Let’s start here: Nostalgia is a liar, but she’s the best kind of liar. She tells you that the past was easier, even though it probably wasn’t. She tells you the world made sense, even though—if you go back and ask your eleven-year-old self—he’d probably confess that he didn’t understand jack. But if you were a kid in the nineties, you lived in a reality that was about to end. You just didn’t know it yet.
Being a kid back then meant existing in a low-resolution universe—literally and metaphorically. The colors on your TV were washed-out, the graphics on your N64 were blocky enough to stub your psyche, and the only thing in HD was your imagination. That glow from the TV when the teacher wheeled in that monolithic cart was the closest thing to institutionalized euphoria. You’d see the static electricity spark off the screen and think, This is living.
There was a strange comfort in the limits. If you missed The Magic School Bus, you missed it. The show just evaporated into the ether, as if the universe itself was saying, “Maybe pay more attention next week.” There was no On Demand, no algorithm spoon-feeding you “Because You Watched Bill Nye.” The world was unapologetically indifferent to your schedule.
Outdoors, you lived by a kind of biological WiFi—the kind of connectivity that involved yelling, running, and arguing about who had to be “It.” Moms shouted out open windows like town criers announcing the end of free play. The sun set and that was the notification system. Nobody was tracking you. Nobody even wanted to.
Music? You couldn’t just “share” a playlist. You had to manufacture it, Frankenstein-style, out of whatever you could leech from LimeWire or Napster, hoping the track you downloaded wasn’t actually Bill Clinton saying “I did not have sexual relations with that woman.” Burning a CD was like building a mixtape altar to a crush, then handing it over and pretending it meant nothing. The tactile magic of waiting—physically waiting—for a song to finish burning. The ritual of writing “SUMMER JAMS 2001” on the plastic with a Sharpie that somehow smelled like every art project you’d ever done.
And then there was Blockbuster, the temple of American entertainment. Walking the aisles wasn’t just about finding a movie; it was about feeling the pulse of what mattered. You’d see the empty shelf where GoldenEye used to be and feel real, honest-to-god disappointment. Your choices were limited and that made them count.
Our social networks weren’t networks at all—they were lists. MySpace made us rank our friends, unapologetically, in public. And, somehow, no one died. AOL was a confusing primordial soup of fonts and statuses and screen names like xXxSk8rBoi420xXx. But this was where you could say exactly what you felt, then immediately log off and pretend you never said it. Away messages were poetry by cowards.
The first flip phone wasn’t just technology—it was a social currency. Even if it had five minutes of prepaid time left, you felt like you could call the president and tell him what was up.
And maybe that’s what it was about. Childhood in the nineties was defined by the space between things—between home and the streetlights, between missed episodes and the next week, between who you were online and who you were on the monkey bars. The limitations were the magic.
We thought those friendships would last forever. Because why wouldn’t they? We didn’t know the world was about to become frictionless and infinite and lonely in ways we couldn’t yet imagine. We didn’t know nostalgia would turn our memories into the cultural equivalent of a burnt CD—scratched, but precious, skipping in just the right places.
Different times, different magic. And we’ll keep telling ourselves those times were better, because for us, they probably were.
When the World Was Low-Res: Why 90s Childhood Was Magic
