You Don't Actually Want the 2000s Back
Posted: Sun Aug 02, 2026 4:24 pm
All over the socials I frequently see (and I gather that part of this is due to algorithms from the corpo socials) people pining for either the early 2000s, or even the 90s. Some of this is targeted at me, because the algorithm knows I'm a 90s child. Other times it's because other people in their 30s and 40s wish they still had a gameboy, and so on, and so forth. But I do also see a lot of, "I wish we could go back."
But you don't want to go back.
I remember the late nights on cable TV, the unskippable commercials and Beavis and Butthead. The dial-up internet that sometimes took forever to connect, and then disconnected the second someone in your household picked up the phone. Images taking minutes to load, or sometimes even longer! Or, downloading the Duke Nukem 3D shareware version, which had a download time of twelve hours.
The Duke3D Shareware version was three and a half megabytes.
Of course, yeah, I know. The 90s and early 2000s had its charms. You weren't always constantly available to anyone in the world at any time. You would leave your house and your computer never came with you. You couldn't log on from the mall at KB Toys and message your buddy, like, "Hey, did you get this new Stretch Amrstrong?!"
Queue your 4th grade teacher: You won't always have a calculator in your pocket when you grow up!
And, oh yeah! The malls!
I try not to base my nostalgia for the past in just ... consumerism, but malls were modern community centers. And there's a reason they're dead and dying. And it's not because people don't want to go to the mall anymore.
It's because of big corporate box stores that sell everything.
That's why your mall is dead.
That's why one of my favorite malls no longer exists.
You don't want to go back to the past, though. You don't want to boot up Windows 95 and throw a game demo disc into your CD Rom drive and explore a virtual 3D arena where you could try different games by walking into a portal aboard a Manhattan space station.
Okay, that was pretty awesome, actually.
But, the thing is, what you remember of the 90s and 2000s is from back when you were a kid. And being a kid, if you were born in the right circumstances, and especially during that era, was awesome!
You're an adult, now. What would it be like if you were an adult in the 90s and early 2000s?
Probably not so rose-tinted, I bet.
Like, maybe you would have enjoyed the surge of home PCs for the first time, and having access to the internet for the first time. But let's be real, you'd be at work most of the time. You'd be driving on long commutes with nothing but a radio where some guy decides what you want to listen to.
There weren't any dating apps, either. Some would say this is a good thing. And, actually, that probably is a good thing. But stuff just took longer in that era. It was a very WYSIWYG time.
What you see is what you get.
But there were chatrooms, right? You could meet people that way ... and then it'd turn out to be a dude in his 50s, or a married woman who's using the internet as an escape from her marriage (real experiences referenced).
I digress, though. There were a lot of good things about the age of the early internet and the MP3 player. And some of those things still exist today!
The reason, though, that it all seems so much better back then, that it does now, is because being an adult fucking sucks. Working day-by-day for some money so that you can pay some bills while you watch everything around you descend into disaster really fucking sucks. And you didn't have to worry about any of that when you were a child. So maybe you want to be a kid again, and maybe you want to go back to the 90s, or 2002. I know I'd probably enjoy that for a little while.
If I could skip out on going back to high school ...
But the past is the past, and you can cherish every memory you have until you forget everything, and some day, maybe there'll even be a way to virtually relive your memories.
Until then, maybe we should aknowledge things that are cool in 2026?
Smartphones can be cool. You can play a game in your car on your lunch break at work. Also, jobs don't really penalize you for having a phone anymore, because everyone's got one. The internet is super fast, and you can download a terabyte within a day if you want to (I'm not sure why you would). You can subvert the hyper-consumerism and connect with people all over the world, and maybe even find someone you really vibe with, even if they're 4,000 miles away.
Planes and trains exist, after-all.
And you can create basically ... anything you can possibly imagine, because computing has just come that far. You don't need major studios, millions of dollars, and a lot of luck.
You can just do shit. Boredom isn't real, anymore. You realistically cannot run out of things to do. And some would argue that this is maybe a bad thing, but there is always something you can do in order to fill your time. It wasn't like this in the 90s. There were times when I would sit on the couch as a kid and just kind of ... blank.
Because there wasn't jack-shit to do, at times.
And I was by and large much less educated. I didn't have access to all of the information in the world, and neither did you.
So, I think there are good and bad things about the present, and good and bad things about the past. Are there more bad things in 2026 than there were in 1996? Maybe. I couldn't even really tell you for sure, though, because I was a child, and I did not know what was going on in the world in 1996.
