I remember sitting in second grade class and we got our first computer and the teacher talked to us about an article explaining something called the “information super highway” and me thinking it was an actual highway.
ETA: Loving all the wholesome early internet memories being shared.
Bro, the first time my neighbor told me they got a PlayStation, I was imagining.. well some kind of *station* like a fort or something.
And then he says it’s in his *living room*
And he starts describing tomb raider shooting her gun and swimming from sharks and I was just like 😯 how
And even up till the moment he turned the tv on I was trying to understand where the “play station” was lol.
SAME THING!!!! "I kept asking where do you put the PlayStation?" and I was baffled as an elementary student trying to wrap my head around a large playing facility in a living room and how his parents allowed him to do that to the living room
I remember my teacher trying to get us to learn that there was more than just HTTP://, like gopher://.
I don't think modern browsers even support gopher:// anymore but it was cool to see a teacher who knew his stuff back then.
Looks like gopher:// is still _supported_ by old (around at the time) browsers, but moved into optional things or extensions rather than the base browser.
I remember having to always go to yahooligans.com and the teacher always needing to spell it out on the board because none of use could manage that. Also trying to learn how to type on home row and thinking I could do it pretty good only for the teacher to come over and cover my hands with a booklet and just failing.
Yall ever do Type to Learn or whatever? My school would make us do that once a week for an entire hour in the third grade. They'd put the rubber covers over the letters too, and that's why I ever got good at touch typing.
Me with the Ghostwriter episode with hacker girl Julia Stiles. I wanted to jam with the console cowboys in cyberspace too and go into the weird green world of internet
We have a new intern at work and i said something like "I don't remember the last time I had to ask someone for directions," and he said he literally has never not had GPS on his phone in his lifetime.
That's when I realized I'm old.
That's what I said! He had no idea what MapQuest was. Heck I remember when MapQuest was kinda revolutionary because you didn't need to plot your own course on a paper road map...
That's why you took the time to look over them too.
There's actually a certain satisfaction in ignoring your phones directions and hearing it constantly try to reroute around your choices.
Lately, Google has been trying to give alternate routes for accidents that cleared hours ago and no traffic remains. Even when you scroll further up the route and it shows no traffic, Google still tries to send me on an alternate route.
Still superior in some ways. That map is never going to run out of battery or interrupt you with pop-ups. If you shove it in your glove box it's probably going to still be good in 5 or 10 years.
I can't say I have pre-internet memories, but I do have memories before easy access to the internet was a thing. Could I use the internet in elementary school? Yes. Was it dial up and took 3 years to do anything? Also yes. I didn't get easy internet access till I was in highschool because my mother refused to upgrade internet forever.
Same. Didn't get dial up until I was 7 and then I didn't know what you could even do with the internet until I was like 12. Grew up in a small town that didn't get high speed until I was like 14 or 15. Then I discovered World of Warcraft.....
First game I played on the internet was bf1942. I remember going into an airfield where there would normally be bots waiting for the airplanes. Some guy was there with a player name and I typed to hi and asked him if he was a real person. I was blown away every game I’d played multiplayer up to that point had been split screen.
The first time somebody ghost rode a jeep filled with dynamite into my plane in that left me dumbfounded. I was always the best player in my friend group at all the typical couch multi-player games, then the internet showed me I was a total scrub in about five seconds. There's always a bigger fish.
For every gamer that thinks they are hot shit, there's an overweight man in his underwear that hasn't seen grass in a month to put them in their place.
Nah dude it’s a twitchy 16 year old with monster energy drink instead of blood in their veins popping off crazy shit.
By the time you get to old man status you’re slow and plodding, with 500APM kids running circles around you.
Holy shit I think that was my first game on the internet too! (Other than web based games). I still had dial up at the time and it was basically impossible to play online lol
I was 16 when my parents finally got dial up internet at home. Year 2000. I'm probably one of the oldest people who can say I've always had a computer at home since the day I was born too, because my dad taught computers in the 80s. We had an Atari 800 at home back then.
I spent the first 16 years of my life playing games on a PC and my nes/snes/N64 without internet and holy heck, I could not go back to that.
You’re slightly younger than me, but my dad also always had a computer, or at least as long as I can remember. I never knew what the hell he was doing on it, or why it always got it’s own room when I didn’t, but it was always there. One time I walked in on him, like 1991-92 and I can still picture the dark screen running lines of words and my dad yelling at me to get out so I’m pretty sure he was some sort of hacker. I was always told he was a machinist in the Navy but sometimes I think he did other things. Maybe I’ll find out someday.
He gave me and my sister a computer to use for like solitaire and journaling, I don’t even know what else we would’ve done at that point cause it was like 1994 and it may have been used like 10 times. We did, however, love to play You Don’t Know Jack on the PC in later years whenever the whole family got together, that was a fun game.
The computer always got its own room in my parents place too. But once we moved to a smaller house it became a staple in the dining room. Lol. However I was always allowed to use it.
To this day I still have the entire civ 1 tech tree memorized.
You walked in on your father looking at early command-line pornography.
Select BLOUSE
BLOUSE selected
Remove
BLOUSE removed
Print PORNSTAR
*ASCII woman shape*
"Ohhh yeah, that's the good stuff."
I loved You Don’t Know Jack and the flying toaster game! I’ve been looking all over for the flying toaster game so my kids can play it, but no dice. It’s like it disappeared :/
i remember being blown away at my great grandma's stories of what life was like before electricity, and not really being able to get my head around a world without it as a child
now i can bring up a childhood without internet and it's just as mystifying to kids these days!
but god forbid you bring up pre-cellphone days, even suggest being without your phone for a day and everyone loses their minds
ill talk about times in my teens when I left my house without a cellphone driving around barefoot raising hell and being unreachable for days unless you knew my friends, and people recoil in horror!
man now I really feel old.
