Anyone here went to high school in the mid/late 1990s?

[zboy1]

The 90s were nowhere near as good as the 80s, but it had its moments...The music was good (I liked alt-rock music) and the TV and movies of the time were entertaining. The people started becoming unfriendly, standoffish and dickish in general, though.

The first half of the decade was good, but by the late 90s, I started noticing a decline in the culture and society. Then 9/11 came--and that was the beginning of the end of this country. ...

[Guhji]

I was born in '75. If heaven exists, and that's where I end up, I hope I can go back in time and relive the '80s. I love everything about that decade. The fashion, the music, the movies, the tv shows-there was a "fun factor" then that simply doesn't exist anymore. No auto-tune crap, No CGI. No liberal progressive ideology permeating all facets of life. No SJWs running wild, making life miserable for everyone. When was the last time you listened to a song as emotional as "Take my breath away" or watched a movie as fun as "Top Gun"? Men were men, and women were sexy, but feminine. Today, men act like supplicating clowns and women are just batshit crazy. That's how I see it, anyway. Or maybe I'm just an old man trying to fit into a world I don't understand anymore. Maybe the world is just fine the way it is, and it's me who needs to change.

I think Trump is trying to create a cultural shift in American society, trying to go back to the way things were-but I think it's too little, too late. It's sad really...

[HappyGuy]

Like you, NA Guy, I remember thinking the good old days were numbered. At the time it was hard to nail down just why; it was more of a gut feeling, one that's been confirmed over the following decade and a half.

I think we were all responding to the stressful social environment the media was creating. Remember the Y2k panic? That was only one of the many irrational fears about the future promoted by the news. Today we recognize Fox News and CNN are liars pushing clickbait headlines but we didn't know that in the late 1990s when Fox News began to air and CNN ramped up it's fear mongering with events like the war in Kosovo.

I think there was an effort to destroy the naive fun loving 1980s culture of Americans in the early 90s with coverage of the Gulf War and the deaths of American soldiers and conspiracies about Gulf War syndrome, but the infrastructure wasn't there yet. Very few people had satellite dishes and cable tv so CNN didn't have many viewers. In the mid-90s people had heard of the internet and CNN but millions weren't hooked up yet, I think this is one of the reasons why people's joyous and optimistic mentality was mostly preserved until the end of the decade when everything became more negative and cynical with the relentless media bombardment making everyone worry about the future.

America's economy was the envy of the world in the late 1990s so there was really no reason to act like the good times were a thing of the past but with media coverage promoting fear and chaos people were acting like it was the end of the world.

[statnerd]

I was in high school 1999-2003 and kids weren't glued to their phones like they are nowadays. Kids interacted face to face and had parties at someone's house to socialize. Kids started getting cell phones my junior and senior year of high school, but they were simple flip phones only used for talking. People were more social in general and there was definitely helicopter parenting then, but it wasn't nearly as bad as it is today.

Also, transgenders were considered freaks back then and being gay was certainly not considered cool. They were outcasts. Most of the kids I went to school with were relatively conservative and there wasn't the SJW crap like there is today.