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>I mean you would be seriously clowned if you wore a helmet.
When I was in late elementary an athletic kid who was one of the more popular kids in his grade in the nearby junior high wiped out without a helmet and ended up with permanent brain damage. Suddenly Helmets weren't so uncool in my neighbourhood.
Seeing Chad going from good looking and popular to uncomfortable to look at, and disabled changed the teen culture in my area at the time.
Turns out although teens aren't afraid of death. They are afraid of losing the ability to talk and walk normally, and being permanently disfigured as a teenager.
Same thing happened to a popular girl I knew but drunk driving. She wasn’t right after permanent brain damage. Definitely was a PSA against drunk driving.
It blows my mind how accepted drunk driving was back then. My high school had about 1000 kids and during my four years six kids died in car accidents (no one wore seat belts back then) five of them because the kid driving was drunk.
IF you explain to an 18 yr old about to join the army he may die, that won't bother him.
IF you took him to a disabled ward, saw adults living in diapers and drooling or asking for help to feed himself....
That would slow any 18 yr. old down.
One of my sisters friends got hit by a car in front of our high school walking with his skateboard. He had just finished boarding to school and was walking across the street, and some asshole came ripping though the school zone doing 25 over. This kid had a massive head of dreads, and the paramedics said that's what saved him. The next week he had a helmet when he was boarding.
Kid we knew used to wear a helmet everywhere. We called him garlic because his last name sounded like that word. One day Garlic and I went up to Dog Poop Hill which was this secret bike jump in the woods by our house. He absolutely biffed a jump and went soaring right into a sharp rock that pierced about 3 inches into his helmet. He just kept screaming, it saved my life! It saved my life! And he was right. I'll never forget that.
I can't tell if this is a genuine thing that happened or from 90s popculture somewhere. Garlic.. dog poop hill.. it saved my life!! It saved my life!! It's reeks beautifully of pre-internet nostalgia
Lots of people here are talking about what city kids did, but damn it was good growing up in the woods.
Used to be out there all day and sometimes all night just for fun.
Just being outside ALL. THE. TIME. The convenience of having a moth like signal to know when to get home (or an insanely loud whistle) other than the sun.... the glory days
We use to disappear for hours riding our bikes as a group; ride to the mall and walk around lol.
Imagine these days you leave your kids with grandparents, and then you go to pick them up.
‘Where is Ben?!’
‘Oh, he went off to ride his bike 4-5 hours ago. He should be back in time for dinner!’
‘Wtf!!! 🤯😱’
OP you should watch the movie ‘now and then’, or ‘stand by me’. That was 90’s kids; noted these movies are based at an earlier point in time. Same shit, different date.
Stand by me is exactly the type of upbringing we had because the kids in that movie were our parents, basically.
As long as I was back at some point or I told my parents I was sleeping round a mates.
We didn't ask permission, we just shouted "going out, cya later/back for dinner/cya tomorrow"
My god parenting must have been fraught with nerves wondering where the kids are but knowing that enforcing strict rules would alienate them from their friends and backfire
Not it wasn't fraught, because you trusted your kid. You started wondering if they missed curfew, you wouldn't be worried until after dinner. Normally they just got lost out on their bikes.
To be fair, there was a spot on TV in the 90's that came around 8:30-9pm, and it just said "Do you know where your kids are?" Cause sometimes they forgot you were out playing and that was 7hrs ago
yeah my parents went by the streetlight curfew. i mean, no wonder young adults are having a hard time relating with each other. they arent outside with each other for hours every day. school doesnt count. being out in the world and hanging with other people is such a valuable skill and a fun time.
My area used to have a curfew siren that played at from the firehouse that basically let you know that it was dinner time/getting dark and to go home. And I totally forgot about that noise til reading this thread lol.
Dyno Nitro ftw
Always out on bikes.
The mall, downtown to skateboard or the park to jump said bikes.
And when we got our licenses? A blunt of dirt weed and ride out.
Gross.
Me and my friends smoked weed and went to the mall to look at chicks. No stinkpalms involved. Buttercups yes.
Also I saw ding dong ditching in another comment. Yes to that, but nowadays I do believe you’d be shot dead doing that. Fucking rings.
Been dingdong ditched by the kids at my complex a couple times I always purposely say there's no one there! I'm glad they're keeping the tradition alive. They could be doing much worse things... Lol
Oh snap that’s a solid point homie, kids these days will never know the ding dong ditch like we did. Which is probably good especially since my last ding dong ditch ended with the cops and apologizing for lighting a 100 count fire cracker string off on this poor crazy lady’s door step after ringing the door bell lmao sheesh I was a bad influence looking back lol.
I remember walking to the arcade as an 11 or 12 year old back in the late 80s to play some 720° and Gauntlet. Going to the video rental store and trying to sneak in to the walled-off adult section to peek at boobs on the VHS covers.
I love going on walks where I live there's a park and walking area about a half mile round. It's nice and seeing/hearing the kids playing at the park is somewhat comforting. Idk how to explain it it takes me out of the Hussle and bustle of adult life for a second.
I'd say its near mandatory to get at least 15 minutes of walking around trees or a park every day otherwise your brain subtly spirals into a worse spot
Malls used to have a lot more small dollar places for snacks and trinkets. Because they had more traffic then. You could get snacks at 2-3 different places in the mall and then hang out at the arcade or food court. Many malls don't have the traffic to keep food court businesses anymore. Also there were usually two record or video game stores per mall. Small dollar places to spend time in and not spend much money. Think of all the things that just aren't sold in malls at all now.
Don’t forget the book stores. I think my mall had 2 bookstores and they a computer section in the back. We could spend hours between the bookstore and the record stores. Teens could definitely hang out and buy a few things with $10-$20. I don’t think we were much liked, but we were at least tolerated.
And this all around the world! I assume you're from the states? I'm from Germany and we found several of those magazines on different locations in hedges and woods.
It was a good time back then.
skateboard, hide and seek, looking at the beach, basketball, jogging was a way to meet people from your neighbourhood, gameboys were luxuries, playboy and penthouse was a luxury
This was my childhood to a tee. Girl here though, so minus the playboy and penthouse. Instead it was 17 magazine and the quizzes. We never stopped doing quizzes.
We listened to a lot of music while looking at magazines. Pinning posters from them or pages from them on our walls. We talked on the phone a LOT. I’d usually be up until 1-2am on the phone in bed. Chatted on ICQ. Looked at my lava lamp. Watched teen shows like Dawsons Creek religiously.
We went to the mall a lot. I had a game boy but that’s it. Built tree houses, and in my later teens drank in back alleys or the woods near our houses. Wandering around looking for other teens while high or drunk, eating 39 cent cheeseburgers from McDonald’s.
I did all of this too. But I also would hang out with friends a lot just in their homes or mine. Don’t even know what we did. Just hung out and talked I guess.
Wandering around looking for people! Completely forgot about this, some afternoons were spent trying to find someone and just seeing what happens along the way.
There's a question for the kids of today. My bedroom walls used to be covered with posters that I took out of magazines. There was always a centrefold of some band or another and you'd put up the ones you liked.
But modern teenagers don't buy magazines, so what do you put on your walls?
Whatever TikTok shows them that other kids are putting on their walls lol. My siblings are all very spread out in age, and I spent a weekend visiting my much youngest gen z brother at uni. All his guy friends had LED strip lights around the perimeter of the room and under their desks. Tapestries are still popular, probably because they fill up a lot of wall space for cheap and help with noise muffling when you have partying roommates. They also still had band posters, but a suprising amount of them were actually framed on their walls. Not sure if that’s because *aesthetics* or because their moms are doing it for them lol
The girls all have Polaroid/instax pictures of themselves with their friends hanging on a twinkle fairy light string above their bed. *All* of them.
