The 90s were a decade of carefree optimism and comically low stakes. Matthew Perry’s death brings us crashing back into the now
In 2004, the author Damian Barr published Get It Together: Surviving Your Quartlerlife Crisis. Barr would go on to write poignant and beautiful books (including the memoir Maggie and Me) but this wasn’t either of those things. It was more of a fun, generational howl: how’s this stuff supposed to work? How are you supposed to become an adult in these conditions? The dream of life in your 20s – flailing around not sure what to do, mooching from one dead-end job to another but still managing to afford a gigantic, lovely flat in the centre of everything, failing romantically, hilariously, while it all turns out for the best, never feeling anxious for no reason or as if you’re slipping through the sieve of polite society, too small and weightless to remain in the in-crowd – well, that dream was cracking a little. As Barr put it in a radio interview, the question, essentially, was this: what if Friends, which by then was in its 10th and final season, wasn’t very true to life?
Definitely, the economic winds were changing: wages in the UK started to stagnate in 2003; in the US, graduate wages had been falling since 2000, and health cover cut for young employees, both graduate and not, since 2002. All of this, plus climbing student debt, was dwarfed by the 2007-2008 financial crash, after which everyone got much poorer, much faster. But the casual 90s elision between “young” and “carefree” was already not true by the mid-00s.
Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
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