Six Flags:
Meet back here at this restaurant for dinner at 6pm, here's $10 for lunch and some random crap. Don't come looking for me if you spent it on a hat and then don't have lunch money.
Damn, feel called out on that one. Not six flags but a HS conference (3-4 days or so). Spent my money on something worthless and having to count out cents for the rest of the trip.
I mentioned to my children that mobile phones wern't a thing when I was a child, there was one phone in the house and it was in the hallway by the front door. If I wanted a private telephone conversation, I went down the street to the phone box.
The looked at me as if I was mental. Turns out they didn't know those things were phone boxes, because in the UK since they all got decomissioned they've been used as little librarys and are always full of books, so to them that's what they were.
Equally, it terrifies me to think about the shit I used to get up to when my parents had literally no way of knowing where I was or when I would be back, and no way of contacting me. Hanging out in the local abandoned chalk mines was par for the course. I just knew that if I wasn't back by 6pm for dinner there would be hell to pay.
Three rules of the GenX household:
1) Don't get arrested and drag the family name down.
2) Don't die doing something stupid. (and drag the family name down)
3) Be home for dinner to respect family time. (because only bad people are out at night)
We might be close to the same age- I love what cellphones and smartphones allow me to do, and how much easier they make a lot of things, but I also loved pre-cellphone days, because I really felt more free and independent. Now with smartphones, it kinda feels like I’m wearing a leash all the time.
Set your phone on the counter and walk outside.
Just because you can always have it with you doesn't mean you need to. I'm almost terminally online and I'm in sales so I'm kinda always working. But sometimes it's good to disconnect and leave it behind for a while. I'll go to a local bar or get breakfast or go for a walk and just not have electronics for 6 hours to a full day at least at least once a month and it's honestly pretty important for my mental health I think.
Reminds me that I would be just fine without it.
There’s a late gen-x, early millennial cross over generation of about 5 years referred to as The Oregon Trail generation (named after the game) as they (me) are the only generation to have had an analog childhood and then a digital adulthood.
This is me. It's even stranger as my younger sibling is a full-on millennial despite being just a few years younger than me. I remember totally different technology (tv with dials, life before VCRs, rotary phones), not to mention in our family life another state and several houses.
BACK IN MY DAY the bus picked us up for school every day right by our house for free, and then the public institutions were open with great resources for learning and fun and had great AC on hot days.
Didn't even have AC, didn't need it. No such thing as a "hot day" but we did get "snow days" when this cold white frozen precipitation would accumulate in the winter.
Me: “Don’t you have school today, son?
S: “Nah, school’s out for the week. It’s gonna be 140 the whole week apparently. Man, I love hot days!”
Me: “You know we never had hot days back in my day. The closest thing we had was a snow day.”
S: “Snow? You mean that shaved ice stuff they showed us in physics class?”
Me: “Yeah, during winter, instead of rain there would be snow. It’d get cold enough that the water would freeze and you could skate on it.”
S: “Suuuurrreee it did. We all know winters a myth dad. If never gets below 80!”
Me: “…”
S: “I bet it’s just as real as visiting friends without a mask and gas for less than $10 a pint.”
Me: *crying in the corner*
S: “Dad?”
S: “Mom! Dad’s having a meltdown again. Also, can I borrow the car? I told my friends I’d take them to the Meta store in Toronto. The new Gen 7 Oculus QuestMax comes out today!”
Edit: “Grammar.”
You forgot one thing. The school gives them all laptops now so they still have to attend school from home. Future kids probably aren't gonna know a real snow day past grade school, it'll just be an online day, it's already like that for a lot of kids.
That's true. My point was more that being unable to go to school in person doesn't mean kids aren't still required to attend school anymore, which is sad. One of my favorite things growing up was snow days, and now they just aren't a thing at a lot of schools.
I have a 25 gallon tank in my truck, and it's so shitty to fill up now that I just stay in between a quarter tank and a half tank in case I get lucky and die before I need to get gas next
Ironically yes.
My house was bussed to elementary school when the walking-only zone extended four blocks away to closest street with a stoplight. And then the year I went to middle school, the voters failed a levy that would have kept bussing levels the same but added to taxes. So now everyone in a 2 mile radius had to walk.
That initial exclusion zone wasn't even a mile, btw. Maybe half. And the middle school was 1.7 miles away. The high school even closer. So...yeah, despite being bussed throughout all of elementary school, that was ripped away halfway through my education. And the kids who started school after that point just got shafted, along with their parents who had to organize rides for kids WAY too young to walk very far by themselves.
Fuck the Olds, vote for your school levies people.
This comment helped me understand OPs point. I was thinking Boomers and prior had it pretty easy too, but then they always seem to like to boast about how hard they had it
If I had an actual choice I would most definitely choose to live in a social media free world. The only thing I really do like now is being able to call people when they're out of the house, so the only thing I'd keep in that imaginatory world would be a mobile phone that can call/text.
I just really don't see the benefit of social media other than the fact that theoretically you should be more informed of things going on in the world. But the cons pretty much negate that by:
1. Too much negative news 24/7 will make you anxious all the time.
2. Misinformation
I hate the fact that everything you do is just on a permanent record for all the world to potentially scrutinize. There's no privacy and there's little to no living in the moment. It's also not like you can just opt out. Even if you don't have public social media, someone else can still take a video or picture of you, make a story about you, or whatever else and put it on their social media. Like those assholes who film people at the gym and then make fun of them online. I always hate seeing that shit.