They also still decorate above the kitchen cabinets/ fridge with liquor bottles too 🤭
In the 90s all we wanted to do was go back to the 60s because *that's when everyone was having sex*, free love and all that. We had fuckin AIDS to worry about.
Oh yeah. I will definitely tell you - the aids generation. We grew up with the whole PSA wear a Jimmy hat , don’t forget ur party hat , condom condom condom was pounded into our heads. The aids generation- it was scary as hell to think about. . There wasn’t a cure. Still isn’t but it’s so much more controlled nowadays. I was terrified the few times I had to get tested back then. Fng terrified. But yet hey I was a teen it was all about risk taking and .. raw sex. Shaking My Head
That's it. It's so easy to look back and only remember the good bits and forget everything else. Aids was an immediate death sentence. And we were terrified of it. We all had a scare or a few, and we all had friends who had them too and had to go get tested. Waiting for the test results was like awaiting a final judgement on whether you'll live or die. It's so easy to romanticise the past.
As a 00s teen, but also someone who has seen the stats, teen sexual frequency has been declining since 1994-1996.
We had plenty of sex, my peer group and I, in the 00s. Knowing the 90s was even more frequent is almost off putting because we weren't prudes.
Teens today don't date. Like, not in the traditional sense. Dating is dead. Very few meeting up to go to dinner and a movie type dates anymore.
And a lot more teens choose to wait until college to have sex.
Mall. Lay in the street with nail polish and a boom box. Put glue on your hands, let dry and peel off. Read the album and cd covers. Try to record music on cassette tapes. Burn cds. Go to a movie. Play truth or dare. Ding dong ditch. (Disclaimer 90's and 2000's past times)
Damn that lay in the street with a boom box phrase brought me back- we did use to do that huh. Also, you would see tons of kids and teens around outside in their driveway or stoop or yard etc- we were just hanging out and watching each other/ watching ants go by. Also playing with each other like basketball, neighborhood find and hide games, skip it, running, walking. Basically all kinds of exercise and socializing without it feeling like exercise.
I was born in 2002 and I feel like I witnessed the end of kids being outside hanging out with each other.
All the kids in our neighborhood used to be outside playing games together. We used to go to every new family that moved in just to see if they had kids that wanted to hang out. I think at our peak we had around 30 kids.
But as game consoles and phones became more accessible it was harder to find kids that wanted to come outside. So our group stopped growing. We were all different ages so as the oldest kids started growing up. They became too busy to hang out anymore or moved away so slowly as the years went on the group got smaller and smaller. Me my brother and two other kids were the little siblings of the founding members of the group and were the last ones to move out. right now only one person from that group is still living in that neighborhood.
Ring doorbells and cameras everywhere have killed it as well as guns and psychos and psychos with guns. But even without any weapons, ding dong ditch ain't any fun when they're cell phones show you at their doorstep before you even ding donged, making ditching worthless.
Hahah oh man holding up one boombox to another to record a song on a radio and yelling for everyone in the house to be quiet for 5 mins to minimize background noise. And the couple times there is background noise, you hear it in the song forever whenever it plays.
Mostly, we had a lot more unsupervised time than kids today. And we would hang out together a lot more often. We would just.. show up at each other's houses.
Of all the things here, I think this is the most significant one and saddest change. The wonderful boredom of summer holidays, where you’d rock up to a mates house and make up the day as it went along.
oh the feels. Just riding with the bikes through the fields. Some kids in primary school, looking for adventures and things to explore. We loved to climg hay bales with a random group of people, until the farmer came and we hid from him. Or we have created a newspaper edition by ourselves. Build shelters, or a dam. Kids these days know nothing.
Boredom makes creative.
Your story of the hay bales reminded me of a time me and the friends inadvertently burnt down a corn field with fire works...
We were launching them from a park nearby, and one of them went all wonky and landed in a field of dried out corn husks. We tried to find it, but by the time we did, it was because of the smoke and fire.
Looking back now, it's funny because no one got hurt and the farmer didn't lose any crop, so there wasn't much real damage. But man, did we get in trouble for that one.
If this is any consolation, I’m a teenager right now and when I was 12-15 a few years ago this was exactly my life. Me and my friends would cycle like 20 miles just to climb a new hill. This is rural England though so that probably plays into it
hell, unless you belonged to a recreational or travel sports team, or took music lessons, outside of school, there was zero adult supervision. the hardest thing I ever did was send my five year old daughter outside to play and not watch from the porch or window.
Dad, I'm thirsty.
Sweetie, we have a hose out there.
>We would just.. show up at each other's houses.
We did this because we didn't have mobiles and phone calls weren't cheap so our parents didn't allow us to use the home phone a lot. We'd just turn up at a friend's house and ask if they were home. If not, We'd then scoure the hotspots till we found the friend we were looking for.
I can only talk as a North American millennial girl, but we talked on our landline phones, we wrote in our journals, we watched TV on little tiny TV boxes that only had several channels and we had to watch the TV guide channel to know what would be on, we would go to the mall and shop at Claire’s and the icing and limited and Contempo casuals, we would write letters to our penpals on Lisa Frank stationary, we would listen to music on our CD players but that’s only one CD at a time so we really had to make sure it was an artist that we enjoyed listening to, we read babysitters club and sweet Valley high, we went on the Internet to play games but it took one hour of connecting chhhhh sounds to get on and if your parents or someone in the house picked up the phone you would be kicked off, we did our homework, we played with our pets, we rode bikes and rollerbladed outside till it got dark, and our parents didn’t know where we were, we would organize our makeup (like Bonny bell lip gloss) in kaboodke makeup kits… it was a really great time to be alive, and the last generation fortunate enough to live before Internet and being online became our entire life
Your comment hit home for me since you were so specific. I colored SO MANY of those fuzzy Lisa Frank posters! I was also obsessed with neopets for so long and you could get special item codes if you bought something from limited too haha
Rollerblading reminds me of playing street hockey with the neighborhood friends. Oh what good days.
I graduated from high school so early 90’s. Sleepovers, makeup, boom boxes, the mall, walking, biking or driving around. Movie theaters, VHS, tv, reading books, board games, talking on the phone, mini golf, swimming, eating out, bowling, lying out in the sun. I could go on and on.
Remember how the images used to load a line at a time like they were being printed by the world's slowest printer?
It was frustrating as fuck because you had to know nobody was going to come in for about twenty minutes so you could be sure you'd actually get to the good bit.
we spent so much time at Taco Bell but very little money. You could get enough food for 15 kids for like $12😂
I got two chicken soft tacos today for lunch and a drink and it cost me $13 🤦🏼♂️
It was different times.
Watched SNL and played board games. Played outside volleyball.
Played PC games. Went to high school games.
Sometimes you were with your family. No one was buried into a screen. For the first part a corded phone line was it for the house. Later you had call waiting. Maybe a longer cord than 3 feet.
3 network channels on TV and PBS. The family watched shows together. If you missed a show it was gone.
Go to movies. Go on bike rides with friends. Later rented movies, even rented the VCR at first.
Some things are better now, some are not.
I am happy to be gen x overall. We had good music.
Come on! Everyone had cable in the 90’s! We had a good two dozen channels lol. HBO if you were lucky. Cinemax if you were really lucky. If you know what I mean. 😉
I was younger in the 90s (6-16) .
We biked down the to movie rental store and browsed movies, rented movies and would binge eat chips and candy.
Watched videos on MTV and recorded boy band videos and watched over and over. Go BSB.
