The X-Files Has Made Me Nostalgic for a Time I Never Experienced.

I experienced that world, and many things were in fact better.

Gender relations were much smoother; men and women did not loathe one another as they seem to do now. Everyone was much more optimistic. We thought we’d solve all our problems and build a better future. And no, it wasn’t just young people. Everyone believed that. Now we know that we certainly will not solve nor fix anything. And what a difference those two divergent weltanschauungs make.

This reminds me, I’m generally sick of clowns writing about the 1990s when they didn’t experience it. If you weren’t there, you don’t know. And no, being three years old in 1999 does not count (though many of those doofs think it does).

Even some of the linked essay (which I like, as it does not presume to know about something they did not experience) is wrong, but this part is 100% correct.

Technology went from functional in the 90s, to fun in the 2000s, and is now – somehow – neither.

In the 1990s we were attempting to give people more freedom. Now we’re making every effort to take all that away and put the information genie back in the lamp. That is the crucial difference.

This next part isn’t quite correct, though.

It’s been said too many times, but I will repeat it at the risk of sounding decades older than I am – television like this simply isn’t made anymore, I believe in large part due to the rise of digital cameras over film.

Cinematography is much worse now, but that is not mainly due to digital cameras. The real explanation is that it makes production cheaper to use neutral, even lighting. And that’s for two reasons. The first is that it’s just more economical not to have those complex lighting setups like The X-Files used. And the second is that it’s far easier to alter something in post with the au courant bland, even lighting.

The next bit is the strongest part of the essay, and all correct; the social milieu was vastly different then. Vastly, vastly different.

Drop by a friend’s place, chat to a stranger, uncover a government conspiracy relating to alien-human hybrids… well, maybe not that last one – but live in a way that almost resembles the human condition! Our brains are made for living in a village, not isolating ourselves behind glowing blue squares. We can pretend that pixels on a screen are equivalent to sharing an impromptu coffee with a friend, but we are kidding ourselves. Normal human life was left in the nineties, and I never got a chance to experience it. The X-Files has shown me that working, thinking, and socialising were not the same then as they are now, and may never be again.

Just dropping by — which was common then — is absolutely verboten now. What a different world that was, and anyone who claims anything else is almost always just too young to actually remember it.