Before algorithms shaped taste, Gen X discovered music, television, and culture through scarcity, shared timing, waiting, and accidental encounters. This essay explores why nostalgia from that era feels heavier and why the process of discovery still matters.
We grew up with warnings everywhere. On TV. On cabinets. In classrooms and after-school specials. Some stuck. Some didn’t. But together, they shaped how a generation learned to think about risk, responsibility, and consequence.
Before smartphones, we collected things — stickers, friendship pins, Care Bears, and Cabbage Patch Kids. Take a trip back to the mid-’80s, when school supplies were status symbols and Saturday morning cartoons ruled the weekend.
In the mid-’90s teens turned thrift stores into treasure hunts, and bell-bottoms, vintage jackets and flannel became DIY 1990s thrift shopping statements.
Between 1992 and 1995, I spent more weekends than I can count folding tiny T-shirts at GapKids in Montgomery Mall in Bethesda, Maryland. It wasn’t glamorous, but working at the mall was its own rite of passage: equal parts paycheck, hangout spot, and backstage pass to the social hub of the ’90s. The Mall as…