The Buzz of the 90s

If the ’80s were about clawing back control, the ’90s were about flaunting it. Our world appeared polished, packaged, and just a little too eager to be believed.

Everything accelerated. Technology slipped into daily life like a well-rehearsed lie. It brought a new promise of something smooth and convenient; almost seductive. Home computers, the early internet, cell phones, all pointed to the same conclusion: we’ve solved it. 

Life was becoming sleeker, easier, more predictable. And if it was easier, then surely it was better. At least that was the story. The new world felt neat, comforting, and suspiciously unchallenged.

Even then, something else lingered. A low, constant hum beneath the surface, that no one could name; the shadow of success and expansion that proves there’s a dark side to everything.  

We hoped this era had healed the past, when actually, it just rebranded it.

Pain became productivity. Disconnection got a glow-up and called itself independence. Emotional weight? Streamlined, managed, quietly tucked away so it wouldn’t interrupt the grind. And we were rewarded for it. Sound familiar? 

The faster we moved, the more we produced, the more we performed competence, the more convincing the illusion became: look how far we’ve come.

It’s unlikely that a generation reaping the rewards of its accomplishments would feel compelled to consider the parallels between themselves and their grandparents of the Industrial Revolution. Yet, it might have been wise to consider if they, too, were over-doing production and growth for the purpose of wealth and superiority.  

But that’s not how we’ve come to live, and forward motion tends to be a master of disguise, and there’s discipline in never stopping long enough to ask questions. Especially when stopping is risky. Stopping means feeling. And feeling—really feeling—has a nasty habit of unraveling the systems holding everything together.

It’s much safer to keep optimizing; keep building; and keep perfecting the version of life that photographs well and can be hung on the mantle.

Which is what we did. We engineered smoother systems. Curated identities built on self-sufficiency and success. Constructed a future sleek enough to suggest we’d outgrown the past entirely. But no matter how sophisticated the architecture, it doesn’t erase what it was designed to contain.

In other words, you can’t outbuild what lives inside you.