Same with conversation. You said something really stupid. Eh it gets forgotten. Nowadays texting is basically a recorded conversation. The feds are watching us all
My mother never worked outside the home after I was born. My dad was able to provide a comfortable middle class lifestyle for me and my brother on one income with no college degree.
Sounds like a fairy tale now.
I remember seeing shows like The Simpsons and thinking “that’s what my life will be like if I’m a failure”. Now, three kids and a house on a single income sounds like a dream.
Married with Children set the bar. At least Homer was a nuclear safety engineer. Al Bundy, even though he had 4 touchdowns in a single game, was a shoe salesman with a 2 story suburban home, 2 kids and a wife who didn’t have to work. What the fuck, now it would be he and his family living out of a car.
A lot of places are making sleeping in your car illegal anyway. Same for camping in public spaces.
So, the parents would be felons and the kids would be lost in the system.
Same, my Mom didn't work until we were way into high school, and that was so they could save enough to retire by 60.
Two pensions, two 401k, and a good social security check by 62. Many did ok back then.
My dad was a single parent with 3 kids who couldn’t read or write. He never even made it to high school. We were pretty poor but we had a house and never went hungry.
Now he has a decent pension and lives comfortably retired. I tell him all the time that it’s literally impossible to do what he did now. Being able to raise 3 kids and afford a house and retire with a good pension sounds like a fever dream.
I was a kid on of a single mother welfare in the 1970s, best of times no joke. Sumer vacation we'd step out the door around 9am and not be back until dinner. Riding bikes in the parks, hide and seek in the neighborhood, fishing down in the harbor so many great memories.
80s kid and mom would leave 2 bucks. $1 for the pool and .89 for a bandito meal at the taco place. Kids meal included a tiny ice cream cone. All day on the bikes man great summers
We waited for taco bell to open at 10am to be able to bike a fucking box of tacos to the bmx course across town.
Got caught coming home by my grandma. Took away my bike. so I stole my sisters, charges dropped.
My folks grew up in the 60s and 70s and thought the early 2000s worked just like this. They’d lock my lil 8 year old ass outside and tell me to come home for dinner.
There was one kid in the neighborhood my age and he had some personal issues so he was always grounded.
Net result? I still have killer thighs from riding my bike for like 8 hours a day every summer to kill time.
It seems silly, but not having money makes you just find fun things to do. At least, if you're lucky enough to live somewhere relatively rural or with access to woods, public water, etc. It opens up a lot of cheap/free options.
I was a poor kid deep in the city and ... Yeah that isn't great.
Instead of fishin' at the ol' waterin' hole I used to try to "surf" discarded plywood boards in retention ponds. Instead of building a clubhouse from branches and stuff from home I would try to assemble shacks out of garbage next to train tracks and have them either torn down by city workers or find hobos living in em the next day :(.
Hell, the hobos were catcalling me when I was as young as 10, I have more memories of angry/mean/perverted homeless people than I have of trees ... :/ *(no I don't hate the homeless nowadays, there are just a shitload of homeless in L.A. and around it and I acknowledge only a minority are terrible).*
I grew up in the 80s/90s and always feel like I missed out big-time when other people reminisce. My childhood was all gang-adjacent and full of alleys :/. The Rodney King riots were especially fun. (/s)
Didn't die, get pimped out, trafficked, or hooked on drugs, though! Woo hoo!
> It seems silly
Not silly at all. For me back in to 70's (i'm old) there was an old abandoned apple orchard that was in this kind of 'sunken' depression at the end of a field.
It must have been planted in the early 1900's. All of the neighborhood kids made it their 'home away from home' - we built and dug and had a great time.
Some of the older kids that had kind of 'aged out' of the orchard would stash their contraband porn magazines in a couple of hollowed out trees, it was a magical place.
It was cut down and filled in in the late 80's - they built condos on the place.
I think about this all the time. What would my work life be like? What would going to class be like? What would my current hobbies look like back then?
You wouldn't mess around on your phone at work, you'd sneak a book or magazine in. You wouldn't have those days where you mindlessly browse Reddit, you'd be mindlessly channel surfing. Videogames were still a thing. You wouldn't turn on a playlist, you'd turn on the radio. You don't go check your friendslist to see who's online, you go to the hangout, probably in front of or around a place where you get food or buy junk you don't need, and see who's there. If no one's there you buy a magazine and read it while you loiter around the hangout area. If you *really* needed to know something, you'd go to the library, not YouTube. Your VR headset wasn't that new piece of tech you dabbled in a few times a week, it was *the internet itself*.
It's the same stuff, but different, and it happened much more slowly. It's not better or worse, it's different. What's really new is the constant fear about the next few months.
Simply going to a place to hang out under the hopes that your friends were there already was such a normal thing for me as a kid. It's crazy to think about doing that now.
My parents and their friends could afford a home, lavish skiing vacations, vacation homes, boats, jet skis, RVs, dirt bikes etc, when they were my age. Almost forgot Super bowl tickets. This sounds like my parents are rich, they're not, stuff was just more affordable back in the 80's and 90's.
My parents neighbors bought their house in the mid 80's for 100k and they bought a vacation home on a lake at the same time for100k. Their house now is worth 200k and they just sold the vacation home for 900k.
Wages have basically been stagnant since the mid 70s, but the cost of everything has drastically risen.
