One poster already mentioned Matrix, but games like Alpha Centauri and others had also explored socioeconomic themes of power laws and what massive sweeping changes entail.

You can still get the 90s and 2000s experience to some extent. It hasn’t truly left, but society has moved on so it is a rather isolated journey and somewhat limited. But you won’t get MTV or any of that nowadays sadly.

For me, my car is a mid 2000s model so the way I listen to music is to buy CDs. I haven’t stopped. That part of 80s/90s hasn’t gone away, but it doesn’t really feel nostalgic either because it’s normal. To others of course, especially newer generation, they don’t even know we had to rewind tapes manually sometimes because the device would fail to do it properly.

The larger thing we lost is the internet. There’s no “90s internet” that someone can do without doing some stupid geocities/angel fire meme site. I don’t have an answer to this.

As far as I remember, Mulder's suit was meant to look like the cheap and ill-fitting suit that a low-level, young government employee would buy for a dress code and because he didn't want to think about clothing.

And so much of the environment was slightly strange to US viewers, I think, because it was mostly filmed in the Pacific Northwest and Vancouver, and felt just ever so slightly in the uncanny valley of being like much of the US but also not.

I also think the technology was somewhat reduced for plot purposes. Consider the "road warrior" template that already existed for business travelers, with more use of laptops, cell phones, email, etc. I think the writers just found it convenient to make communication and information research more cumbersome than it really had to be in that era...

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Its set slightly earlier in the PC rush.

The magic of that era, I think was that there was this new explosion of technology and a smart teen could figure out how things worked and tinker.

It coincided with a relatively low level of economic inequality, meaning garage bands and garage startups were doable, imo.

For 90s kids who remember their parents having people over, parties were really like that! Obviously without the drama and comedy. But people would come over and socialize and not be glued to screens. And we have data that things have changed dramatically. In 1990, 55% of men reported having six or more close friends. In 2021 it was down to 27%. The percentage of men who have no close friends is up by a factor of five, to 15%.

It's very intense, with an Emmy-deserving performance by star Lance Henriksen (whom you may remember from the movie Aliens). It mixes Christian theology and eschatology, mythology, horror, and serial killers, leavened with delightful humour.

The first season is mostly "serial killer of the week", but is important to establish the characters and long-running story arcs.

The second season is a delight, with some of the best writing of any TV show I know, and a lot of complex situations with no easy answers.

The third season changed (and cheapened) everything, and is only worth watching for completists.

While it is impossible to not have a smart phone at this point you get to decide how you use it. Want to feel like you are in the 90's? Stop using your phone. Consume only old or physical media if you want, get rid of streaming services. Go buy an old car if you feel like it. Go read a book. Anything you could do in the 80's and 90's you can do now just as easy. You just have to curate such a life.

I think the only place you have to compromise is work. You can't roleplay like it's the 90's if you work in tech. But hey when you clock out of work turn your laptop off and go do whatever you want. Again, there is nothing stopping you from doing anything you could have done back then now (except maybe buy a house).

I remember not loving the '90s when I was living through them, but my sense now (and I am hearing it more and more from others) is that we didn't realize how good we had it.

"Remember the good old 1980s?

When things were so uncomplicated?

I wish I could go back there again

And everything could be the same."

At the time, it was a bizarre and crazy idea that the 1980's would be better than the future.

The idea that the future would be MUCH better has always been a given - at least for me but I think much of society felt that way back then.

The other half was that so much of it took place almost entirely in rural or at least tight-knit suburban settings because that's where all the weird stuff happened. You couldn't grow up in the rural US (or probably anywhere) without spending many long summer evenings staring up at the clear starry sky and wondering what was out there, or hearing a sound in the woods that you couldn't readily identify. Pets occasionally disappeared without a trace. Livestock and wild animals behave strangely sometimes for no apparent reason. That guy living on his own a few miles down the road who hurls insults at anyone who walks by.

