Before the Scroll: What Connection Used to Look Like in the 90s

This year marks my 30th wedding anniversary, and lately I can't stop thinking about the 90s. It started when Love Story: John F. Kennedy Jr. & Carolyn Bessette premiered on FX and Hulu this year, which took me back to 1996 again. I remember them getting married a few weeks before us. My husband and I had no idea what was ahead of us. It was before Amazon was a household name. Before texting was mainstream, and Netflix and Google existed. And way before smartphones — which didn't arrive for another decade.

It was a different kind of ordinary back then. Texting wasn't a thing yet. Most people didn't have a computer humming in the next room, let alone one in their pocket. There was no scrolling before bed, no comparing our lives to a stranger's highlight reel, no algorithm deciding what we'd worry about today. There was less noise overall, and fewer moments that felt like you had to pick a side just to have a conversation. COVID hadn't yet reshaped how we thought about crowds, handshakes, or each other. If you wanted to talk to someone, you called them. Or more often, you just showed up.

And that summer, the world genuinely came together. The 1996 Olympics were in Atlanta, and for a few weeks, people who'd otherwise never cross paths were cheering for the same thing at the same time. It didn't matter where you were from. It was healthy competition, joy in the present moment, and a shared story everyone could follow together.

What's familiar again

This year, the World Cup gave us a flicker of that same feeling. For a little while, the noise quieted and something simpler took over — people gathering, watching, celebrating, arguing good-naturedly about a game instead of everything else. It reminded me that we haven't lost the capacity for that kind of togetherness. We've just buried it under more layers than we used to have.

Thirty years ago, connection happened almost by default, because there wasn't much competing for our attention. Now it takes intention. We must choose it.

What I don't want to lose

I'll be honest, I don't want to pretend 1996 was simpler in every way, or that I'd trade back the good parts of now. I love working from home. I'm grateful for having GPS on my phone (and having a cell phone at all), information at my fingertips, streaming video, and Facetime. There's real convenience in this life we didn't have then.

But I do think about how much of my earliest connection — with my husband, with friends, with neighbors — happened simply because there wasn't much else pulling at us. No notification buzzing mid-conversation. No quick comparison to someone else's version of marriage, a body, a home, a life. No option to disappear into a feed instead of sitting with a person, or a feeling, a little longer than felt comfortable. Connection didn't compete with anything back then. Now it competes with almost everything.

That's really the thread running through all of it — texting, social media, remote work, the sheer number of screens between us and each other. None of them is the enemy. But all of it asks something of us that 1996 never had to: the intention to choose each other on purpose, every time, instead of connection just happening because there was nothing else in the way.

Thirty years in, I don't want to go back to 1996.

I'm thankful for the progress. But I do want to bring some of it forward. Now more than ever, my husband and I are committed to helping people not lose real connection in all the modern conveniences that make it too easy to crowd it out. Research has shown that connection is essential to a happier, healthier life — and if that matters to you, check out our website at cherknebel.com and read our other posts at www.cherknebel.com/blog.