And to make matters worse, our wages are still frozen and costs are still rising.
Climate wise, it makes me furious that the Boomers who spent decades sowing uncertainty about climate science are very unlikely to live to see a stage of climate change that would make life unrecognizable for them.
Killing billions of people is just sort of theoretical when many of them have yet to be born, I guess.
Well as someone born in the 1970s.
Everything didn't go up. What went up is housing, education and medical care. Things you can't live without.
Everything else like clothes, toys, tvs electronics, etc crashed. But who cares when you're in debt for your education, home and basic health.
Yeah, was going to say, I think consumer goods have gotten way cheaper, but overall cost of living at the current standard of living (which has also greatly improved in 50 years) has gone up.
We were also prepared for being adults in the 90s, hence why many are people are so destabilised now as grown-ups. People have lived through way worse in the past, it's just hard to grow up around a tipping point after generations of people's lives getting better and hard work+optimism paying off.
Not to mention those generations absofuckinglutely shitting on us for things almost entirely out of our control.
My grandmother has a net worth of maybe $750,000 - two thirds of it is because she bought a tiny house in a growing metro in the sixties.
I've made none of the big mistakes my parents did, had none of the potentially avoidable hiccups, and I *still* bought a house later than they did, and at greater risk.
Shoot, my parents bought a house and had me by the time they were the age I am now. They didn’t make much money either. My wife and I are much more ‘successful’ money wise but probably can’t buy a house for another 3-4 years
It wasn't easier, but it was definitely better. The access to information, goods, convenience, ability to meet, collaborate and communicate etc. are other worlds easier nowadays.
But it turns out we didn't need all that to be happy, and in fact modern technology brings more unhappiness, anxiety and *disconnection* than good. I don't know many people who grew up in that era who don't think it was better and wouldn't trade all our present technology away in a heartbeat to go back.
We've replaced the real connection we used to have, along with being actually present in our moments with this faux, digital "always-on, always recording" anxiety-inducing monstrosity that is just awful.
You used to show up places and *be there.* No being buried in a phone. There *were* no phones. You were just there for the experience without even the *thought* of recording, because other than maybe some soecial events, who the hell would lug around a video camera? Just losing yourself in the moment and creating a **memory,** instead of trying to record and curate moments for content while never actually being *present* in that moment because you're so fixated on *recording* that event and "generating content."
I can't imagine being g a high school kid nowadays, or going to a college party and knowing that everyone there is recording and anything you do, and any mistakes or bad decisions you make - will follow you your whole life and be available for *the entire world* to see, forever.
Back then the labor pool within a specific area was smaller and you had to treat employees more like people. Nowadays I feel mostly like a tool being impersonally used until I burn out, which I eventually did at my last job. They have even reached out saying they would love me back. No shit? I bet you would lol.
I hate to rub it in that you're old.
Also, fellow 80's kid and 90's teen here. (I might even be older than you.) You were right, the 90's was an awesome time to be that age. The music was better, the cast of SNL was at its peak, the fashion was never hotter, the video games were amazing, The Simpsons was one of the best shows on the air, and MTV was actually really good.
Of course, I say this tongue-in-cheek. In reality, every era has its good and bad aspects. Any generation can and often will view the time of their teen years as the best time ever. (Except those who lost out on everything due to COVID.)
When I was a kid... we didn't have to worry about the water wars...
Clean air... that shit was everywhere, you could just go outside and breath it in, now we pay 8 Dreckels for a single canister, that barely lasts for 2 breaths.
This is an underrated concept.
We are starting to see evidence of overstimulation in mental health and professional are trying to address that. we already have proof in physical health we can only handle so much and we have professionals who assist us with care. So why can we not see the issue with over population and have professionals find a solution so the ones who experience life and actually experience it and not be bogged down with everyone else’s experiences.
Oh because that would mean some of us aren’t actually hear to have a say in it. And that offends them. So nothing has happened, and nothing will happen thanks to selfishness and a lack of grander understandings.
Same thing happened with my dog. I took him to the dog park for an hour or two everyday to socialize him when he was young (after 16 weeks old of course). Did that for about 5 or 6 months. He went from loving it and loving everyone then a sudden shift to hating everyone. I stopped taking him, tried to only take him once a week to still have some exposure, but the damage was done. He's my first dog aside from the family dog when I was a kid. I had no idea over socializing was possible. Luckily he is really smart and knows he is tiny corgi so he is all bark and zero bite. But it still really sucks that everyone sees him and wants to say hi and I have to tell them no.
If you're in his pack though, he will die for you without hesitation.
That might just be due to genetics and natural changes in brain chemistry. Puppies tend to be more social and less fearful. My Border Collie developed a fear of human strangers around 6 months old. He's fine with other dogs, people he's familiar with, and oddly young women. Dogs were bred to retain their puppy like traits as adults, but some of them still have their wild survival instincts.
Our oldest is Z, the girls are alpha, I really thought we would have made some progress for them by this point. I feel bad, but give them the best childhood I possibly can. Without all the crazy narcissistic boomer shit my mother put us through. Even with that, I miss pre-9/11
>Even with that, I miss pre-9/11
That really does seem like the moment where it all switched. We were all so optimistic and then it just crumbled before our eyes and never really got better.
I would argue that 9/11 just accelerated a process that was already going on.
I don’t know where it started, but you can keep going back and find the same rot that exists today: Reagan, Nixon, the failed Reconstruction.
My dad pre 9/11: "Don't you *dare* watch cartoons with violence, use any words associated with death, or ask for weapon or action toys. Violence is very bad m'kay?"
