The 90’s
Writing About the 90s: When Life Was Analog and Beautiful
I grew up in the 90s. And lately, the 90s have been growing up in me again.
It started with the trailer for Elle Woods in the 90s. There she is, pink flip phone to her ear, hair crimped, optimism dialed all the way up. Then Facebook fed me Ghetto Diaries.
I remember. God, I remember.
We had car phones.
Not everybody. Just your uncle who sold insurance or your friend’s dad who thought he was important. They were the size of bricks and the call quality sounded like two tin cans with a long-distance relationship. It cost $1.99 a minute to say “I’m running late.” So you didn’t. You just were late, and people waited. We waited for each other back then.
We had pagers.
You clipped it on your jeans and prayed for that 911 code. If someone paged you “143,” you knew you were loved. If they paged “07734,” you flipped your calculator upside down and grinned. We spoke in numbers because words cost money and minutes were sacred. You had to call them back from a pay phone, so you better have a quarter and a reason.
We had flip phones. Eventually.
The Motorola StarTAC. You could snap it shut to end an argument. That was power. No text threads to spiral in. You got the message, you reacted, you moved on. Event6, T9 texting, pressing 7 four times to get an S — we had the patience of saints because the alternative was not talking at all.
We had pay phones.
On every corner. Outside every 7-Eleven. You wiped the receiver on your shirt and hoped the person before you wasn’t crying. You memorized numbers. Your mom’s. Your best friend’s. The pizza place. If you were stranded, you called collect: “Mom-please-pick-me-up.” She always did.
We had landlines.
With a cord long enough to stretch to your bedroom and a sibling yelling “I’m on the internet!” which meant “get off the phone in 3 minutes or die.” Busy signals were a lifestyle. Privacy was the hallway, the cord wrapped around the door handle, whispering secrets that couldn’t be screenshotted.
We barely had computers.
And when we did, they screamed. That dial-up tone was the sound of the future arriving slowly, one pixel at a time.You didn’t Google it. You asked someone. You went to the library. You waited.
And life was so much better.
I know how that sounds. Nostalgia is a liar with a scrapbook. The 90s had crack epidemics and Rodney King and Columbine and parents who didn’t talk about mental health. It wasn’t perfect. But it was present.
We made mixtapes, not playlists. You had to sit by the radio with your finger on Record and pray the DJ didn’t talk over the first three seconds. That was love: giving someone 14 songs and all your patience.
We took photos and didn’t see them for a week. 24 exposures. No retakes. If your eyes were closed, you were closed-eyes immortalized at the mall with your friends. You lived with it. You lived in it.
We got lost and then we got found. No blue dot. No Share My Location. You had an address written on a napkin and hope. You showed up. People showed up for you.
Watching Ghetto Diaries,That was us. Joy wasn’t content. It was just joy.
Watching Elle Woods with her flip phone, I remember when ambition looked like that — bright, dumb, unstoppable. We thought the future would be shiny. And in some ways it is. But I miss the friction. I miss the waiting. I miss when a call was an event and not an interruption.
The 90s raised us between analog and digital. We’re the last translators. We remember the weight of a Walkman and the lightness of being unreachable. We know what it’s like to be bored and not fix it with a scroll. We know what it’s like to miss someone and have to wait to tell them.
So yeah, writing about the 90s feels beautiful. Because growing up in the 90s was beautiful — not in spite of the pay phones and the busy signals and the $2-a-minute car calls, but because of them.
We had less, and we had each other more.
And if that’s nostalgia lying, let her. I’ll take that lie over the truth of 37 unread texts any day.
Just page me 143. I’ll call you back from a pay phone.
