relax.

We can pretend dial-up Internet can’t work because Mom’s on the phone. We can think about riding bikes because we don't have hours of video games to entertain us.

We can just be for a little while.

If we think about our childhoods, we can forget sometimes being in the adult world is hard.

Even though we are starting to master this whole adult thing, sometimes we feel like failures.

We aren’t at the job we thought we’d be, or in the relationship we hoped we would have. Everything seems to be taking longer than expected.

This isn’t what we dreamed of as a child. We didn’t think we’d be so strapped with student loan debt that being able to move would be hard.

We didn’t think we would struggle finding a decent job that paid well after earning a degree. We didn’t expect the world we idolized as children to be ugly and filled with disappointment.

So, if we go back to our childhoods, we can remember the good times; the times we were filled with hope; the times we had so many dreams and everything seemed possible.

In our nostalgia, we can dream about the adult lives we want to live while we are in the hard times.

Our nostalgia helps us deal.