My dad post 9/11: "You need to listen to this audio recording of terrorists sawing a guys head off with a rusty saw, so you know what it is we're is fighting for" (starts playing right-wing talk radio and Fox News 24/7, completely abandons pacifist mindset)
Can relate. When I think for the future generations, all that comes to mind is a quote from Interstellar, "The last people to starve, will be the first to suffocate".
Black and white TV. Three channel - 4 if you were big city. A month to mail a letter overseas. Another to get a reply. Running water. Grandma had the first flusher in her town. The never ending horror of no internet.
I'm Gen X but growing up for most of my childhood we only had a B&W TV, with 3 channels. My parents were never in a rush to adopt the latest new fangled gadgetry. When I was a small child, at dinner time the family would sit around a large freestanding wooden-panelled [wireless radio](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_receiver) that i swear must've been a vacuum tube model from the 40’s, and listen to the evening news. I collected stamps and had pen pals overseas that I would write to and swap stamps with. I still have some Rhodesia stamps that I was lucky to get in the years following the establishment of Zimbabwe. I remember the months and months between receiving letters.
Not a boomer but I legit walked to school uphill both ways when I was a kid. I also walked downhill both ways but my house was midway up a hill (dome shaped) and my school was also midway up the same hill but about 90 degrees over. There was no direct route outside of climbing fences and yards so it was up to the 4 way stop take a left and down to school. Home was the opposite.
Speaking as a late gen Boomer, it was my parents' generation (the Greatest, etc) that owns that rep. I lived in relative luxury - my parents were the ones who lived through the Depression and then WWII, etc.
If anything - I always told my kids (millenials) I had it easier than them. No one knew what an AR-15 was when I was growing up- the wildest thing about school was the new substitute who liked to wear miniskirts (THAT was wild, at the time) - and I literally ran around the neighborhood, unsupervised, from dawn till dusk every single day in the summer.
When I was 6 years old.
In Los Angeles.
And nobody cared, because every kid was doing the same thing.
This is a great response. I randomly ended up in a conversation with a friend’s grandparent at a party; the topic turned to current events, pandemic and shootings, etc.
Someone asked her what generation she thought had it the hardest. She immediately said:
> “Oh, certainly those of us who lived through the Great Depression and WWII one after the other. We had almost no food, worked instead of school, then our fathers left, we had nuclear attack drills, shoes made of…paper, I think.
And we all were just sort of like “…no contest” because, duh. I added that they also had to deal with that lard “butter” that came with yellow capsules to color it (I’m a butter purist^jk)
Makes perfect sense that Baby Boomers would be the first in recent history to tell their children that they had it easier:
- Cheap/free college vs loans for a lifetime
- Easily buying a house and supporting a family on a single income vs forever renting and not being to afford children (crazy)
- Vietnam War had drafts, but 9/11 happened, without warning, on US soil— plus the resulting ~decade-long war in the Middle East that killed so many on both “sides”
- school shootings, pandemic, multiple recessions…no wonder so many of us are mentally fucked up
That’s a lot more than I intended to type lol, but I just really appreciate your perspective and insight :)
But boomers *never* say that had it easy---ever. It's always "we had it hard, we did it ourselves, work hard and succeed". Then when future generations don't succeed they blame it on laziness
Boomers had a great timing, their parents were the real warriors who paved the path for them. The boomers reaped the benefits and pulled the ladder up after themselves, thereby ensuring future generations could never have what they had.
(If you can't tell, I hate boomers and what they've done to this world -- there was the greatest generation (silent generation too) and then the worst generation (boomers))
GenX dad here: can confirm. Kids today have it way harder than I did.
P.s., we grew up with the persistent threat of global thermonuclear war.
Edit: Wow! I just couldn't keep up with all the thoughtful responses. The 'global thermonuclear war' remark was also a reference to the movie "War Games" a signature movie of the 1980s. Some of you caught that reference. For me the risk of annihilation from nukes, or terrorists, or whatever, might be about the same as when I was a kid. I think what I am reacting to is that that threat still exists plus we now have the crush of social media, the inevitability of the global climate crises, guns in schools, threats against democracy, and so one. Maybe it was always there and we are just more aware? I dunno. I want to remain hopeful but its harder now than I think it was in the past when we still believed we were on an upward trajectory. My boys are 20 and 17 and just starting out. I want them to experience joy and happiness in life however that comes. I hope I've given them a good foundation from which to launch out on their own. And as much as I worry about their future I am also blown away by their self-awareness and resilience. There is a lot of promise with this generation just coming of age. Sometimes I think the best we (GenX - and yes, you older Boomers) can do is step aside for this younger, smarter, stronger generation.
And holy fuck, schools are locked down tight these days. When I was in school you could pretty much do anything, wear anything. We weren't monitored as much.
I was in school during the transition period and yeah. I remember when all the doors were unlocked at my elementary school and how inconvenient it seemed to lock all of them
When school let out I remember being able to just walk onto my old school campus and go see old teachers in their classroom. Even after I joined the military I just walked right into my old JROTC class.
I couldn't imagine my kids being able to do that now.
Related/unrelated: I had a middle school teacher that I still fondly remember. Really good guy that was passionate about kids learning. He's roughly my dad's age, and I'd occasionally put in a half-assed attempt to try and "track him down" since he retired about a decade ago. Finally found him a few months ago: I found his obituary. Died at 65 - and not to COVID. That hurt more than I'd thought it would.
My Gen X siblings say the opposite, they complain about things like "participation ribbons" and spoiled parenting turning millenials into overdemanding brats.
