What 90s Summers Got Right
Do you remember the feeling of summer as a kid?
The way it seemed endless, until one day the air suddenly changed somewhere in August.
You'd wake up in the morning with absolutely no plans and somehow stay busy until dinner. A trip to the penny candy counter felt like an event. A bike ride could take all afternoon. Vacation took forever to arrive.
Maybe it's because we were kids.
Maybe it's because the world was different.
Either way, there are a few things about 90s summers that are worth bringing back.
Here are seven of them.
1. Being offline.
If you were away from the computer, you were simply gone.
You didn't get notifications. There were no persistentgroup chats. Oh gosh, remember when you didn't get bombarded with breaking news alerts? There was no one sending you reels while you were trying to enjoy a day at the beach.
If someone wanted to talk to you, they called the house phone and hoped you were home.
Looking back, it feels less like inconvenience and more like peace.
2. Feeling very rich with very little.
Walking into a penny candy store felt like being on top of the world.
Five dollars wasn't much money, but somehow it felt like enough to buy half the store. You'd spend fifteen minutes carefully making your selections, weighing the pros and cons of every jawbreaker, gummy shark, and sour rope.
Then you'd walk out with a paper bag full of treasure and feel like you'd gotten away with something.
I've never felt as financially confident as I did holding five dollars in a candy store in 1997.
3. Having to figure out what to do next.
There was no algorithm waiting to tell us what came next.
Sometimes you were bored.
So sometimes you wandered around the neighborhood.
Sometimes you rode your bike with absolutely no destination in mind.
Sometimes you knocked on a friend's door and hoped they were home.
An entire afternoon could be spent simply figuring out what to do with an afternoon. And somehow, that really wasn't a problem that needed solving.
4. Disappearing for awhile.
You could leave the house at 10 a.m. and no one would wonder where you were until dinnertime.
That was normal.
You'd tell someone you were going to the beach, or riding your bike, or heading over to a friend's house, and that was generally enough information for everyone involved.
You belonged to the day, not to a device.
5. Waiting.
Vacations. Birthdays. The season finale. The catalog in the mail. The ice cream truck.
Maybe most famously, film.
You'd take twenty-four photos all summer, drop the camera off at the pharmacy, and then wait.
There was no checking how they came out. No deleting the blurry or unflattering ones. No taking another hundred just in case.
You got what you got.
Opening up that envelope when it came back felt like a time capsule from a version of you that was already far away.
6. The comfort of tradition.
The same campground.
The same ice cream shop.
The same beach.
The same Fourth of July parade.
These traditions were exciting because they happened year after year and they could be counted on. There was comfort in knowing exactly what was coming.
The same streets. The same people. The same stories.
Year after year, they became as essential to the season as the heat itself.
7. Shared culture.
Most people watched the same shows, listened to the same songs, and knew the same references.
The day after a season finale, everyone was talking about it.
The song of the summer was actually the song of the summer.
Even if you lived in different towns, there was a good chance you were experiencing a lot of the same things at the same time.
Summer felt communal in a way that's harder to find now, just because our attention was gathered in fewer places.
Maybe what we miss isn't the 90s.
Maybe we miss boredom and anticipation.
Maybe we miss belonging to the moment we were in instead of the next one.
The decade isn't coming back, but some of those feelings still can.