Except for what was happening under Bill Clinton's desk.
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Originally published at NovaLandia: https://mkultra.monster/culture/2026/08/02/you-dont-want-the-200s/
But you don't want to go back.
I remember the late nights on cable TV, the unskippable commercials and Beavis and Butthead. The dial-up internet that sometimes took forever to connect, and then disconnected the second someone in your household picked up the phone. Images taking minutes to load, or sometimes even longer! Or, downloading the Duke Nukem 3D shareware version, which had a download time of twelve hours.
The Duke3D Shareware version was three and a half megabytes.
Of course, yeah, I know. The 90s and early 2000s had its charms. You weren't always constantly available to anyone in the world at any time. You would leave your house and your computer never came with you. You couldn't log on from the mall at KB Toys and message your buddy, like, "Hey, did you get this new Stretch Amrstrong?!"
Queue your 4th grade teacher: You won't always have a calculator in your pocket when you grow up!
And, oh yeah! The malls!
I try not to base my nostalgia for the past in just ... consumerism, but malls were modern community centers. And there's a reason they're dead and dying. And it's not because people don't want to go to the mall anymore.
It's because of big corporate box stores that sell everything.
That's why your mall is dead.
That's why one of my favorite malls no longer exists.
You don't want to go back to the past, though. You don't want to boot up Windows 95 and throw a game demo disc into your CD Rom drive and explore a virtual 3D arena where you could try different games by walking into a portal aboard a Manhattan space station.
Okay, that was pretty awesome, actually.
But, the thing is, what you remember of the 90s and 2000s is from back when you were a kid. And being a kid, if you were born in the right circumstances, and especially during that era, was awesome!
You're an adult, now. What would it be like if you were an adult in the 90s and early 2000s?
Probably not so rose-tinted, I bet.
Like, maybe you would have enjoyed the surge of home PCs for the first time, and having access to the internet for the first time. But let's be real, you'd be at work most of the time. You'd be driving on long commutes with nothing but a radio where some guy decides what you want to listen to.
There weren't any dating apps, either. Some would say this is a good thing. And, actually, that probably is a good thing. But stuff just took longer in that era. It was a very WYSIWYG time.
What you see is what you get.
But there were chatrooms, right? You could meet people that way ... and then it'd turn out to be a dude in his 50s, or a married woman who's using the internet as an escape from her marriage (real experiences referenced).
I digress, though. There were a lot of good things about the age of the early internet and the MP3 player. And some of those things still exist today!
The reason, though, that it all seems so much better back then, that it does now, is because being an adult fucking sucks. Working day-by-day for some money so that you can pay some bills while you watch everything around you descend into disaster really fucking sucks. And you didn't have to worry about any of that when you were a child. So maybe you want to be a kid again, and maybe you want to go back to the 90s, or 2002. I know I'd probably enjoy that for a little while.
If I could skip out on going back to high school ...
But the past is the past, and you can cherish every memory you have until you forget everything, and some day, maybe there'll even be a way to virtually relive your memories.
Until then, maybe we should aknowledge things that are cool in 2026?
Smartphones can be cool. You can play a game in your car on your lunch break at work. Also, jobs don't really penalize you for having a phone anymore, because everyone's got one. The internet is super fast, and you can download a terabyte within a day if you want to (I'm not sure why you would). You can subvert the hyper-consumerism and connect with people all over the world, and maybe even find someone you really vibe with, even if they're 4,000 miles away.
Planes and trains exist, after-all.
And you can create basically ... anything you can possibly imagine, because computing has just come that far. You don't need major studios, millions of dollars, and a lot of luck.
You can just do shit. Boredom isn't real, anymore. You realistically cannot run out of things to do. And some would argue that this is maybe a bad thing, but there is always something you can do in order to fill your time. It wasn't like this in the 90s. There were times when I would sit on the couch as a kid and just kind of ... blank.
Because there wasn't jack-shit to do, at times.
And I was by and large much less educated. I didn't have access to all of the information in the world, and neither did you.
So, I think there are good and bad things about the present, and good and bad things about the past. Are there more bad things in 2026 than there were in 1996? Maybe. I couldn't even really tell you for sure, though, because I was a child, and I did not know what was going on in the world in 1996.
Except for what was happening under Bill Clinton's desk.
-----
Originally published at NovaLandia: https://mkultra.monster/culture/2026/08/02/you-dont-want-the-200s/