What I Want You to Know About 1994

In my mind, there are two kinds of people in this world. There are the people that were born before Say Anything was released in 1989, and the people that were born after Say Anything was released. If you were born after, you are, by my rough estimation, certainly not Gen X and also quite possibly a newborn even though you may in fact be nearly thirty years old. Having myself been born in 1977, my Gen X street cred is virtually untouchable.

So I read this piece, 1994 Was a Prison of My Own Making, with great interest. In the spring of 1994, I was wrapping up my junior year of high school. To say that I look back on this period with anything other than nostalgia and fondness for a bygone era, would be an understatement. But this is the job of all subsequent generations: to overly glamourize whatever period they came of age in.

In the very first line of the piece, the author writes, “We tend to recall the past not on its own merits but in terms of what it lacked in retrospect.” Her assignment, to live as though it truly was 1994 and that both technology and culture had ceased to evolve beyond this point, was an interesting sociological experiment. But the lense through which that experiment is inevitably reflected through, 2019, colors how we view it. Everything feels weird and inconvenient in 1994 land because relative to our modern selves it sort of was. Time and information and responsiveness, all of that was slower. But if we really want to capture the essence of that year, of that moment? That’s about more than Great Lash…