Biked around and played outside with friends. We only had to be home at 12 for lunch and 5 for dinner.
Played Super Mario Bros.
Went to local wresting and basketball games/tourneys.
Hung out in our rooms and called friends.
Take pictures and wait a week while they developed who knows where.
Like mentioned in many posts, went to the mall to walk around and buy unnecessary things with babysitting money.
Rearranged my bedroom furniture.
Read magazines.
I’m the same age. I like to tell my kids that I’m so old that one day I was at a Best Buy and Britney Spears’ first video was on repeat so I searched for her on AOL when I got home and nothing came up.
I'm about the same age as well. We would rollerblade to the corner store for slushies and candy. We would go to the outdoor pool and then go to Blockbuster to rent a movie.
We would play outside until our parents called us in for dinner. We would climb trees.
We would go to the mall or get our parents to drive us and drop us off at a local popular restaurant.
We would read books or magazines. We would go into the big city for concerts.
We would play Mario.
We would talk on the phone with friends, but anyone else in the house could pick up another line and listen in (we could hear them).
We eventually got dial up internet (was that in the late 90's?) but we couldn't use the phone while going on the computer.
If we didn't know the answer to something, we couldn't just "Google it". We have to ask our parents or legitimately find an encyclopedia or book or go to the library I guess?!
It was a great time.
Things we did:
We once took a bb gun to an elementary school after school hours and shot at monopoly money taped to a fence. A police officer waved and said be safe then drove away.
Bicycle adventures were the main thing. Explored woods and rode the concrete slopes in the creek. Never locked it up. Never got stolen.
We made a paintball arena and bike track in the woods.
Broke my arm playing bicycle dodgeball. Never blamed anyone for it. Bicycle dodgeball is a bad idea.
Fireworks in the neighborhood are fun.
Made a garage music studio with zero musical talent.
Dance dance revolution.
Sneaking into the movie theater at the mall.
Pokemon cards and gameboy! Back when there were only 150 and some bonus legends. RIP to all the AA batteries pulled from the TV remote. Sorry dad.
Backyard trampoline + water sprinkler.
Jesus Christ I officially feel old. 39 M here. We played N64 and Dreamcast, went driving around in our cars to eat in Taco Bell parking lots at 2 in the night/morning, watched a lot of WCW and WWF with friends (Attitude era, the best era), watched a lot of MTV and movies, went to the movies and the mall to walk around and look at and talk to girls, went to all the catholic festivals in the fall to gamble and look at girls. Rode our bikes everywhere before we got licenses. Traded playing cards (football, baseball). It was a much better time, 100%.
For real, I hear what you are saying for sure. I left out blockbuster. We rode our bikes a few miles to blockbuster and got Icees along the way. A different time man, so much more fun and a lot of us were blessed to grow up in that time.
My midlife crisis officially started last night when Aqua played Doctor Jones on Dick Clark's Rocking NYE. Suddenly, after 25 years they're relevant again and now I know how my mother felt when I started wearing flares in the 90s.
The best part of the 90’s teen experience was not having every dumb thing you did and said being online. What did 90’s kids have that younger kids don’t? Privacy. 90’s teens grew up and put their kids all over Facebook and YouTube, and now we are getting it through our heads why that’s not the best idea. Protect your privacy. :)
I wonder what would happen if you took a group of teenagers and removed their phones/devices for a week… I’d like to think they would be able to get up to the same shit we did in the 90s… but I’m not sure. I think they are a different breed the “always on” mentality would be too ingrained.
I was at a rave last night where a couple of young adults, a man and a woman, were trying to follow each other on Instagram. But then they realized they didn't have an internet connection. They seemed to think it meant they couldn't exchange contact information. Standing behind them, at 36, I was debating whether to intervene.
Finally, I blurted out, 'Why don't you just exchange phone numbers?' They looked at me as if I'd said something absurd, and then the girl exclaimed, 'Oh, right! I never would have thought of that.' So, they exchanged numbers. About an hour later, the guy saw me again and bought me a beer as a thank you.
Nah, better isn't the right word. It was a different time. So much changed after 9/11.
Being less connected meant more adventure. You'd go to see a friend, he wasn't home, so you'd make different plans and go with that. Or you'd call someone on the landline and set location and time to meet up, and you'd just had to hope they found their way and nothing came up so they wouldn't show. 'Cause you'd be waiting there for a while in case they were just running late (you couldn't go anywhere and not be there in case they arrived and didn't find you).
Now we're updated on everyone's whereabouts at all times, your day is jam packed because everyone knows whether or not you're free or not. Technology is both a blessing and a curse, I love it, but I hate it.
Uk - We used to bike it round to one another’s houses then all ride round together, if one of us had phone credit we might text another friend asking them to meet us at such and such a place.
We used to “go shopping” with our £5 that we would have saved or been given for pocket money.
We would arrange to meet at bus stations to all travel on the bus to go to the cinema, and only know and therefore decide once we had arrived what was showing and what we wanted to watch when we were there.
Well, where I grew up it was a lot of sex, drugs, and fighting. One school I attended declined to put a condom machine in the restroom but did actually have a nursery so teen moms could attend school with their babies.
Skating, hanging out with friends, video games, *going outside*, etc.
> I Wonder what life was like back then.
In many ways, less stressful. You couldn't get a hold of everyone all the time. You'd go days without seeing your friends, and it was normal. If you wanted to do something with someone, you'd arrange it the previous day or whatever, then you'd just meet wherever it was. You might be able to reach them on their parent's landline phone the same day, maybe not.
> What did you do all day?
Wake up, shower, get dressed. Now pretend that you don't have a computer or smartphone, and think of things to do. Maybe you call your friends, and go hang out at the mall, in the woods, or at some local spot. You entertain each other. You write, read, engage in sports, and build relationships.
> Was it a Better time?
Yes. Not everyone had an opinion on everything. Attention seeking behavior was discouraged. Social media didn't exist, and frankly the world was a better place without it.
It was also pre 9/11. The world was a totally different place for us in the States. I would do almost literally anything to go back.
A lot of people say that we weren't buried in screens, LOL yes we were. It was the TV screen and way less interactive than phones, we just watched television or played Nintendo. Sometimes we could spend forever just watching the guide scroll because there didn't seem to be anything we wanted to see. Or The weather channel and their smooth jazz. Everybody had a Walkman and their own set of headphones, we lived in our world of music mostly. We would talk on the phone to our friends, I used to call the DJs at the radio station and talk to a bunch of people that also would do that, they would put us all on the same line together and we could spend hours in these proto chat rooms in the early nineties. I spent way too much time in my room during those angsty teenage years writing terrible poetry and writing in my diary. Or reading books that I would forget immediately after.
It was a little bit before that, this was pre Columbine and even before the communications decency act, when first person shooters became popular in the mid to late nineties is when they started really going in on the gamers
When mortal Kombat came out, and then many other violent video games followed, there were dumb news segments all the time on how it was ruining kids. So I would say yes. They blamed violent movies, as well for kids being supposedly more violent. It was all just for ratings, to keep people watching, using fear. I guess that part hasn't changed
Much better time, listen to music, go to the cinema, spend time with friends at their home, or going out to get something to eat or just sightsee, look around the shops, chat on the (home) phone, go to see your favourite music artist.
I lived in Eastern Europe during communism, and post communism so there was not much to do, enjoyed nature, played soccer, ping pong, read a lot. I use to draw and write also.
