Dude, What Happened to My 90s?*

It was sometime back in the early teens of our current century that I realized something was off. Placing a half-hung morning order at a local cafe, I was knocked awake with details about artisanal bread, organic greens, and free-range eggs sourced from a local farmer named Jeni or Daphne or something adorable like that.

I wasn’t surprised by the spread, nor the chef’s proclivities. I’d always had a shop-local, support-the-community bent. Satisfying as a McMuffin can be, the novelty of weird one-off shops is hard to beat: the charm of mismatched furniture, foam-play on the lattes, hand-scrawled gig alerts on the corkboard, the people watching.

Many of my best youthful hours were spent at places like this, surrounded by stickered-over notebooks and the self-serious headscratching of caffeine-starved students and crank poets, shaking off the night, trying to do a thing.

Rattling off recommendations while blinky-eyed first-timers ingested the chalk-drawn menu was part of the barista’s job. Nothing new there. But what got me was the way that she said it. It wasn’t a space-filling spiel while she picked at her cuticles, counting down the minutes to the next cigarette, ending in a reflexive “yeah…but, whatever.”

I had her full bright-eyed attention. She seemed invested. She took pride in the products on offer. It wasn’t just another minimum wage, nametag-on-the-apron job to her. She cared.

It was charming. It was sincere. It was also bizarre. I was completely thrown. Somehow caring became cool. I knew in that moment that the 90s were dead.

Chuck Klosterman tries his best to pin down what happened in his recent pop-culture commentary, The Nineties. I’ve read Klosterman off and on for the last decade or so. As we’ve led somewhat parallel lives, it’s easy to be a fan.

Klosterman grew up around Fargo, found rock ‘n roll, and then spent his early years writing for the Akron Beacon Journal back when even third-tier cities still produced a daily rag worth reading. I grew up reading Doonesbury and Bloom County in the Beacon Journal, found rock ‘n roll, and eventually got shunted off to Sioux Falls, the notch-south Fargo of South Dakota.

His writing hits me with the comforting “yep, been there, done that” familiarity of one who’s shared the same geography, points of reference, and the gnawing curiosity of the peripherally-cool personality.

For most of the 21st century, it’s been easy to think that the 90s never left. Things like reality television, craft breweries, and the digitization of everything started in the 90s. Throw the word “alternative” before anything, and you can easily argue that it got going in the 90s.

Portlandia made it rather clear: The dream of the 90s was alive and well. Teleport a 90s kid from a Beck concert to Brooklyn, Silver Lake, or the gentrified strip of any mid-sized city and they’d probably think they’d been transported to a Gen-X theme park, a commodified and slightly-sanitized utopia where everyone had dropped the dutiful facade and could now spend days focused on the things that really mattered — thrifting vintage t’s, perusing used books, eating organic burritos, drinking locally-roasted coffee — where every wistful day crashed out at band practice.

Beyond the glued-on presence of smartphones and earbuds, there’s no clear line between the 90s and today. It’s not like the 50s vs. the 60s, let alone the 40s vs. the 70s. It’s easy to forget we’re talking thirty years here. That’s a long time for the trappings of life to remain so static. Walk through any high-school today and you can still see kids decked out in Nirvana shirts, flannels, and yellow-stitched Docs. Squint and you’d think that nothing has changed.

But of course, everything’s changed.

It’s key to remember that little of importance happened during my generation’s emblematic decade. The Berlin wall came down in ’89. The Twin Towers fell in ’01. In-between were easy years to be alive. Trying to find some sort of “meaning” during the 90s is a futile pursuit.

The stakes were low; the economy was humming along. Apathy and irony were the lazy buzzwords of the era. We assumed that the powers-that-were would always remain the powers-that-be. You didn’t have to have an opinion. And even if you did, that was just like, your opinion, man.

Solipsistic navel-gazing was the status quo. We were aware of the world, yet unaffected by it. Mass media was exploding, but before the dominance of 24/7 cable news and the ever-present reach of the internet, most days were spent tuned out. Your life was all about you, your friends, and your stash of ephemera. Culture — high, but mostly low, or mostly low parading as high — was all there was to talk about.

So where did the 90s go?

The pivotal event that Klosterman lands on was the fallout from the Bush/Gore election of 2000. It wasn’t the election itself, which at the time was seen as an uninteresting contest between two nearly identical candidates. Gore was the sighing center-left scion of a political family and the obvious choice to carry on the still-popular policies of the Clinton era. Bush was the center-right challenger from another dynasty who said he was planning on doing very little if he were to win the White House, viewing it as typical 9-5 job for any MBA. The most pivotal poll asked, “Who would you rather have a beer with?” As Klosterman writes, “It was very 90s way to think about a problem.”

After the shenanigans in Florida, the Supreme Court ruled in a 5-4 decision to end the recount and call the contest in Bush’s favor. What started as the most boring election in US history ended in a cynical exercise in zero-sum politics. In Klosterman’s telling, a 9-0 decision would have shown scholarly consensus on the finer points of the law. A 8-1 or even a 7-2 tally would have demonstrated philosophical debate with general agreement. The 5-4 ruling came down along party lines. There was nothing high-minded about it.

Even then, there was a collective shrug. No one stormed the Capitol — such things were unimaginable. And how much influence does one guy have anyway? Weren’t Bush and Gore still pretty much the same fiftysomething, Ivy League’d, silver-spooned centrists? What did it matter? That complacency came crashing down on 9/11 and rumbled through the escalating war in Iraq. The politics of the next decade took a box-cutter to the center, and now every minuscule issue, from bathrooms to plug-in cars, has to be another 5-4 ideological tussle.

Now everyone has to have an opinion on everything. Everyone has to care. All the time. And that’s pretty exhausting.

I’ll always miss the screw-it vibe of the 90s. But my barista’s guileless eyes made me realize that times have changed, and I knew that it was time to catch on. Tiring as this new sincerity can be, in my heart-of-hearts I knew that this was a necessary correction, that this was progress, and that progress was good. Good for the world, and probably good for me. I mean, it’s good to care, right?

So do me a favor the next time you catch me getting all 90s, all “yeah…but whatever.” Remind me that it’s ok to care, that caring a good start. Maybe the next generation will find a way to lay off the binary antagonism and the sound-bite self-righteousness and celebrate the center once again. Maybe tomorrow’s kids will decide that it’s cool to be kind. Then wow, man…we’ll really be getting somewhere.

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*The original title of this was going to be “It used to be fun to be an asshole. Now, you’re just an asshole,” but I figured that Google, and my more delicate readers, might not like that so much. I still like it.