For gen Z, the pull of a time before smartphones is strong. For those of us who lived through it, the reality is somewhat different
‘P
eople have to start going 90s,” according to the content creator Mike Sheffer. In other words: leave your phone at home. “In the 90s no one had cellphones,” Sheffer explains, helpfully, on a reel I saw on Instagram, in which he describes how he and his friends do this, using it as a challenge to be in the moment and invite serendipity. “Things just happen,” he says. “There’s a different energy.”
Ah yes, the serendipitous 90s energy of arranging to meet someone “under the clock at M&S” and hanging around for 40 minutes when they didn’t show, of trudging dangerous miles home late at night thanks to transport fails (several comments on Sheffer’s reel highlighted the safety angle), or of forgetting your keys and spending hours locked out (I think I spent most of 1990-1994 sitting, bored witless, on the doorstep).
I’m not mocking (I can’t mock anyone’s desire to disconnect; I sometimes anxiously look for my phone while actually holding my phone). I’m just interested that the 90s have become so aspirational. There’s also a social media trend doing the rounds that asks: “Mum (or Dad), what were you like in the 90s?”, prompting gen Xers from Snoop Dogg to Drew Barrymore, Jamie Oliver and countless civilians to post photo montages of a time when they were cool, free and unworried by their cholesterol.
