Had I gone to sleep on New Year’s Eve in 1999 and waked today, Rip Van Winkle style, much of the world I left behind that night would still feel familiar.
One sign that you are older than perhaps you think is that the world you grew up in makes a return and is greeted by the youth as a fresh discovery. As a Gen X-er, I spent my late teens and early 20s in the heyday of the 1990s. Lately I’ve been experiencing a strange sense of déjà vu: The dream of the ’90s is still very alive, and it’s everywhere. In more ways than one, this is nothing new. Each decade seems to go through a fascination with particular points in the past. (The fashion of my 1980s childhood, for instance, veered from the 1950s poodle skirts featured in “Back to the Future” to hippie outfits seen on “The Wonder Years.”) And we’ve been living through intermittent ’90s moments for a while now. But as I write in my guest essay this week, what has been notable to me in this current retreading is that it is not limited to remakes and cultural reappropriations. We are still living with and, in many cases, are still under the influence of the exact same people who dominated the culture and even the politics of the late ’90s. But what is the pull? Is Gen X, so often made invisible by the boomers and the millennials, exerting some strange revenge? Is it simply a desire for an offline world and a city where everyone was seemingly having a good time? Or is it more than that? And isn’t it time for a change?
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