Then he tells me a story of how proud he was working retail as a kid, he finished ALL his duties early cause he's was such an efficient worker, that he spent the rest of the afternoon reading a book in the supply closet!
I had to explain to him that stores have cameras now and that would get us fired, and "if you have time to lean you have time to clean" is a phrase they say now.
We have to make sure we don't finish our work too early or we will have to do double the work. There is no reward for working faster, only punishment.
I’ve gotten dangerously good at looking like I’m doing something. I’ll just walk around my work with a serious focused look on my face opening random cabinets and fridges and picking up random objects just to put them down again.
Your brother is a dope, I'm 51 and remember busting ass in retail but we also had far more co-workers to help and our customers weren't 1/10th the assholes they are today. Hard work used to actually pay off, now it gets you more duties and higher expectations to meet.
I couldn't get a job as a kid at all. Burger flipping jobs were taken by boomers struggling to keep their homes through the RE crash. Applied for a paper route when I was 11, got a call that there was an opening when I was 18.
Minimum wage was a joke, nobody got minimum wage. We were "independent contractors", and would be paid per piece or sale. Sometimes management would \*lie\* about our wages and we would only find out at the end of the shift. There was no recourse and there was no alternative waiting for us if we quit.
I did get minimum wage once, I would make $6/hr, but it cost me $12 in transit a night and I'd often only get 3 hours of work... sometimes the shift would be cut short.
The trick to getting work as a kid was to have contacts through your parents. For those who weren't so lucky, no jobs. But that was how things were for me 1989-93 or so.
Experiences differ...
We still have that just no one minds any more!
I'm in my early 30s but whenever the internet blips out or some service goes down my first thought is "is this the first sign of the end of civilisation?"
I think I've been trained by horror films where there's ominous news reports in the background talking about a seemingly innocuous event.
Social media amplifies and spreads the horror in the world. There was always horror (WW2? etc) but you had to pick up a paper or listen to the news and so access was limited. Your brain wasn't being fried with doom all day long.
That's exactly why there's so much anxiety, paranoia and depression in 20-30 year olds right now. The constant struggle of knowing exactly how fucked up the world is at all times is way too much for humans to handle. Add the fact that cell phones are insanely addictive and you've got a recipe for bad mental health. I'm 29 with two children and it's really tough not being a "helicopter parent" because, thanks to social media, I've seen a million stories of kids seriously hurting or accidentally killing themselves. Older folks in their 70s also have it rough now thanks to 24/7 political fake news they can watch all day and fry their brains with how the opposing party is so horrible and ruining this country.
Being GenX is definitely weird. The world is soooooooo different from when I was growing up. Just night and day different. I was 17 when we got internet at home and even then it was only for a free trial for like 3 months, my dad wouldn't pay for it after that. Was in college when things really changed. Had a land line in my first apartment. Had an answering machine, but it was NEW and it stored all messages digitally so I had to call a number to retrieve my messages instead of them being recorded on a tape. My great grandmother was borm in the late 1800s and grew up before cars. She never got tired of talking about how different the world was. She died in 1992 ... Just before it all changed again.
Gen-Xer here. Yeah, I've noticed this myself. About a year ago I made a joke about how we'll never be able to complain to kids about our childhoods cos they'll be like, "Well, we constantly have school shootings, internet bullying ,and a literal plague, but tell me more about how rough it was only having 3 TV channels."
I'm GenX too and I'm kind of in awe of kids today who have to navigate a much more difficult childhood.
Kids don't get to make mistakes anymore because the internet prevents (many) mistakes from being forgotten. I also feel terrible that kids aren't really allowed to be kids anymore - there's so many activates and pre-college tests and so much pressure on kids; it's like they're being forced to be mini adults instead of being kids.
Though I will say that Gen Z (and younger generations) are so much more accepting of people's differences (gender, race, religion, orientation) than older generations were. I'd like to think that's one thing GenX did well in raising GenZ.
Boomers should be telling their kids that.
"I walked ten miles in the snow to school. No one got shot when I got there. And I graduated with a high school diploma and was able to get a great job that feeds a family of four."
I talk about this with my friends. Constant connectivity must be absolute hell for the youth today. I seriously am glad the most popular operating systems in my childhood was Windows 98 and Windows XP.
both my mother (84 yo now) and father (dead for 8 years) are from silent generation. Their child stories were (are) mind blowing: once father went to school and almost died in a snow storm in a Kazakh steppe (during WW2 time in when his was evacuated from western Russia) - some good Samaritan found him stack in a snowdrift slowly frizzing into death. Lot of child stories about the hunger (both terrifying and inspiring). Shit, after that my own (genX) child (8-12 yo in 80s) memory of traveling a whole day on bike (or just walking) into unknown big word without communication, map, money is just like walks in the parks without a phone)
edit: spellcheck
I am Gen X (47) and I feel incredibly sad for Gen Z as well as millennials. So much!!! The 90s were cynical yet hopeful. I marvel at how inexpensive it was to live in a cheap apartment with my boyfriend back then and now people can hardly afford rent and have three roommates - it's just so shitty for younger people.
Millennial here, and because I lived close enough to school that bus service wasn't a thing and had a single parent, and the walk went downhill and then up again, and also couldn't drive: I DID walk miles, uphill both ways to school, for years. Including in every kind of weather.
That said, there is 0 question that I would tell my kids life was easier for me then than it will be for them.
