Members of Gen Z, born between 19, are nostalgic for this decade that they didn’t even live through. ![]() A student who selected 1968 did so because “there was love in the air, lots of good drugs and the Grateful Dead had just begun…also, there was no AIDS and everybody was having sex.” We can’t do that today.” Students’ comments showed they associated the 1960s with music, free love, and drugs. As one student, who chose 1969, told us, “This was a time where it was acceptable to be lost and confused and not have an understanding of where tomorrow is going. Respondents, likely reacting to the ways that decade had been mythologized in pop culture, perceived the 1960s as a time when young adults had more freedom. In the early 1990s, my dissertation advisor, Jerry Markle, and I conducted a study that asked over 200 college students the question: “If you could step into a time machine and press any year to go to-forward, or backward in time-what year would you pick and why?” The majority of students, young Gen Xers at the time, chose decades they never knew firsthand, the most popular being the 1960s. Bands from the 1990s are also making comebacks: the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Backstreet Boys, the Spice Girls. In the world of fashion, grunge has returned-witness the prevalence of distressed jeans-along with graphic tees, platform shoes, and cropped tops. Today we are awash in ’90s nostalgia, as evidenced by the resurgence of Friends and reboots of Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, The Wonder Years, Saved by the Bell, and Sex and the City, among others. ![]() Such “displaced nostalgia” is easily triggered by the way particular eras are represented in popular culture. But the current ’90s nostalgia craze is a broader cultural phenomenon. That millennials and Gen Xers are nostalgic for the 1990s is to be expected-we are typically nostalgic for the times in which we came of age. In times like ours, immersing in a classic ’90s movie like Reality Bites may be a sign of emotional and psychological health, and a way of moving forward. However, as those of us who study nostalgia can attest, it is also a complex, ambivalent emotion that can improve our personal and social wellbeing. Nostalgia often gets a bad rap: Critics dismiss it as regressive or reactionary, a sign that our view of the past is uncritically monolithic, making it easy to adhere to a rigid ideology. People and groups often feel nostalgic for the past when current circumstances are deficient, leaving us with a sense that something valuable has been lost, an unsettling discontinuity between past and present. We ride a wave of nostalgia, seeking solace in those pre-COVID, pre-smart phone times. might have noted, came 20 years later, when COVID-19 prompted a collective existential crisis.Īgain, we find the ’90s on our minds. We now know that the end of the world as we know it, as R.E.M. ![]() At the end of the 1990s, all anyone could talk about was the impending Y2K doomsday-that moment on January 1, 2000, when computers would think our calendars had all flipped to 1900.
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