Ask HN: Do you miss 90s simplicity?

Yep. I hope there's always ways to do things in a tech-light fashion. Otherwise, we'll be so tied to it we'll forget what it means to be human.

Like when the 'off' button meant 'off'? Yeah, I do.

Truth. In the 90's, if you went to a party and sat in a corner reading a book, it was usually....odd. The idea was that you were supposed to at least try to be interacting with others. Some of us were geeks, some of us found social interaction difficult, but since there wasn't a real substitute for it, we had to stick it out and learn how to be with people. And then we got the benefits of being with people.

Now there's always something else you can do at any moment. I feel like some younger folks I know (in their 20's) don't have the same capacity for understanding their place in the social universe. Social media / phones etc. give a simulacrum of social experience so you never have to really stretch yourself and grow these new skill sets.

Let me answer your question with another question. How old are you?

Because I'm in my 40s, which means I was in my 20s during the 1990s. And from my perspective, it was not a notably simpler time back then than it is today. It was not some pastoral idyll, it was just a time a lot like now, except it was a little harder to get a hold of people.

But I do notice that when I talk to people in their 20s and 30s, they often talk about the '90s as some kind of dramatically simpler time. But that's not because of anything about the '90s; it's because they were children during the '90s, and people of all ages look back on their childhood as a simpler time. This is true even of people who grew up in objectively much more difficult times, like the 1930s and '40s. It's not that the world children grow up in isn't complicated, it's that they don't comprehend all the complications. You don't start to appreciate that stuff until you reach adulthood. So to everybody, childhood is like a lost paradise.

This is part of why nostalgia is such a seductive trap. It's so easy to look back on the past and think that it was something it wasn't. So if you try to make it your mission to restore that lost paradise, to restore something that never really existed in the first place, all you end up doing is chasing shadows.

Things we have now that I would never want to be without:

- Amazing browser debugging tools - Source Maps - Typescript - VSCode w/ Liveshare - Mostly standardized CSS - Automated build tools

These are solutions to problems we had in the past.