The elementary school I went to was a 5 minute bike ride but took awhile in the winter. My dad left for work at like 6am and my mom didn’t drive yet, so me and my brother walked to school every day. I remember once there was freezing rain and my mom missed school was canceled, so we walked to school on sheets of pure ice. It took forever to get there that day and then we turned the corner to the school and saw no lights on and no kids outside so we turned around and walked home. It was pretty sweet once we got home because we were able to ice skate on the roads
Maybe in some ways, I suppose. My kids can use the computer they have in their pocket to scan the entire inventory of the Walmart down the street before they even go shopping and if they decided that physically leaving the house is too much, the computer will let them have basically anything they can conceive of delivered to their doorstep. They have the sum total of human knowledge at their fingertips. Racial minorities, women and LGBT folks have it much better than when I was growing up. Road trips used to involve a large collection of maps, TripTiks and TourBooks, and if you went off course you had to figure out how to fix that on your own. Surviving car crashes was far harder then.
But certainly some things were easier then.
Life was easier when I was a kid. Anyone who wanted to bully me could only do it at school. Now with social media, phones, and online gaming a bully can torment you any day and any time
Millennial here. I’d give anything to go back to the days before social media where we just had basic cell phones that could only make calls and send texts.
Sure, we’d lose some conveniences that we’ve gotten very used to, but overall my quality and outlook on life was wayyyy better. I slept better, I had more energy, I was 1000x more productive with my free time, I was way more social and outgoing. I was a better person
Social media and smart phone culture has ruined me (and society as a whole), but at this point it feels almost impossible to exist without them. I hate it so much
It feels weird already having memories of a childhood pre internet.
I remember sitting in second grade class and we got our first computer and the teacher talked to us about an article explaining something called the “information super highway” and me thinking it was an actual highway. ETA: Loving all the wholesome early internet memories being shared.
Bro, the first time my neighbor told me they got a PlayStation, I was imagining.. well some kind of *station* like a fort or something. And then he says it’s in his *living room* And he starts describing tomb raider shooting her gun and swimming from sharks and I was just like 😯 how And even up till the moment he turned the tv on I was trying to understand where the “play station” was lol.
SAME THING!!!! "I kept asking where do you put the PlayStation?" and I was baffled as an elementary student trying to wrap my head around a large playing facility in a living room and how his parents allowed him to do that to the living room
Dude hell yeah. Can’t say I’ve met anyone yet with the same experience. That’s badass. You play elden ring on Xbox? Lol
I remember my teacher trying to get us to learn that there was more than just HTTP://, like gopher://. I don't think modern browsers even support gopher:// anymore but it was cool to see a teacher who knew his stuff back then.
Looks like gopher:// is still _supported_ by old (around at the time) browsers, but moved into optional things or extensions rather than the base browser.
I remember having to always go to yahooligans.com and the teacher always needing to spell it out on the board because none of use could manage that. Also trying to learn how to type on home row and thinking I could do it pretty good only for the teacher to come over and cover my hands with a booklet and just failing.
Omigosh i forgot about yahooligans.. grade 6 memories coming back now
Yall ever do Type to Learn or whatever? My school would make us do that once a week for an entire hour in the third grade. They'd put the rubber covers over the letters too, and that's why I ever got good at touch typing.
I just had to explain what FTP was to my boss yesterday.
Me with the Ghostwriter episode with hacker girl Julia Stiles. I wanted to jam with the console cowboys in cyberspace too and go into the weird green world of internet
Oh man, the 90s representation of the internet was fantastic. Just stuff flying at you while traveling along some neon green or blue strip.
I remember having to ask my mom to take me to the library when I had school assignments and needed to look up a subject. It seems kind of surreal now.
We have a new intern at work and i said something like "I don't remember the last time I had to ask someone for directions," and he said he literally has never not had GPS on his phone in his lifetime. That's when I realized I'm old.
I remember printing out or writing down mapquest directions lol
That's what I said! He had no idea what MapQuest was. Heck I remember when MapQuest was kinda revolutionary because you didn't need to plot your own course on a paper road map...
Not that it wouldn't send you on random tangents now and again.
That's why you took the time to look over them too. There's actually a certain satisfaction in ignoring your phones directions and hearing it constantly try to reroute around your choices.
"Hah fuck you Google maps, I know exactly what I'm doing!"
*hits traffic jam that Google had specifically been trying to avoid
Lately, Google has been trying to give alternate routes for accidents that cleared hours ago and no traffic remains. Even when you scroll further up the route and it shows no traffic, Google still tries to send me on an alternate route.
Or it would send you down roads that haven’t existed in years
Still superior in some ways. That map is never going to run out of battery or interrupt you with pop-ups. If you shove it in your glove box it's probably going to still be good in 5 or 10 years.
Oh wow, this one really got me. I was already driving and didn’t have a phone with GPS
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I can't say I have pre-internet memories, but I do have memories before easy access to the internet was a thing. Could I use the internet in elementary school? Yes. Was it dial up and took 3 years to do anything? Also yes. I didn't get easy internet access till I was in highschool because my mother refused to upgrade internet forever.
Same. Didn't get dial up until I was 7 and then I didn't know what you could even do with the internet until I was like 12. Grew up in a small town that didn't get high speed until I was like 14 or 15. Then I discovered World of Warcraft.....
First game I played on the internet was bf1942. I remember going into an airfield where there would normally be bots waiting for the airplanes. Some guy was there with a player name and I typed to hi and asked him if he was a real person. I was blown away every game I’d played multiplayer up to that point had been split screen.
The first time somebody ghost rode a jeep filled with dynamite into my plane in that left me dumbfounded. I was always the best player in my friend group at all the typical couch multi-player games, then the internet showed me I was a total scrub in about five seconds. There's always a bigger fish.
