The Un-Aesthetic Beauty Of 90s Birthday Parties
What a time.
Welcome to Cheaper Than Therapy, a healing newsletter for 80s babies by Shani Silver. This newsletter does not publish free content, but if you’d like to read it you can subscribe here. Thank you for enjoying the work of independent writers.
We live in a time of visuals. Optics. What it’s like doesn’t matter half as much as what it looks like, and if you find that upsetting, you were probably a kid in the 90s. You know, when photos were printed on paper and stored in albums and were, by all realistic estimates, only ever seen by about 14 people, max. The point of birthday parties wasn’t how good they’d look in photos, and honestly they weren’t even that centered around celebrating someone’s birth. They were about turning kids loose, wearing them out, and artificial flavors. The birthday parties of the 90s were not pretty, but they were perfect.
When life changed, when social media put us all on a global stage for critique, the way we experienced life changed, too. Events became less about how much fun we were having, and more about how much fun it looked like we were having. In the 90s, the only moments that mattered were the ones we were living, not the ones other people would see us living on the internet, because what even was the internet? In any area of human history, the most fun we genuinely have isn’t captured in photos, but rather in sight, scent, taste, touch, and emotion. Which is why we probably look so fondly on the 90s, an era that was aesthetically revolting, but experientially divine.