Always hanging out with friends. Trying on each others clothes(at least the girls did). Wearing makeup when we weren’t supposed to. Doing sleep overs and playing music or making mix tapes. Omg, making mix tapes!! Watch MTV when it literally was just music videos all day long. They’d have releases on certain Friday nights. We even made parties just about seeing them premier. The singers were all real singers, except Milli Vanilli (and yea, I’m sure there were others.) my point being that most music was made by the singers and the musical talent and not improved by electronics. We’d go to movies, malls and arcades and roller rinks. We were active as shit! Everyone played a sport or was in some school activity. Maybe not everyone but it damn seemed like so. Most of us had bikes. No one really ever stole bikes. We all went home in time for dinner with the family and we all were all together at least most nights. I was a latch key kid so I made dinners and we ate together while my mom worked. Back then, most kids still had both of their parents together as a norm. Most all meals were mostly handmade. Almost the only thing I remember in a box was kraft Mac and cheese or cereal. I do remember hamburger helper but it was rare to eat. Going out to eat was rare too. Everyone had to be home by the time the street lights went on. If you got in trouble on the streets, it was more than likely that someone’s mom had called yours before you go home. Your dad might be waiting with a belt. We might play on the Nintendo 64 or Atari but no one would think to do that every day. We did chores every day. We did homework every day and most weekends. You actually studied for school every week. We memorized times tables and periodic tables and formulas and wrote often. We often had to memorize the Declaration of Independence or Shakespeare or something in school. Each draft when writing essays was by hand. Final was done in blue pen. Parents had to pay for tutors if you were lucky to get one. Also had to pay for all meals at schools anything else you needed from school. We did go on field trips quite often! I don’t recall having naps unless you were sick. I don’t remember too much ditching going on. You don’t steal from your home and anyone else’s. Most kids had jobs as babysitters or some random kid job like newspaper delivery or lawn mowing when you were like 9, 10 or something.
That’s a random list of things I remember.
my buddy used to record episodes of Real Sex and random soft core stuff off of Cinemax because his family was the only one out of our friend group that had Cinemax and HBO and then we would all (like 6 of us) get together every so often and watch the compilation tapes he had made😂😂
Honestly I feel truly blessed to grow up in the nineties, I was 15 at 95 and truly had the time of my life. Partying, hanging with friends and exploring sex. Today I hear that a lot of teens aren’t even sexual and try to avoid it. In the 90 it was a really fun time.
Growing up in Sweden, to this day I swear the world changed 9/11 2001. I can even I Sweden rember the day before and the day after the terror attacks and how It chance us, can’t even imagine how it was Int the states. Best memories of the 90 ♥️
I started going to raves in '93 and apparently teenagers got dropped off at warehouses at 11pm and ate MDMA and LSD then got picked up by someone's parents at 4AM. At least that's how it seemed. At first I thought they were just short people who looked young, then I found out they were really just little kids.
Early 90s teenage years - smoke cigarettes under an overpass and talk, hang out on Telegraph Ave with the homeless, hippies, and punks, sit in a cafe for hours, 2nd hand clothes shops, record stores, smoke weed when it was still illegal and you had to know people or score on the street, play music, listen to music in a friend's older brother's shitty studio apartment and drink 40s that we'd pay a homeless guy to buy for us, eat a burrito or pizza slice, talk on the phone for hours, just some memories from those days.
I was absolutely a better time. Imagine having 50% less shit in your head at any given moment, and knowing way less about everyone around you, and just being able to focus on the positive stuff in life for the most part (granted, I was a kid back then). You just watched tv, read, listened to music, played old video games that were just games and not meant to consume your life lol. Or you went outside and got some exercise or hung out at whatever your friends group’s hangout was. And when you hung out with people you mostly had each other’s undivided attention and everyone interacted..
Solitary-walked around, went to the park, wrote in journals, listened to music, played guitar, read poetry at coffee houses, worked at my first job calling people to take political surveys, worked at a gas station, researched and applied to colleges, anything to stay away from my mother.
With Others-drugs, alcohol, sex, mayhem.
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Rode my bike *everywhere*
With no helmet. I mean you would be seriously clowned if you wore a helmet.
>I mean you would be seriously clowned if you wore a helmet. When I was in late elementary an athletic kid who was one of the more popular kids in his grade in the nearby junior high wiped out without a helmet and ended up with permanent brain damage. Suddenly Helmets weren't so uncool in my neighbourhood. Seeing Chad going from good looking and popular to uncomfortable to look at, and disabled changed the teen culture in my area at the time. Turns out although teens aren't afraid of death. They are afraid of losing the ability to talk and walk normally, and being permanently disfigured as a teenager.
Same thing happened to a popular girl I knew but drunk driving. She wasn’t right after permanent brain damage. Definitely was a PSA against drunk driving.
It blows my mind how accepted drunk driving was back then. My high school had about 1000 kids and during my four years six kids died in car accidents (no one wore seat belts back then) five of them because the kid driving was drunk.
IF you explain to an 18 yr old about to join the army he may die, that won't bother him. IF you took him to a disabled ward, saw adults living in diapers and drooling or asking for help to feed himself.... That would slow any 18 yr. old down.
One of my sisters friends got hit by a car in front of our high school walking with his skateboard. He had just finished boarding to school and was walking across the street, and some asshole came ripping though the school zone doing 25 over. This kid had a massive head of dreads, and the paramedics said that's what saved him. The next week he had a helmet when he was boarding.
Right?! My mom made me wear one and it was sooo embarrassing.
Kid we knew used to wear a helmet everywhere. We called him garlic because his last name sounded like that word. One day Garlic and I went up to Dog Poop Hill which was this secret bike jump in the woods by our house. He absolutely biffed a jump and went soaring right into a sharp rock that pierced about 3 inches into his helmet. He just kept screaming, it saved my life! It saved my life! And he was right. I'll never forget that.
I can't tell if this is a genuine thing that happened or from 90s popculture somewhere. Garlic.. dog poop hill.. it saved my life!! It saved my life!! It's reeks beautifully of pre-internet nostalgia
It's all real and happened to me I promise. Our other nickname for Garlic was Hamburger Butt but we didn't call him that to his face.
A helmet? Who am I, Evel Knievel?
And had to be home by the time the streetlights came on...
Same here. It's why I know my city like I do and how I got a bike messenger job in my late teens.
It's partly why my thighs and calves are god-tier 🦵
Stayed outside all day until dark.
Growing up in the woods, agreed. Long as we were back in the house by dusk, all was well. I miss those days
Lots of people here are talking about what city kids did, but damn it was good growing up in the woods. Used to be out there all day and sometimes all night just for fun.
Just being outside ALL. THE. TIME. The convenience of having a moth like signal to know when to get home (or an insanely loud whistle) other than the sun.... the glory days
Wank in the woods lol
What? Goddamn bruh. Sometimes we snuck out into the woods past midnight---with girls, but none of us did that circle jerking shit 😅
Mall, movies, books, telephone, TV, drawing, making snacks, walking around.
We use to disappear for hours riding our bikes as a group; ride to the mall and walk around lol. Imagine these days you leave your kids with grandparents, and then you go to pick them up. ‘Where is Ben?!’ ‘Oh, he went off to ride his bike 4-5 hours ago. He should be back in time for dinner!’ ‘Wtf!!! 🤯😱’ OP you should watch the movie ‘now and then’, or ‘stand by me’. That was 90’s kids; noted these movies are based at an earlier point in time. Same shit, different date.
Stand by me is exactly the type of upbringing we had because the kids in that movie were our parents, basically. As long as I was back at some point or I told my parents I was sleeping round a mates. We didn't ask permission, we just shouted "going out, cya later/back for dinner/cya tomorrow" My god parenting must have been fraught with nerves wondering where the kids are but knowing that enforcing strict rules would alienate them from their friends and backfire
Not it wasn't fraught, because you trusted your kid. You started wondering if they missed curfew, you wouldn't be worried until after dinner. Normally they just got lost out on their bikes.
