Nineties Kid Summer

Image by Eaton Print Shop

We are all just a little bit too online these days, are we not? I personally suffer from a phone addiction that would baffle my ancestors—what do you mean, you spend four-plus hours a day staring into a void that feeds you short-form content about couples in therapy and knitting hacks?—and with the rise of generative AI, a streaming platform for every genre, and apps that make daily life, from grocery shopping to music selection, a frictionless experience, the siren song of technology is loud. 

In response, a nostalgia for "1990s kid summer" is bubbling up. The aesthetics presented online are very analog: hours spent on bikes, at the community pool, watching movies from a generation prior, sleepovers with friends, library visits, road trips, mall quests, and endless casual reading. It harkens back to kids on the cusp of independence, the age when you can walk to the 7-11 with your allowance but still need a ride to the movie theatre. It is the type of summer where even adults do not know what "optimization" means, and they will never encounter a Slack channel. 

This is the type of summer I grew up having. I was six in the summer of 1990, and my tweens and teens were spent at Sauble Beach at the bottom of the Bruce Peninsula. I went to summer camp there, gamely singing vacation bible school classics about the Pharisees and whomping my fellow campers with pool noodles. I had my first jobs there: crappy retail where we sold tankinis and listened to the Billboard 1979 Top Hits album on a loop, minimum-wage food service where we served fries to surly tourists and scrubbed sandy grease off the floor mats. I made lifelong friends, had my first kiss at the outdoor roller rink, and spent long hours at the beach and on the deck, not doing much of anything. 

I know this type of summer is becoming less possible for many of us. My mom didn't work, so she was available to watch her three kids as we played. A half-day of VBS provided us with a social scene, and we had myriad cousins and summer friends who had similarly long months away from hometowns and familiar social circles; it now feels rare that people spend their entire summers at the cottage, opting instead to rent them out to tenants who come in by the week. Technology was sparse. For years, we had no television and no landline, meaning that if you wanted to make plans with anyone in the family, you had to physically show up at our door (unthinkable now, in the era of lakeside hotspotting). Friends had VCRs or cable; we had the drive-in movie theatre outside of Owen Sound, a stack of library books, and all the Archie comics we could carry home from garage sales. This was pre-cell phone, pre-texting, pre-email. When people talk about elder millennials having a childhood split between pre- and post-internet, this is what they're describing. 

As the meme says: take me back. 

An article on The Cut earlier this year talked about "frictionmaxxing," in that friction—the small irritants and light barriers we encounter in life—are what dirt is to oysters, or time is to tragedy: it alchemizes our lives and experiences into lessons, memories, and stories. Describing a truly terrible-sounding road trip and the joys of browsing cookbooks rather than ChatGPT-generated meal plans, writer Kathryn Jezer-Morton suggests that we allow our lives to be slightly...bad. Or, at least, not fully optimized: allowing people into your slightly messy home is normal in friendships; same with doing each other slightly inconvenient favours. Exposing children to chores and errands, either with an adult or on their own, also exposes them to responsibility and autonomy (I remember hearing about a member of my social circle whose school-aged children, in a post-COVID world, had never been to a grocery store); the kids might do the chores and errands badly, but the way to get good at something is to practice. 

Analog life does have more friction. Juggling a Discman plus a Walkman required complicated music-shuttling systems (books of disks in flimsy pockets, little suitcases of cassettes). Landlines required you to talk to your friends' families: HiJoshcanItalktoJessicaplease and then waiting as Josh bellowed all over the house to retrieve his sister. It required being at home at certain times if you wanted to watch "your" show, or learning how to program the VCR to tape it if you were double-booked. It meant going to the bank to get out cash. It meant talking to more people, all day every day, in order to live your life. 

It's a trope to complain about modern life—how contactless payment, online shopping, social media and all the rest are draining us of opportunities to connect with each other—but tropes are often true, to a certain extent. And I can't be the only one who is tired of constantly referring to my phone, but in modern times, the phone is not just the phone; it is the camera, the bank card, the mailbox, the television, the magazine, the novel, the jukebox and the family calendar. It is where my friends are, many days. And because the phone gives me all those experiences in the same way (staring into a screen, occasionally with headphones), my life does not feel particularly textured. 

The way to fix that is to deliberately muss it up, to add some of the weird old stuff back in. A postcard will bring me more joy than a text (but I do like getting a text); a printed and framed photo holds a memory longer than an Instagram post; my pen-and-paper to-do list is much more effective than any efficiency app I've encountered. I've written before about how A.I. eliminates the process-work of creation and learning, and studies have shown that habitual A.I. users have measurable cognitive decline. Part of being alive is learning how to be alive; smooth, frictionless, admiring technology robs us of those microlessons. Does this take more time? Is it slightly annoying? Yes and yes, especially if we're used to having everything at our fingertips. But I want to reach for things, these days. To reach is to stretch. 

I don't want to give back my debit card or disconnect from my online friends, but do I want to have more memories, more experiences, more stories. I want my kid to know what it is to struggle for something they want, and how to overcome the small inconveniences of life. The way to get good at something is to practice; this includes being bored, being inconvenienced, or having to slow down. If we want a nineties kid summer, it has to include those things.