Weird rural shit still happens of course, but it's shrinking as suburbs continue to grow, and you see less of it on TV and in movies these days.

> I want to twiddle the dials on a car radio

That's one thing I miss. As a kid in the early 90s, I used to collect car radios whenever someone was replacing theirs (which seemed to happen a lot more back then) - they were fun to take apart because so much of it was mechanical. Even the buttons to remember a station were mechanical and worked by using latches and levers.

Are we talking about the same 90's?

There's no one like you in your area? I hope you like sitting in your house alone. You saw half of a movie late at night? Heard a song in a show? Hold onto it, it might take you a decade to finally track it down (it was Land by Patti Smith.) Have an medical issue that the doctors in your area aren't interested in diagnosing? Good luck, I hope it's not progressive.

You had to fight for access to everything in the 90's. Even if you could track down the thing you want (big IF), actually getting it was SLOW. That book you finally found, it might be 2-3 months away.

Today is the best day in human history to be alive.

We have instant access to everything and yet we choose to waste our time on short-form garbage. We are the people Homer Simpson was designed to mock. Homer and the people of the 90's wasted their time watching whatever trash TV was sloshed into their troughs. We're watching whatever an algorithm is slopped into ours.

You live in a fantastic world with instant access to everything in recorded history and yet you choose to rot in front of YouTube.

Here's the secret. It's not the 90's, the 90's were nothing special. It's the Past World, the one that you can only see when you're looking back at it. The world that we live in today was built in the 90's and the world that we will live in tomorrow is being built today.

The world is and will be what we make of it.

Our current moment will pass. I want to see what we'll achieve in another 100 years and I'm jealous of the babies just getting started now. I hope that something that I make will be seen as a stepping stone towards something better.

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Social media + mobile phones pit the ingenuity of our cleverest minds against the will and habits of the many, to sell ads.

There are a few things which have gotten better. Gay marriage. Marijuana legalization. But Entshitification is real and for the last 25 years has been relentless.

I feel like most people who are nostalgic about X-files, me included. Are only nostalgic about the vibe it gives you in the beginning.

This is one of the images in ly life I keep going back to and cherish.

It is interesting hiw sounds and smells are strongly embedded in these memories.

But yes I mostly rewatch 00s and 90s TV only

The 80s and 90s were peak western civilization.

Tech was exciting, futuristic.

Politics - whilst certainly always grubby and adversarial - had not descended into lies and manipulation and misinformation and attempts to destroy the democratic systems.

People talked socialized read books.

Dating hadn’t been turned into a high volume marketplace in which no one is ever satisfied and everyone is always upgrading.

The environment and global warming were an issue for sure but not like now.

But in retrospect, I wish we hadn't all collectively decided to winkingly go along with conspiracy theories. While crackpots will always exist, I think a lot of people took this and other shows too literally. Yes, conspiracies exist. But no, most of the time, the guy at the metal desk in the grey government office is just doing what his job description says he's suppose to be doing.

I don't know that X-Files directly led to idiocy like antivaxxers and climate change denial and election truthers. I do think it gave a lot of people social cover to start exploring those dumb ideas, and no one took them seriously until it was too late.

but if you wanna straight up X Files just based on 50s check out Project Blue Book, it's like retro X Files, you won't get closer than that to X Files

Im a young millennial so I can relate both with millennials and gen-z, and from what I can tell the vibes are just really really bad. People don't even really care about the future anymore because they know it's just going to continue to be shite.

* Music was incredible

* Movies were amazing, enough to go to the theater 12 times a year at least

* Homelessness was pretty much non-existent

* People were friendly and had time for strangers

* Employment was 10x better than today, and not by today's way of counting (which don't count group x y and z)

* Jobs actually made people feel needed and going to work was an incredible feeling for your soul.

* Very few people were on drugs 24/7 like they are today

Our biggest problem was probably Alcohol, which has actually dipped today (but probably because people are on pot instead)

If I had $200 Billion I would literally give all of it to be a teen again for ten years from 1990 to 2000 again.