You’re suffering from survivor bias. It happens. Not nearly as cool as you “remember” it. Everything was comfortably normal and bland. Music was kinda “meh” or at least mainstream was. There was a lot of cool stuff happening but none of us really knew about it outside of reading Rolling Stone and even then shelling out $16 for a CD was a financial commitment. Internet was kind of a thing (or at least BBS were) and unless you were an uber nerd you didn’t know anything about them; if you did, you were a nerd struck into a social caste that in high school (and maybe college) you couldn’t really recover from. The cool kids were too cool, even if they actually weren’t, and the artsy kids cocooned themselves in the hallway by the drama room and would endlessly quote Monty Python in ways that made no sense to the average pleb. You still had the social strata of jocks, cheerleaders, and valedictorians, but it was all an artifice of what we thought we knew.

The internet has an impeccable memory but is just as agile in forgetting the boring stuff, the asinine, the fleeing trends that never really stuck, and just fondly recalls the cool stuff, filtering out the rest of the bullshit.

There’s was a saying that “if you could remember the 60s, you weren’t there.” If you can remember the 90s, it’s because you were there, in all its safe, comfortable, boring glory. It was a great time, for sure, but not nearly as cool as you (don’t) remember.

That said, I’d choose what we had then over what we have now.