Going analog: The 90s are coming back: Here’s how you can live like it’s 1990

The 1990s saw Americans experience a period of increasing happiness and life satisfaction according to the World Happiness Report. However, the turn of the millennium saw those numbers begin to drop and then plummet.

This was happening even as the economy was improving after financial crisises like the Great Recession and crime rates were falling. Jean Twenge, professor of psychology at San Diego State University, posited in the 2019 report that ”Americans are less happy due to fundamental shifts in how they spend their leisure time.”

Dialing back the clock to improve quality of life

Since smartphones burst onto the scene and the numerous apps that they support, people have become addicted to them. We spend hours scrolling through feeds on social media like Facebook, TikTok and X (formerly Twitter), just to name a few.

Given the state of the world today, it’s not surprising if you’re feeling a little depressed. But that screen time isn’t helping things even if you are looking at AI slop cat videos.

Ann Dunning and Christina Kelmon, the founders of Señora Era Media, pointed out in an article published on Yahoo!Life that “a systematic review and meta-analysis of multiple studies found that high screen media use was associated with about a 28% increase in the odds of depression among adults.”

Furthermore, flooding our eyes with screen content within an hour of going to bed has been found to be detrimental to sleep quality, something that has serious harmful knock-on effects for your health.

But people are waking up to this reality fortunately and dialing the clock back to the 1990s, going analog and taking up what’s been dubbed “physical media.” This is helping people to slow down, focus and return to bygone rituals.

Some of the ways that people are going analog include the following:

• Watching DVD’s instead of streaming content
• Playing music on CD’s, vinyl records or MP3 players
• Printing photos and creating physical albums
• Reading paper books, magazines and newspapers
• Scrapbooking

While the authors admit that “going analog won’t solve our collective screen addiction overnight,” they say “it will give your brain a break from the constant noise.”

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