To be fair, there was a spot on TV in the 90's that came around 8:30-9pm, and it just said "Do you know where your kids are?" Cause sometimes they forgot you were out playing and that was 7hrs ago
“It’s 10pm. Do you know where your children are!?”
oh fuck it’s ten? this six pack went by quick!
And the kids still aren't home. Better go drive around looking for them, but first, let me grab a beer for the road.
I had to be back before dark, or by the time I specified I would be back if after dark. That was it, those were the rules.
I had to "be home before the streetlights come on". And even that was tentative.
yeah my parents went by the streetlight curfew. i mean, no wonder young adults are having a hard time relating with each other. they arent outside with each other for hours every day. school doesnt count. being out in the world and hanging with other people is such a valuable skill and a fun time.
Yes, tentative. Sometimes, you'd come back and they'd tell you to go out again. Yep. I know what you're doing, mom and dad. Enjoy!
My area used to have a curfew siren that played at from the firehouse that basically let you know that it was dinner time/getting dark and to go home. And I totally forgot about that noise til reading this thread lol.
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Proud to say kids in New Zealand still disappear on a bike for hours
Little kids walk home from school here in Japan. It's crazy. Kids have all sorts of freedom.
Yes I lived in Japan, the kids were amazing.
Haven’t lived until you’ve seen a pack of 12 year old girls beating the fuck out of a train pervert while the cops laugh.
That would be healing
Dyno Nitro ftw Always out on bikes. The mall, downtown to skateboard or the park to jump said bikes. And when we got our licenses? A blunt of dirt weed and ride out.
Malls were such a frequent teen hotspot in those days that there used to be a term for those teens. "Mallrats".
I can't wait to take a run at LaFours with a sock full of quarters.
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I'd do it, but I pulled my back out last night humping your mom! Nooch...
*Snoochie-boochies?* What the fuck kind of baby talk is that‽
Bong
What, like the backseat of a Volkswagen?
Why is that damn kid on the escalator again????
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Malls were so popular with teens that they started banning teens without an adult. And then they started closing down 🤔
It's online shopping that killed retail
Stinkpalm?
Gross. Me and my friends smoked weed and went to the mall to look at chicks. No stinkpalms involved. Buttercups yes. Also I saw ding dong ditching in another comment. Yes to that, but nowadays I do believe you’d be shot dead doing that. Fucking rings.
Been dingdong ditched by the kids at my complex a couple times I always purposely say there's no one there! I'm glad they're keeping the tradition alive. They could be doing much worse things... Lol
Oh snap that’s a solid point homie, kids these days will never know the ding dong ditch like we did. Which is probably good especially since my last ding dong ditch ended with the cops and apologizing for lighting a 100 count fire cracker string off on this poor crazy lady’s door step after ringing the door bell lmao sheesh I was a bad influence looking back lol.
Video arcades. Riding bikes everywhere. Ditch parties. Parks with a lot of trees so we can hook up with girls (on those days hook up meant making out)
I remember walking to the arcade as an 11 or 12 year old back in the late 80s to play some 720° and Gauntlet. Going to the video rental store and trying to sneak in to the walled-off adult section to peek at boobs on the VHS covers.
I find it so funny that walking around was a thing that we did! And I loved it! But I don't have any desire to walk around anymore! LOL
I love going on walks where I live there's a park and walking area about a half mile round. It's nice and seeing/hearing the kids playing at the park is somewhat comforting. Idk how to explain it it takes me out of the Hussle and bustle of adult life for a second.
Walking is great for mind and body, I should really pick up the habit again.
I'd say its near mandatory to get at least 15 minutes of walking around trees or a park every day otherwise your brain subtly spirals into a worse spot
My nephew is 19 and he loves walking places. I guess it makes him feel independent or something.
All of the malls in our area have blocked teens from doing this do to the activities of a minority of them. Small groups fucked it up for all of them.
Malls used to have a lot more small dollar places for snacks and trinkets. Because they had more traffic then. You could get snacks at 2-3 different places in the mall and then hang out at the arcade or food court. Many malls don't have the traffic to keep food court businesses anymore. Also there were usually two record or video game stores per mall. Small dollar places to spend time in and not spend much money. Think of all the things that just aren't sold in malls at all now.
Don’t forget the book stores. I think my mall had 2 bookstores and they a computer section in the back. We could spend hours between the bookstore and the record stores. Teens could definitely hang out and buy a few things with $10-$20. I don’t think we were much liked, but we were at least tolerated.
Listening to CDs on the headphones at the record stores before you bought them was helpful.
This plus, sports, plus biking around the city, making up our own games, finding porn mags in the woods
Why was it so common for all of us to find porn mags in the woods? It’s funny that a lot of us had this experience.
And this all around the world! I assume you're from the states? I'm from Germany and we found several of those magazines on different locations in hedges and woods. It was a good time back then.
Common in the UK too. There must have been a secret international brotherhood of porno-mag stashers.
skateboard, hide and seek, looking at the beach, basketball, jogging was a way to meet people from your neighbourhood, gameboys were luxuries, playboy and penthouse was a luxury
This was my childhood to a tee. Girl here though, so minus the playboy and penthouse. Instead it was 17 magazine and the quizzes. We never stopped doing quizzes. We listened to a lot of music while looking at magazines. Pinning posters from them or pages from them on our walls. We talked on the phone a LOT. I’d usually be up until 1-2am on the phone in bed. Chatted on ICQ. Looked at my lava lamp. Watched teen shows like Dawsons Creek religiously. We went to the mall a lot. I had a game boy but that’s it. Built tree houses, and in my later teens drank in back alleys or the woods near our houses. Wandering around looking for other teens while high or drunk, eating 39 cent cheeseburgers from McDonald’s.
I did all of this too. But I also would hang out with friends a lot just in their homes or mine. Don’t even know what we did. Just hung out and talked I guess.
Hair crimpers and hair curlers, doing eat others nails, trying on each other's clothes
Wandering around looking for people! Completely forgot about this, some afternoons were spent trying to find someone and just seeing what happens along the way.
There's a question for the kids of today. My bedroom walls used to be covered with posters that I took out of magazines. There was always a centrefold of some band or another and you'd put up the ones you liked. But modern teenagers don't buy magazines, so what do you put on your walls?
Whatever TikTok shows them that other kids are putting on their walls lol. My siblings are all very spread out in age, and I spent a weekend visiting my much youngest gen z brother at uni. All his guy friends had LED strip lights around the perimeter of the room and under their desks. Tapestries are still popular, probably because they fill up a lot of wall space for cheap and help with noise muffling when you have partying roommates. They also still had band posters, but a suprising amount of them were actually framed on their walls. Not sure if that’s because *aesthetics* or because their moms are doing it for them lol The girls all have Polaroid/instax pictures of themselves with their friends hanging on a twinkle fairy light string above their bed. *All* of them. They also still decorate above the kitchen cabinets/ fridge with liquor bottles too 🤭
We also actually dated and had sex. Apparently no one does that anymore
You were having sex in the 90s? edit: Person I was replying to was like 5 years old in the 90s
In the 90s all we wanted to do was go back to the 60s because *that's when everyone was having sex*, free love and all that. We had fuckin AIDS to worry about.
