Pogs, Furbies & Dial Up Internet: 10 Reasons Why Growing Up In The 90s Was Hard

Were you born in the 80s? If so you’ll remember what life was like growing up in the 90s. The 90s were pretty awesome, we’re not going to lie. However sometimes people tend to overlook the hard parts of growing up during that period.

You see growing up in the 90s wasn’t all Furbies, Crayola Mini-Stampers and hair wraps. Oh no. Parts of it were actually pretty tough.

We thought it’d be fun to cast our minds back and remember the not-so-great parts of growing up in the 90s.

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10 Reasons Why Growing Up In The 90s Was Hard

This show used to terrify you on a weekly basis

1. You were taught how to hate the dark: There was a show which asked us on a weekly basis Are You Afraid Of The Dark? If your answer was ‘no’ this show went out of its way to traumatise you and make you develop an intense fear of the night and camping with your friends (why were all the stories told around a campfire? Why?!).

The worst thing about Are You Afraid Of The Dark? Was the fact that everyone used to watch it and obsess over it in school the next day. If you didn’t watch it you were labelled a chicken, so you forced yourself to listen to the stories about monsters under your bed and evil clowns. You still have to check your wardrobe before you go to sleep – that show caused mental scars that are still haunting you in 2013. Shudder.

2. You couldn’t sneak online: Back in the 90s we didn’t have broadband, wireless internet or quiet modems. This meant that you couldn’t have a sneaky browse on the internet when you were supposed to be upstairs studying for your Junior/Leaving Cert. Sneaking on the internet would require stealthily positioning the phone cord so your mam couldn’t see it snaking its way up the stairs to your bedroom and blaring music so she couldn’t hear the sounds of your modem struggling to connect to the world wide web. Let’s be honest, there’s no way in hell you would’ve gotten away with it.

3. Communicating with your friends was hard: There was no such thing as Facebook and chances are you didn’t have a mobile phone yet, so if someone was on your house phone you had to think of other ingenious ways to contact your BFF. At some point in time you probably developed an elaborate method of communication that involved you shining a torch across the street at her bedroom window.

The 90s were all about being patience

4. You had to embrace the art of patience: In the 90s nothing was fast. You had to deal with dial up internet, videotapes and cassettes on a daily basis. This meant that your life usually involved a twenty minute wait to connect to the internet, fifteen minutes of hitting the ‘tracking’ button on your VCR so you could watch a tape and spending anywhere from five minutes to half an hour blowing dust out of your cassettes so you could listen to music.

5. You mad bad fashion choices: A pair of button-up tracksuit pants and some platform runners: good in theory, embarrassing in retrospect.

6. You had a really bad diet: Back in the 90s sweets for cheap. If you were lucky enough to find a pound on your way home from school you could feed yourself and your BFF a diet of cheap crisps, jellies, chocolate and dip dabs for at least two days.

Oasis or Blur? That was the main question you were asked

7. You were judgemental: In fairness you couldn’t really help this one because the 90s were all about making choices. You were either a diehard Oasis fan who judged people who loved Blur or you were all about Robbie from Take That and couldn’t stand the people who liked Gary (or vice versa).

8. You couldn’t decide which Spice Girl to be for Halloween: Sporty, Posh, Scary, Baby or Ginger – it was one of the toughest decisions to make.

9. You had unrealistic expectations about relationships: Zach and Kelly from Saved By The Bell ended up together after countless disagreements. Sam from Clarissa Explains It All climbed a freakin’ ladder every day just so he could hang out with Clarissa. Harvey would have done anything for Sabrina in Sabrina The Teenage Witch. Don’t even get us started about the Disney princes…

Pogs were the currency of the day

10. You had to deal with the ramifications of making a bad Pog swap: In the 90s break time in school was all about dealing Pogs and making swaps with your friend. You probably still curse yourself for the fact that you traded Arabian Night Pog for a boring plastic slammer.