BY DREW DRAIN If you grew up an idealistic, counterculture kid in the 90s, you were raised on a particular kind of oxygen. It came through...
BY DREW DRAIN
If you grew up an idealistic, counterculture kid in the 90s, you were raised on a particular kind of
oxygen. It came through distorted guitars, liner notes, zines, college radio, message boards, and the
shared belief that whatever this system was, it wasn’t to be trusted. Money was suspect. Institutions
were corrupt. Adulthood looked like a trap disguised as stability. Selling out wasn’t just embarrassing,
it was a moral failure.The future was something to resist.
Then the modem disconnected. The years stacked up. You wake up, you’re nearly 50, and you realize you are working a full-time job, raising a child, earning a good salary, and participating in the very structures you once defined yourself against. Somewhere between the mortgage payment and the school pickup line, the question crept in quietly: When did this happen? And what does it say about me?
This isn’t nostalgia. It’s about what happens after nostalgia stops explaining anything.
The counterculture kid of the 1990s was built around refusal. Don’t buy in. Don’t comply. Don’t play the game. That posture made sense when rent was cheap, responsibility was optional, and consequences were mostly personal. You could afford to be broke. You could afford instability. You could define yourself by what you rejected because no one else depended on you to keep the lights on.
The dial-up era reinforced that worldview. The internet still felt like a frontier. Corporate culture hadn’t yet perfected the art of absorbing dissent and reselling it back to us. There was a real belief that opting out was possible, that authenticity lived somewhere outside fluorescent lights and HR departments. That belief wasn’t naive. It was situational.
It just didn’t survive adulthood intact.
Becoming a parent is where counterculture mythology collides with reality at full speed. Ideals stop being abstract. They acquire price tags. Health insurance becomes a moral issue. Stability becomes a form of care. The question shifts from “Who am I?” to “Who am I responsible for?”
That shift often feels like betrayal. Like you failed a test your younger self wrote and graded harshly. The job, the salary, and the routine start to feel like evidence entered against you. But that framing assumes that ideals are only real if they keep you poor, unstable, and uncommitted.
They never were.
What most of us discover is that our ideals didn’t vanish. They were stress-tested. Some cracked. Some evolved. Some turned out to be more about posture than principle. That realization is uncomfortable, especially for people raised to believe moral clarity is supposed to be simple.
Working a full-time job does not mean you believe the system is just. Earning a good salary does not mean money won. It means you recognized that constant financial precarity is not a virtue. There is a difference between critique and self-sabotage, and the dial-up decade blurred that line more than we like to admit.
Systems exist whether you engage with them or not. Capitalism doesn’t collapse because you refuse to participate. Institutions don’t weaken because you choose instability. Sometimes survival inside a system is not endorsement, it’s leverage. Learning how the machine works well enough to live inside it without being consumed by it can be its own quiet resistance.
The narrative we were handed starts to fall apart, because many of the people who modeled that resistance best didn’t disappear into purity or dropout mythology. They grew up without giving up.
I always think about people like Parry Casto. We grew up playing soccer around West Virigina and the east coast together. We were both, to put it mildly, a little more idiosyncratic than most of the others in our town. For as long as I can remember, he was marching to his own drummer and providing the guitar accompaniment. He never stopped making his art. He never stopped caring. But he also learned how to function in the world as it actually exists. He holds a job. He shows up. He pay bills. He is a parent. He participates, and somehow, his voice didn’t flatten. His curiosity didn’t die. Even today when I spoke to him, he is working on an album called Here Keke with Brett Doeffinger. It is scheduled for a release in late March along with a 41-minute feature length music video. Hopefully, it will premiere at the Appalachian Film Festival.
For a long time, counterculture sold us a false binary: you could be an artist or an adult, but not both. Watching people like Parry dismantle that lie in real time has been quietly instructive. He didn’t cling to chaos to stay authentic. He didn’t require instability as proof of sincerity. He adapted without hollowing out.
That matters. That’s not selling out. That’s endurance.
Adulthood forces a redefinition of integrity. In your teens and twenties, integrity often meant refusal. Don’t take the job. Don’t compromise. Don’t participate. In midlife, integrity becomes about intention and boundaries. Why are you doing this work? What does it allow you to protect or create? What lines do you still refuse to cross?
Those questions are harder than slogans. They don’t resolve cleanly. They require maintenance.
There’s grief in this transition, and it deserves to be named. You’re not just aging. You’re mourning a version of yourself who believed adulthood would offer moral clarity instead of tradeoffs. You’re grieving the fantasy that you could keep everything you valued without paying for it in some way.
But your nineteen-year-old self didn’t have your information. They didn’t know what constant instability does to relationships. They didn’t know how exhausting it is to always be one emergency away from collapse. They didn’t know what it feels like to hold your kid at three in the morning and realize that ideals don’t keep the heat on.
Letting go of that internal prosecutor is part of growing up.
One of the most damaging myths inherited from counterculture is that struggle equals authenticity. That suffering preserves purity. That lie benefits systems that want you tired, distracted, and unable to build anything durable. Choosing stability, therapy, rest, and financial security can be deeply countercultural in a culture that profits from burnout.
Comfort is not corruption. It’s capacity. The danger isn’t having stability, it’s letting it anesthetize you. Money doesn’t erase values, but it can make it easier to stop examining them. That’s where the old instincts still matter. Question authority. Stay curious. Keep making things that don’t scale cleanly. Parenting is where many former counterculture kids rediscover their values in action rather than theory. You stop declaring ethics and start modeling them. Your kids learn what you believe by how you treat people with less power, how you talk about money, how you handle conflict, and how you admit mistakes. That’s not compromise. That’s transmission.
The 90s thrived on spectacle and rebellion as identity. Adulthood demands construction instead. You build routines. You build trust. You build a life that can hold other people, not just ideas. That work is quieter, slower, and far less glamorous than refusal ever was.
But it lasts.
The transition from idealistic dial-up kid to salaried parent isn’t a fall from grace. It’s a translation. You’re converting values forged in resistance into something functional under responsibility. Watching people like Parry and Brett do that without losing their voice makes one thing clear: growing up doesn’t require becoming hollow.
The bravest thing isn’t clinging to rebellion forever. It’s learning how to stay human, stay creative, and stay present while participating in the world as it is.
If you can do that, you didn’t sell out.
You grew up.
As an aside that I couldn’t find a way to shoehorn into anything above, I felt I would be remiss not to mention Parry’s Boulevard Avenue project. He and a musical partner, Alex McCoy, whipped up a batch of songs centered around West Virginia’s love affair with the biscuit. If you’ve ever traveled through West Virginia and stopped for breakfast at the regional Tudor’s Biscuit World chain, you may recognize the track listing as all names of biscuit sandwiches from the menu.
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- DREW DRAIN
Andrew (Drew) Drain is originally from Point Pleasant, WV, and he now resides in Chapel Hill, NC with his daughter. Drew works as a financial risk management professional to pay the bills, but his real passion is photography. He started taking photos of his daughter playing soccer as a way to resist the urge to coach her from the sidelines. Time behind the camera developed into a love for photography that he has paired with his love for sports and live music. Follow Drew’s Instagram, @Drew.Drain.Photo or his MaxPreps galleries, to check out more of his work or contact him if you need photos of your favorite athlete or performer.
Read Drew's posts here.
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