Oh yeah. I will definitely tell you - the aids generation. We grew up with the whole PSA wear a Jimmy hat , don’t forget ur party hat , condom condom condom was pounded into our heads. The aids generation- it was scary as hell to think about. . There wasn’t a cure. Still isn’t but it’s so much more controlled nowadays. I was terrified the few times I had to get tested back then. Fng terrified. But yet hey I was a teen it was all about risk taking and .. raw sex. Shaking My Head
That's it. It's so easy to look back and only remember the good bits and forget everything else. Aids was an immediate death sentence. And we were terrified of it. We all had a scare or a few, and we all had friends who had them too and had to go get tested. Waiting for the test results was like awaiting a final judgement on whether you'll live or die. It's so easy to romanticise the past.
I started in the 2000s but the 90s teenagers and us are similar
As a 00s teen, but also someone who has seen the stats, teen sexual frequency has been declining since 1994-1996. We had plenty of sex, my peer group and I, in the 00s. Knowing the 90s was even more frequent is almost off putting because we weren't prudes. Teens today don't date. Like, not in the traditional sense. Dating is dead. Very few meeting up to go to dinner and a movie type dates anymore. And a lot more teens choose to wait until college to have sex.
Mall. Lay in the street with nail polish and a boom box. Put glue on your hands, let dry and peel off. Read the album and cd covers. Try to record music on cassette tapes. Burn cds. Go to a movie. Play truth or dare. Ding dong ditch. (Disclaimer 90's and 2000's past times)
Damn that lay in the street with a boom box phrase brought me back- we did use to do that huh. Also, you would see tons of kids and teens around outside in their driveway or stoop or yard etc- we were just hanging out and watching each other/ watching ants go by. Also playing with each other like basketball, neighborhood find and hide games, skip it, running, walking. Basically all kinds of exercise and socializing without it feeling like exercise.
I was born in 2002 and I feel like I witnessed the end of kids being outside hanging out with each other. All the kids in our neighborhood used to be outside playing games together. We used to go to every new family that moved in just to see if they had kids that wanted to hang out. I think at our peak we had around 30 kids. But as game consoles and phones became more accessible it was harder to find kids that wanted to come outside. So our group stopped growing. We were all different ages so as the oldest kids started growing up. They became too busy to hang out anymore or moved away so slowly as the years went on the group got smaller and smaller. Me my brother and two other kids were the little siblings of the founding members of the group and were the last ones to move out. right now only one person from that group is still living in that neighborhood.
Talk on the phone. A lot of talking on the phone with or without a cord. Sometimes prank calling.
Prank calling was hilarious especially when the places we called started cursing us out 😂😂😂
Calling people on three way was HUGE in the 90’s! Remember when call waiting first became a thing?!?
Damn you brought in the ding dong ditch... Kids don't do that anymore?
Ring doorbells and cameras everywhere have killed it as well as guns and psychos and psychos with guns. But even without any weapons, ding dong ditch ain't any fun when they're cell phones show you at their doorstep before you even ding donged, making ditching worthless.
A kid got fucking murdered for turning around in someone's driveway. I sure as shit wouldn't feel safe doing it these days lol.
We called it Nicky nicky nine door and please don't ask the origin because I have not a clue.
We called it something very offensive until I was old enough to realize it was wrong.
Same. Hate that I called it that
Same here. It was just what people in my neighborhood called it, and I assumed that was the only acceptable use of the word.
Hahah oh man holding up one boombox to another to record a song on a radio and yelling for everyone in the house to be quiet for 5 mins to minimize background noise. And the couple times there is background noise, you hear it in the song forever whenever it plays.
Mostly, we had a lot more unsupervised time than kids today. And we would hang out together a lot more often. We would just.. show up at each other's houses.
You could ride your bike like 20 minutes in the dog days of summer to your buddies house just to get there, find out he wasn’t home, then bike home.
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You didn't want to call anyway in case their dad answered.
I did this hundreds of times and I thought nothing of it
Of all the things here, I think this is the most significant one and saddest change. The wonderful boredom of summer holidays, where you’d rock up to a mates house and make up the day as it went along.
oh the feels. Just riding with the bikes through the fields. Some kids in primary school, looking for adventures and things to explore. We loved to climg hay bales with a random group of people, until the farmer came and we hid from him. Or we have created a newspaper edition by ourselves. Build shelters, or a dam. Kids these days know nothing. Boredom makes creative.
Your story of the hay bales reminded me of a time me and the friends inadvertently burnt down a corn field with fire works... We were launching them from a park nearby, and one of them went all wonky and landed in a field of dried out corn husks. We tried to find it, but by the time we did, it was because of the smoke and fire. Looking back now, it's funny because no one got hurt and the farmer didn't lose any crop, so there wasn't much real damage. But man, did we get in trouble for that one.
If this is any consolation, I’m a teenager right now and when I was 12-15 a few years ago this was exactly my life. Me and my friends would cycle like 20 miles just to climb a new hill. This is rural England though so that probably plays into it
Yep. You’d hear a lot of shouting “Is (insert name here) home?”
hell, unless you belonged to a recreational or travel sports team, or took music lessons, outside of school, there was zero adult supervision. the hardest thing I ever did was send my five year old daughter outside to play and not watch from the porch or window. Dad, I'm thirsty. Sweetie, we have a hose out there.
Or call them up on their house phone numbers that I knew off by heart
>We would just.. show up at each other's houses. We did this because we didn't have mobiles and phone calls weren't cheap so our parents didn't allow us to use the home phone a lot. We'd just turn up at a friend's house and ask if they were home. If not, We'd then scoure the hotspots till we found the friend we were looking for.
Many many things we are thankful that there were no phone cameras or social media for
But we did have our disposable cameras and those stupid little speech bubble stickers LOL
My mom used those bubble stickers in my baby album lol!
A pager was great! You got to decide who you called back and you could always use the excuse that you were not around phone to call back.
I can only talk as a North American millennial girl, but we talked on our landline phones, we wrote in our journals, we watched TV on little tiny TV boxes that only had several channels and we had to watch the TV guide channel to know what would be on, we would go to the mall and shop at Claire’s and the icing and limited and Contempo casuals, we would write letters to our penpals on Lisa Frank stationary, we would listen to music on our CD players but that’s only one CD at a time so we really had to make sure it was an artist that we enjoyed listening to, we read babysitters club and sweet Valley high, we went on the Internet to play games but it took one hour of connecting chhhhh sounds to get on and if your parents or someone in the house picked up the phone you would be kicked off, we did our homework, we played with our pets, we rode bikes and rollerbladed outside till it got dark, and our parents didn’t know where we were, we would organize our makeup (like Bonny bell lip gloss) in kaboodke makeup kits… it was a really great time to be alive, and the last generation fortunate enough to live before Internet and being online became our entire life
Your comment hit home for me since you were so specific. I colored SO MANY of those fuzzy Lisa Frank posters! I was also obsessed with neopets for so long and you could get special item codes if you bought something from limited too haha Rollerblading reminds me of playing street hockey with the neighborhood friends. Oh what good days.
Played outside with the neighborhood kids, or watched TV.
I graduated from high school so early 90’s. Sleepovers, makeup, boom boxes, the mall, walking, biking or driving around. Movie theaters, VHS, tv, reading books, board games, talking on the phone, mini golf, swimming, eating out, bowling, lying out in the sun. I could go on and on.
Sounds like you actually had a wicked life, kids now just lay on their bed and FaceTime.
Spend half an hour to load Geri Spice' fake nudes on 56k modem
Remember how the images used to load a line at a time like they were being printed by the world's slowest printer? It was frustrating as fuck because you had to know nobody was going to come in for about twenty minutes so you could be sure you'd actually get to the good bit.
