Since Anti-Nostalgic is pretty negative, I thought I'd make this page as a bit of a balance to that. Everything in the past wasn't all bad, though people do glamorize a lot of things too much. But anyway, here's some positives, things to actually be nostalgic about. We're onto page two now! Read page one first, if you haven't already.

• Stores, of all types, had more products in them. This was especially great for places like bookstores or electronics stores, even more so if they were independently run. Thrift stores also used to overflowing with all kinds of unique and cheap things in great quality.
• You could just listen to a whole album in a store in a lot of places, even some big name ones. Just like you could sit on couches and read books before you bought them. And test out new games in store before you bought them, if it was one of the big ones coming out soon. (Games were the most restricted of the options.) No one really monitored you on how long you tested what you were allowed to test out typically either. If you're lucky these days, you might still find a Walmart or a Target that might let you test out a level or so of a Nintendo game, but these kinds of testing units have mostly been removed everywhere. Blockbusters often got custom units. Sometimes special events for games were even held inside Blockbusters.
• Cafes and fast food places actually just let you chill there all day. Some of the fast food places around me lock their lobbies for most, if not all of the day, even during busy hours. Places like Starbucks and Panera have invested in uncomfortable and useless furniture to get you to get out ASAP. You can't sit around chit chatting and writing. BUY BUY BUY or go away!
• Movies could stay in theaters a long time, if they were really popular. Jurassic Park famously was still in most major theaters when it came out on VHS over a year later. Small theaters could run oldies of whatever the local community wanted. Most of these kinds of places have vanished, with only a few in some areas still hanging in there. Streaming has been blamed for a lot of this, and while it has certainly hurt things, if you go through old records, you can pretty plainly see the decline in theaters begins both before the era of streaming and before the Great Recession even hits. An unstated factor beyond streaming and price hikes is the most obvious one. The movies are shittier. If you want to get into the data, the real decline seems to start right at the beginning of the millennium, 1999-2000. I could make a page about this, but if you wanted to go deep diving on your own, that would be a point to pay attention to. It's kind of like schools blaming all their educational declining on COVID when schools have been declining gradually since at least the early 2000s, if not before then. It's a convenient answer.
• For some reason, while media loves to show those brick cell phones as the 90s (we already had shit better than that in the 90s BTW), just like faux retro stuff often ignores pay phones, as we go further in time, for some reason beepers are even more forgotten about. Once again, I'd like to remind everyone that yes, you could communicate with people outside your house in the 90s! If you were willing to dish out the cash, by the end of the 90s, there were alphanumeric beepers, which would be no different than texting. The average teen didn't have these, but like with early chatspeak, had plenty of codes they understood and often these codes were unique to individuals. You will see articles online showing common slang, but that's really the tip of the iceberg and plenty of people used those same codes to mean entirely different things. As things were far ore location based back then than now, you should always be suspicious of articles that suggest anything pre-2000 was universally anything when it comes to taste, slang, etc, outside of really big things like blockbuster hits or top singles (and still plenty of people hated them).
• Speaking of community, "third spaces" were not just malls, libraries, and parks. I suspect young people often go to these three examples because those are still around at least. I can assure you also that libraries, while much better back then, were not like a main place most people hung out at at any age range. It was more of a get in, get out kind of place. Parks and malls were hung out at for much longer than a library (and they were much stricter back then about being quiet in a library). The other third spaces were music shops, electronics stores, arcades, movie theaters, video rental places, bookstores, theme parks, the woods/the beach/literally any secluded nature spot, toy stores, ice cream shops, fast food places (yes, really), coffee shops, I could go on endlessly. What's changed is some of these places have either largely disappeared or their infrastructure or rules around them have changed in such a way that they're no longer "hangout" friendly. Others became so expensive people were prices out of regularly going there, like theaters. And I want to make a point that many of these I've listed were also a mix of big name and independent places. Blockbuster and Hollywood Video were actually quite hated by a lot of people because they often, like Walmart, would drive independent places out of business and then offer a much shittier, generic movie selection. Independent stores, like the old radio DJs and The Box music channel which served different versions of itself by region, used to cater very heavily to their local community's tastes. These spaces weren't just places where people hung out, they were directly shaped by the people hanging out there.
• Your entire childhood wasn't plastered all over the internet for everyone to see. Ddmb shit you did would usually not follow you and would be forgotten.