About

Only '90s Kids refers to a catchphrase and series of memes using the phrasal template that reference people born between 1990-1999. Often considered an entirely different time period than the mid to late 2000s, kids from the 1990s will often look at their childhood with nostalgia and claim that only they are able to remember or perform certain actions. This has also spawned ironic '90s memes, in which something completely normal is captioned with a phrase about '90s kids or a meme is made about a different time period altogether to poke fun at the cliche.

Origin

Though often said as a generalized phrase in the real world, the phrase started to see use online as a form of nostalgia-bait, with listicles and retro throwbacks being made that reference things from the '90s to get clicks from millennials on the internet. The earliest recorded instance of talking about '90s kids and nostalgia is from Urban Dictionary, which has a definition^[1] for "'90s baby" that was posted on October 19th, 2007, before the more commonly used phrase of "'90s kid" was used.

One of the earliest examples of the most common format, "Only '90s Kids Will Understand," was posted to Know Your Meme on April 4th, 2014, by the now deactivated user account Gashadokuro^[2] (shown below). The original image source is unknown.

Spread

While some of the oldest known examples of '90s kids memes come from around 2014, examples of anti-memes and memes annoyed at the trend are also present from that time period. The earliest surviving example of a counter meme uses Eye Rolling Robert Downey Jr to make a My Face When meme annoyed at people who bring up the phrase and cliche. The meme^[3] was made by Kadosa on the site Imgflip back in 2015, where it gained 1,700 views in six years (shown below).

The meme trend saw a minor resurgence in 2018 with more people making memes about the era, although in a more ironic sense. This can be seen in the meme posted by Redditor CrispCrisp to the subreddit /r/memes^[4] on October 2nd, 2018, in which the common setup is done, talking about a nostalgic '90s thing, before switching the punchline for one about the opioid epidemic (shown below).

These started to get more ironic, with the best example being posted to the subreddit /r/HistoryMemes^[5] on October 18th, 2018, by Redditor Flish123, depicting Caeser being stabbed with the caption that only '40s B.C. kids would understand (shown below).

Later, on December 6th, 2018, a joke about gender was made using the format, claiming that only '90s kids would remember their only being two genders, with the meme being posted to the website ahhseeit^[6] (shown below).

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References