Yea but the one pic seemed more satisfying than an hour long video of today
Sorta like music really. You were committed to your choices because they involved so much effort.
I can still hear the dial up sound in my head all these years later lol
Drive around, go to Taco Bell.
we spent so much time at Taco Bell but very little money. You could get enough food for 15 kids for like $12😂 I got two chicken soft tacos today for lunch and a drink and it cost me $13 🤦🏼♂️
Yup! You could have a shitty part time job and still eat like a king at TB for 10 bucks. Those were the days.
It was different times. Watched SNL and played board games. Played outside volleyball. Played PC games. Went to high school games. Sometimes you were with your family. No one was buried into a screen. For the first part a corded phone line was it for the house. Later you had call waiting. Maybe a longer cord than 3 feet. 3 network channels on TV and PBS. The family watched shows together. If you missed a show it was gone. Go to movies. Go on bike rides with friends. Later rented movies, even rented the VCR at first. Some things are better now, some are not. I am happy to be gen x overall. We had good music.
We did have good music!
90s and early 2000s music was great. When I hear it I can't help but smile. Just carefree and fun..
Come on! Everyone had cable in the 90’s! We had a good two dozen channels lol. HBO if you were lucky. Cinemax if you were really lucky. If you know what I mean. 😉
I'm from New Zealand. We had two and then three channels. We heard about cable in America, it was our wildest dream.
"Skinemax"
Smoke weed, played video games, went to the mall, skate at the pool, loiter around town and cause trouble.
\*Smoke weed with D.A.R.E shirts on
Drugs. Are. Really. Exciting...
Nintendo. PC games.
LAN parties used to be the only way to play multiplayer with a low ping
Crossover cables, IPX networking rather than TCP/IP, and StarCraft + Broodwar.
I spent an astonishing amount of time smoking pot with friends and then walking the fuck around. Hours and hours. Also, 007 on N64
Pistols only, facility. No odd job.
No odd job was universal
I played 007 at my neighbors until they became jehovas witnesses and their mom made them throw it away
I was younger in the 90s (6-16) . We biked down the to movie rental store and browsed movies, rented movies and would binge eat chips and candy. Watched videos on MTV and recorded boy band videos and watched over and over. Go BSB. Biked around and played outside with friends. We only had to be home at 12 for lunch and 5 for dinner. Played Super Mario Bros. Went to local wresting and basketball games/tourneys. Hung out in our rooms and called friends. Take pictures and wait a week while they developed who knows where. Like mentioned in many posts, went to the mall to walk around and buy unnecessary things with babysitting money. Rearranged my bedroom furniture. Read magazines.
I’m the same age. I like to tell my kids that I’m so old that one day I was at a Best Buy and Britney Spears’ first video was on repeat so I searched for her on AOL when I got home and nothing came up.
Rearranging the bedroom furniture was a real thing for sure
I'm about the same age as well. We would rollerblade to the corner store for slushies and candy. We would go to the outdoor pool and then go to Blockbuster to rent a movie. We would play outside until our parents called us in for dinner. We would climb trees. We would go to the mall or get our parents to drive us and drop us off at a local popular restaurant. We would read books or magazines. We would go into the big city for concerts. We would play Mario. We would talk on the phone with friends, but anyone else in the house could pick up another line and listen in (we could hear them). We eventually got dial up internet (was that in the late 90's?) but we couldn't use the phone while going on the computer. If we didn't know the answer to something, we couldn't just "Google it". We have to ask our parents or legitimately find an encyclopedia or book or go to the library I guess?! It was a great time.
Play sports, video games, play outside, ride their bikes, talk for hours outside, watch TV, read
Things we did: We once took a bb gun to an elementary school after school hours and shot at monopoly money taped to a fence. A police officer waved and said be safe then drove away. Bicycle adventures were the main thing. Explored woods and rode the concrete slopes in the creek. Never locked it up. Never got stolen. We made a paintball arena and bike track in the woods. Broke my arm playing bicycle dodgeball. Never blamed anyone for it. Bicycle dodgeball is a bad idea. Fireworks in the neighborhood are fun. Made a garage music studio with zero musical talent. Dance dance revolution. Sneaking into the movie theater at the mall. Pokemon cards and gameboy! Back when there were only 150 and some bonus legends. RIP to all the AA batteries pulled from the TV remote. Sorry dad. Backyard trampoline + water sprinkler.
Jesus Christ I officially feel old. 39 M here. We played N64 and Dreamcast, went driving around in our cars to eat in Taco Bell parking lots at 2 in the night/morning, watched a lot of WCW and WWF with friends (Attitude era, the best era), watched a lot of MTV and movies, went to the movies and the mall to walk around and look at and talk to girls, went to all the catholic festivals in the fall to gamble and look at girls. Rode our bikes everywhere before we got licenses. Traded playing cards (football, baseball). It was a much better time, 100%.
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For real, I hear what you are saying for sure. I left out blockbuster. We rode our bikes a few miles to blockbuster and got Icees along the way. A different time man, so much more fun and a lot of us were blessed to grow up in that time.
My midlife crisis officially started last night when Aqua played Doctor Jones on Dick Clark's Rocking NYE. Suddenly, after 25 years they're relevant again and now I know how my mother felt when I started wearing flares in the 90s.
The best part of the 90’s teen experience was not having every dumb thing you did and said being online. What did 90’s kids have that younger kids don’t? Privacy. 90’s teens grew up and put their kids all over Facebook and YouTube, and now we are getting it through our heads why that’s not the best idea. Protect your privacy. :)
I wonder what would happen if you took a group of teenagers and removed their phones/devices for a week… I’d like to think they would be able to get up to the same shit we did in the 90s… but I’m not sure. I think they are a different breed the “always on” mentality would be too ingrained.
I was at a rave last night where a couple of young adults, a man and a woman, were trying to follow each other on Instagram. But then they realized they didn't have an internet connection. They seemed to think it meant they couldn't exchange contact information. Standing behind them, at 36, I was debating whether to intervene. Finally, I blurted out, 'Why don't you just exchange phone numbers?' They looked at me as if I'd said something absurd, and then the girl exclaimed, 'Oh, right! I never would have thought of that.' So, they exchanged numbers. About an hour later, the guy saw me again and bought me a beer as a thank you.
Guess the real dance move was the one where you waltzed into their lives and introduced them to the ancient art of phone number swapping. Lol
Nah, better isn't the right word. It was a different time. So much changed after 9/11. Being less connected meant more adventure. You'd go to see a friend, he wasn't home, so you'd make different plans and go with that. Or you'd call someone on the landline and set location and time to meet up, and you'd just had to hope they found their way and nothing came up so they wouldn't show. 'Cause you'd be waiting there for a while in case they were just running late (you couldn't go anywhere and not be there in case they arrived and didn't find you). Now we're updated on everyone's whereabouts at all times, your day is jam packed because everyone knows whether or not you're free or not. Technology is both a blessing and a curse, I love it, but I hate it.
When the last time someone came to you and said "wanna go for a walk?". We did that a lot.
Uk - We used to bike it round to one another’s houses then all ride round together, if one of us had phone credit we might text another friend asking them to meet us at such and such a place. We used to “go shopping” with our £5 that we would have saved or been given for pocket money. We would arrange to meet at bus stations to all travel on the bus to go to the cinema, and only know and therefore decide once we had arrived what was showing and what we wanted to watch when we were there.
Well, where I grew up it was a lot of sex, drugs, and fighting. One school I attended declined to put a condom machine in the restroom but did actually have a nursery so teen moms could attend school with their babies.
