The Religious Impulse to Return to the '90s

Sacred and profane time.

I’m quintessentially millennial, so the ‘90s are halcyon.

But for me, I think the '90s were extra '90s. I grew up as the youngest child in a mixed family. Brothers from my parents' previous marriages all came together in our house to raise and pay attention to me. We had dinner together every night—my mother's Cajun cooking: shrimp étouffée, red beans and rice. My father, in big '90s bifocals and a wife beater, would be watching sports in the living room while my mother put dinner on the table. We would all wait for my dad before we started to eat. My older brother introduced my father and me to Seinfeld, and we quoted it around the house. We owned a convenience store right next door, where we employed probably 35 workers from the town. They were all family friends. One of them, Ms. Shirley, babysat me. Business was booming, the economy was strong—we wanted for nothing.

These are nearly religious experiences of a mythical world, nearer creation, when it was still vital and strong. But as the bloom of the millennium came around, it shattered. Trade centers fell. Parents divorced (literally in the year 2000). Out of the garden of the ‘90s I was cast into the profane world of history.

I'm reading Mircea Eliade right now, and he talks about how we crave sacred spaces as well as sacred time as a relief from the profane:

“The world becomes apprehensible as world, as cosmos, in the measure in which it reveals itself as a sacred world…. For religious man, profane space represents absolute nonbeing. If, by some evil chance, he strays into it, he feels emptied of his ontic substance, as if he were dissolving into Chaos, until he finally dies.” — Mircea Eliade

The sacred is the center of town, it's the church, it's the home, it's the locus of consciousness. It's the vault that holds up the world and connects heaven, earth, and the underworld. And that's why something as simple as buying a house is a fundamentally religious experience—even though most of us don't explicitly believe in religious experiences. The fact remains: it is.

Go home to your hometown, I dare you. Or go to the school where you went to high school and walk around, and tell me you don't walk slowly in a sort of borderline religious reverence. For you, this is the sacred place (and time) where the cosmos began. And from that sacred pole, you departed into the world and connected every meaningful experience in relationship to that origin. Every endpoint is fixed forever on the day its arc began. There is no other way.

The profane world, on the other hand, is a world of randomness, toil, and lack of context. We are, as people of Middle Earth—meaning somewhere between chaos and heaven—forced to exist partly in the profane world. But as a relief from the profane, we are meant to have cycles to return to both sacred times and sacred places. A Sabbath day, for example, is a time to remember—not historical time, but mythical time—when the eternal refreshes the temporary, strong and pure again in its rebirth.

Hungry nostalgia for the '90s is an anemic image of that sacred return to the beginning. It’s a semi-cosmic beginning, where our behavior (at least, in our memory) was more in accordance with some eternal archetypes, which gave work meaning. Fresh creation once rescued us from the worn-out profane—the endless repeating toil of daily life. Picture, ironically (because it was made in the ‘90s), Office Space and its lament of the profane-only life. What happens when modern man is never being able to enter sacred time or space, but still has to repeat the same day over and over again? The mythical eternal return is turned sour (a la Nietzsche). Our boredom and toil is made eternal and without the release of religious ecstasy. The result is so nihilistic we can't stand it. It’s hell.

We're not the first culture this has happened to, actually. In India, the upper-class spiritual types dove perhaps a little too deeply into categorizing their mythical calendars. They made these time scales of how long the gods live, how long each age is meant to last—something like 13,000 years for this cycle and 100,000 years for that, or whatever. By merely bringing the profane into the sacred in that way, despair set in for Indians. The only solution for them was to exit the cosmos altogether—find Nirvana by meditating until you pop out of the eternal return, instead of deeply participating in it (which we actually crave).

In our culture, Hegel took what the Christians had discovered (the historical sacred), and noted that the sacred spirit worked in and through history. Here’s his addition: the eternal was not a return to the pure beginning (like a baptism)—it was endless progress upward. It’s a “dialectic” (thesis, antithesis, and synthesis). This is the origin of the modern love of progress. In this view, strangely, the future is our mythical creation point—our beginning. We believe this without knowing it: the future is where the gods live. This is an inversion from of almost every human culture, where the gods live in the origin—the mythical past. That also pretty much sums up why Kierkegaard hated Hegel so much.

Moderns uniquely see the future with optimism. It motivates our enormous investment in technology. With our sacred capital, the shamans of Silicon Valley do a rain dance to bring in the AI gods. They are an inversion of the primitive people who did yearly ceremonies to reunite with the gods that created the world—to make the world fresh and new again. Instead, we've decided to put our sacred renewal into some unknown future. So, we're all desperately working towards the return to the gods by building utopia.

But we don't have access to the sacred while we wait for the singularity. So, we can’t help but worship the past with pining and painful nostalgia. Involuntarily, images of the '90s take on a mystical and religious hue. Even looking at photos of my family from the '90s… something about the quality of the photo elicits a sense of the sacred in me.

So, what is the antidote to this nostalgia? I'm not sure. I haven't exactly solved it for myself. For one, I've become more explicitly religious. I participate in ceremonies where I get to experience the timeless sacred more frequently—every week and multiple times a year with festivals and ceremonies. Even though my modern rational mind can't make heads or tails out of it, by just going and participating, I find that my malaise about the profane world is abated. My nostalgia for the past diminishes, too.

I'm able to be present with the sacred that exists in all of us, now.