A reader's plan to live like it's 1994: bomber jacket, coke and trash TV

The life plan of someone who wants to go back to 1994: bomber jacket, coke and trash TV

There is a Spain that never shows up in wellbeing statistics: the Spain of people who check their email once a day "because there's no other option", leave WhatsApp unread for three or four days and take pride in ignoring whatever doesn't interest them. On that basis, one reader has built a complete life programme to return to the 1994-2004 period, and has put it in writing without anaesthetic: branded clothes, a neighbourhood gym, visits to his parents and an iron discipline to avoid reading books.

The ten-point list is no after-dinner joke. It is a thesis: technical pogre hasn't improved life, it has domesticated it. Against hyperconnection, the information diet and the cult of personal productivity, this programme champions boredom, the body and face-to-face conflict.

What going back to 1994-2004 involves

The inventory is meticulous. No digital activism: "real activism", with specific clothing —a bomber jacket and branded boots— and a weekend routine the author describes without sugar-coating: nights out with far-right crowd groups, substance use and fights with rival groups. The ideological affiliation he mentions is explicit and the account is deliberately provocative.

On the domestic front, the rule is television. At least one hour a day, mandatory, and preferably trash TV from that era or football. "I don't like it but it's what's called for," he writes. Reading books is out; comics and bodybuilding and heavy metal magazines are in. Anime, only from back then.

The body has its own liturgy: a split routine at a frequency of 1, everything to failure, four days a week, with "no science or internet pencil-neck nonsense", plus two or three weekly sessions of mixed martial arts at a neighbourhood gym. And one striking exception in the substances chapter: he sets aside money each year for his own chemical cycle, arguing that training without looking "ING AMAZING" is pointless.

From WhatsApp to the office boss: the social life of the return

The work part is the most recognisable. No jumping from company to company: settle in, get on the bosses' good side, be "the ing man" of the office, loved by everyone except those who don't matter. The comparison with high school is no accident, and it describes a very Spanish corporate culture that hasn't disappeared with digitalisation.

On the family front, the author corrects his own course: he goes from seeing his parents once every two weeks to two or three times a week. "You have to spoil mum and dad," he declares. It is the only point of the programme that doesn't look at the past with nostalgia, but at the present with reproach.

Nostalgia as diagnosis, not refuge

The text works because it mixes the trivial with the uncomfortable. The return to 1994-2004 is not framed as an aesthetic exercise, but as a withdrawal from metrics: less email, less social media, fewer diets, less training science. Discipline, in his version, means doing things you don't feel like —watching TV, fighting, putting up with the boss— because supposedly that's how character is forged.

The conversation it sparks leaves a map of eras. Some argue the jump between 1994 and 2004 is too big to lump together, and that the changes of those years —in music, in film, in access to information— were faster than those of any later decade. Others point to housing: the 110% mortgage with the car thrown into the deal and the Euribor plus half a point as a rite of passage in that Spain. And there are those who remind everyone that back then people didn't set foot in the gym or own a dog.

The exact point where the analysis gets stuck is the same as in 1994: if it was better back then, why does nobody repeat it without coke, without fights and without a boss to flatter?