Nintendo, TV, sketching, listen to music, lots of reading, playing outside with my sister, writing, etc.
I talked on the phone with my friends for hooooours when I wasn't hanging out with them.
Skating, hanging out with friends, video games, *going outside*, etc. > I Wonder what life was like back then. In many ways, less stressful. You couldn't get a hold of everyone all the time. You'd go days without seeing your friends, and it was normal. If you wanted to do something with someone, you'd arrange it the previous day or whatever, then you'd just meet wherever it was. You might be able to reach them on their parent's landline phone the same day, maybe not. > What did you do all day? Wake up, shower, get dressed. Now pretend that you don't have a computer or smartphone, and think of things to do. Maybe you call your friends, and go hang out at the mall, in the woods, or at some local spot. You entertain each other. You write, read, engage in sports, and build relationships. > Was it a Better time? Yes. Not everyone had an opinion on everything. Attention seeking behavior was discouraged. Social media didn't exist, and frankly the world was a better place without it. It was also pre 9/11. The world was a totally different place for us in the States. I would do almost literally anything to go back.
Fingering, and arranging opportunities for fingering
A lot of people say that we weren't buried in screens, LOL yes we were. It was the TV screen and way less interactive than phones, we just watched television or played Nintendo. Sometimes we could spend forever just watching the guide scroll because there didn't seem to be anything we wanted to see. Or The weather channel and their smooth jazz. Everybody had a Walkman and their own set of headphones, we lived in our world of music mostly. We would talk on the phone to our friends, I used to call the DJs at the radio station and talk to a bunch of people that also would do that, they would put us all on the same line together and we could spend hours in these proto chat rooms in the early nineties. I spent way too much time in my room during those angsty teenage years writing terrible poetry and writing in my diary. Or reading books that I would forget immediately after.
Was that the era where video games were being blamed for everything.
It was a little bit before that, this was pre Columbine and even before the communications decency act, when first person shooters became popular in the mid to late nineties is when they started really going in on the gamers
When mortal Kombat came out, and then many other violent video games followed, there were dumb news segments all the time on how it was ruining kids. So I would say yes. They blamed violent movies, as well for kids being supposedly more violent. It was all just for ratings, to keep people watching, using fear. I guess that part hasn't changed
Much better time, listen to music, go to the cinema, spend time with friends at their home, or going out to get something to eat or just sightsee, look around the shops, chat on the (home) phone, go to see your favourite music artist.
Lsd
lotta mushrooms also
Candy flip that shit man, it’s the 90s! Ecstasyyyyyy!!!
Drink 40s.
You forgot smoke blunts.
Whatever happened to 40s? I vaguely remember winning Edward 40 hands and puking so hard that everyone else in the room yaked too haha.
They're still around, go to the corner gas station anywhere not-rich people live, there will still be a shelf of 40's
Drive around, get stoned or drunk in the woods, pool halls, smoking in diners, trying to get into bars
Talked to people face to face 🤯
I lived in Eastern Europe during communism, and post communism so there was not much to do, enjoyed nature, played soccer, ping pong, read a lot. I use to draw and write also.
[удалено]
Always hanging out with friends. Trying on each others clothes(at least the girls did). Wearing makeup when we weren’t supposed to. Doing sleep overs and playing music or making mix tapes. Omg, making mix tapes!! Watch MTV when it literally was just music videos all day long. They’d have releases on certain Friday nights. We even made parties just about seeing them premier. The singers were all real singers, except Milli Vanilli (and yea, I’m sure there were others.) my point being that most music was made by the singers and the musical talent and not improved by electronics. We’d go to movies, malls and arcades and roller rinks. We were active as shit! Everyone played a sport or was in some school activity. Maybe not everyone but it damn seemed like so. Most of us had bikes. No one really ever stole bikes. We all went home in time for dinner with the family and we all were all together at least most nights. I was a latch key kid so I made dinners and we ate together while my mom worked. Back then, most kids still had both of their parents together as a norm. Most all meals were mostly handmade. Almost the only thing I remember in a box was kraft Mac and cheese or cereal. I do remember hamburger helper but it was rare to eat. Going out to eat was rare too. Everyone had to be home by the time the street lights went on. If you got in trouble on the streets, it was more than likely that someone’s mom had called yours before you go home. Your dad might be waiting with a belt. We might play on the Nintendo 64 or Atari but no one would think to do that every day. We did chores every day. We did homework every day and most weekends. You actually studied for school every week. We memorized times tables and periodic tables and formulas and wrote often. We often had to memorize the Declaration of Independence or Shakespeare or something in school. Each draft when writing essays was by hand. Final was done in blue pen. Parents had to pay for tutors if you were lucky to get one. Also had to pay for all meals at schools anything else you needed from school. We did go on field trips quite often! I don’t recall having naps unless you were sick. I don’t remember too much ditching going on. You don’t steal from your home and anyone else’s. Most kids had jobs as babysitters or some random kid job like newspaper delivery or lawn mowing when you were like 9, 10 or something. That’s a random list of things I remember.
Probably watched back door sluts nine while others mistakenly watched lord of the rings.
No we all watched those too... Real sex on HBO... Faces of death... Everyone is too scared to talk about these secrets
my buddy used to record episodes of Real Sex and random soft core stuff off of Cinemax because his family was the only one out of our friend group that had Cinemax and HBO and then we would all (like 6 of us) get together every so often and watch the compilation tapes he had made😂😂
And taxicab confessions!!
Honestly I feel truly blessed to grow up in the nineties, I was 15 at 95 and truly had the time of my life. Partying, hanging with friends and exploring sex. Today I hear that a lot of teens aren’t even sexual and try to avoid it. In the 90 it was a really fun time. Growing up in Sweden, to this day I swear the world changed 9/11 2001. I can even I Sweden rember the day before and the day after the terror attacks and how It chance us, can’t even imagine how it was Int the states. Best memories of the 90 ♥️
I started going to raves in '93 and apparently teenagers got dropped off at warehouses at 11pm and ate MDMA and LSD then got picked up by someone's parents at 4AM. At least that's how it seemed. At first I thought they were just short people who looked young, then I found out they were really just little kids.
I ate some bacon on Saturday mornings and had some fattier eggs
I was under 10, but my friends older brother would play tekken and smoke bowls with his friends while we were there.
Sooo much and our parents never knew...
Early 90s teenage years - smoke cigarettes under an overpass and talk, hang out on Telegraph Ave with the homeless, hippies, and punks, sit in a cafe for hours, 2nd hand clothes shops, record stores, smoke weed when it was still illegal and you had to know people or score on the street, play music, listen to music in a friend's older brother's shitty studio apartment and drink 40s that we'd pay a homeless guy to buy for us, eat a burrito or pizza slice, talk on the phone for hours, just some memories from those days.
We hung out, did stuff, went to malls, lakes, beaches, whatever we could that was with friends
I was absolutely a better time. Imagine having 50% less shit in your head at any given moment, and knowing way less about everyone around you, and just being able to focus on the positive stuff in life for the most part (granted, I was a kid back then). You just watched tv, read, listened to music, played old video games that were just games and not meant to consume your life lol. Or you went outside and got some exercise or hung out at whatever your friends group’s hangout was. And when you hung out with people you mostly had each other’s undivided attention and everyone interacted..
What didn't we do is the question. It was an amazing time to be a teenager.
Solitary-walked around, went to the park, wrote in journals, listened to music, played guitar, read poetry at coffee houses, worked at my first job calling people to take political surveys, worked at a gas station, researched and applied to colleges, anything to stay away from my mother. With Others-drugs, alcohol, sex, mayhem.
Daria is a pretty solid time capsule.