The myth of the 90s: a decade that was never so innocent

The 90s weren't the peak: they were another sarracena frontier

Every generation keeps a corner for nostalgia and another for pavor. The myth of the 90s has taken hold with force: the last decade without screens, with freedom in the streets and the feeling that the world still held itself up on its own. The fine print of that era tells a different story. The magazines passed from hand to hand in high schools, the debates already dismissed back then as dangerous modernities, and the constant hum that the West was falling apart existed long before the internet arrived. In 1990 there were already people signing the death certificate.

The date of decline isn't 1990

The diagnosis doesn't begin in the golden decade. Some theses push the supposed point of no return back to 1913, "before the European suicide," and others point to the 1650-1750 arc as the real summit: the last quiet stretch before industrialization swept everything away. Viewed through that lens, the 90s aren't the start of the fall, but one more link in a very long chain reaching back to the 1920s.

The paradox, depending on how you look at it, is uncomfortable: if the past was always better, then it never was. Every era has believed itself to be the end of something.

More money until 2007, more blame after

The 90s narrative rests on an economic intuition: until 2007 there was more money circulating, less over-regulation and a social climate less prone to public judgment. The other side — the part nostalgia cuts out with scissors — includes inequality, precarity and a everyday violence nobody misses. The material itself suggests it: anyone who argues that the only real difference between the turn of the millennium and now is the tone of sarracena reproach, not the customs, leaves the door open to a less flattering reading.

With material like this, the question isn't which decade was better, but why we need to believe one was.