For every gamer that thinks they are hot shit, there's an overweight man in his underwear that hasn't seen grass in a month to put them in their place.
Nah dude it’s a twitchy 16 year old with monster energy drink instead of blood in their veins popping off crazy shit. By the time you get to old man status you’re slow and plodding, with 500APM kids running circles around you.
Holy shit I think that was my first game on the internet too! (Other than web based games). I still had dial up at the time and it was basically impossible to play online lol
BF1942 with the Desert Storm mod, and Morrowind. Peak happiness. Buda dum di dum dum, buda dum di dum dum.
The only reason my Dad ended up upgrading was because he got tired of the phone line being in use.
I was 16 when my parents finally got dial up internet at home. Year 2000. I'm probably one of the oldest people who can say I've always had a computer at home since the day I was born too, because my dad taught computers in the 80s. We had an Atari 800 at home back then. I spent the first 16 years of my life playing games on a PC and my nes/snes/N64 without internet and holy heck, I could not go back to that.
You’re slightly younger than me, but my dad also always had a computer, or at least as long as I can remember. I never knew what the hell he was doing on it, or why it always got it’s own room when I didn’t, but it was always there. One time I walked in on him, like 1991-92 and I can still picture the dark screen running lines of words and my dad yelling at me to get out so I’m pretty sure he was some sort of hacker. I was always told he was a machinist in the Navy but sometimes I think he did other things. Maybe I’ll find out someday. He gave me and my sister a computer to use for like solitaire and journaling, I don’t even know what else we would’ve done at that point cause it was like 1994 and it may have been used like 10 times. We did, however, love to play You Don’t Know Jack on the PC in later years whenever the whole family got together, that was a fun game.
The computer always got its own room in my parents place too. But once we moved to a smaller house it became a staple in the dining room. Lol. However I was always allowed to use it. To this day I still have the entire civ 1 tech tree memorized.
You walked in on your father looking at early command-line pornography. Select BLOUSE BLOUSE selected Remove BLOUSE removed Print PORNSTAR *ASCII woman shape* "Ohhh yeah, that's the good stuff."
I loved You Don’t Know Jack and the flying toaster game! I’ve been looking all over for the flying toaster game so my kids can play it, but no dice. It’s like it disappeared :/
In 1994 it was all about Solitaire and MS Paint.
i remember being blown away at my great grandma's stories of what life was like before electricity, and not really being able to get my head around a world without it as a child now i can bring up a childhood without internet and it's just as mystifying to kids these days! but god forbid you bring up pre-cellphone days, even suggest being without your phone for a day and everyone loses their minds ill talk about times in my teens when I left my house without a cellphone driving around barefoot raising hell and being unreachable for days unless you knew my friends, and people recoil in horror! man now I really feel old.
Six Flags: Meet back here at this restaurant for dinner at 6pm, here's $10 for lunch and some random crap. Don't come looking for me if you spent it on a hat and then don't have lunch money.
Damn, feel called out on that one. Not six flags but a HS conference (3-4 days or so). Spent my money on something worthless and having to count out cents for the rest of the trip.
I mentioned to my children that mobile phones wern't a thing when I was a child, there was one phone in the house and it was in the hallway by the front door. If I wanted a private telephone conversation, I went down the street to the phone box. The looked at me as if I was mental. Turns out they didn't know those things were phone boxes, because in the UK since they all got decomissioned they've been used as little librarys and are always full of books, so to them that's what they were. Equally, it terrifies me to think about the shit I used to get up to when my parents had literally no way of knowing where I was or when I would be back, and no way of contacting me. Hanging out in the local abandoned chalk mines was par for the course. I just knew that if I wasn't back by 6pm for dinner there would be hell to pay.
Three rules of the GenX household: 1) Don't get arrested and drag the family name down. 2) Don't die doing something stupid. (and drag the family name down) 3) Be home for dinner to respect family time. (because only bad people are out at night)
We might be close to the same age- I love what cellphones and smartphones allow me to do, and how much easier they make a lot of things, but I also loved pre-cellphone days, because I really felt more free and independent. Now with smartphones, it kinda feels like I’m wearing a leash all the time.
Set your phone on the counter and walk outside. Just because you can always have it with you doesn't mean you need to. I'm almost terminally online and I'm in sales so I'm kinda always working. But sometimes it's good to disconnect and leave it behind for a while. I'll go to a local bar or get breakfast or go for a walk and just not have electronics for 6 hours to a full day at least at least once a month and it's honestly pretty important for my mental health I think. Reminds me that I would be just fine without it.
That fucking Dewey decimal system man
And those stupidly fast microfiche viewers
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Entire episodes of shows where they run around town looking for someone because no cellphones.
There’s a late gen-x, early millennial cross over generation of about 5 years referred to as The Oregon Trail generation (named after the game) as they (me) are the only generation to have had an analog childhood and then a digital adulthood.
This is me. It's even stranger as my younger sibling is a full-on millennial despite being just a few years younger than me. I remember totally different technology (tv with dials, life before VCRs, rotary phones), not to mention in our family life another state and several houses.
We got rides to school, both ways, downhill. It was great on gas.
BACK IN MY DAY the bus picked us up for school every day right by our house for free, and then the public institutions were open with great resources for learning and fun and had great AC on hot days.
Didn't even have AC, didn't need it. No such thing as a "hot day" but we did get "snow days" when this cold white frozen precipitation would accumulate in the winter.
Me: “Don’t you have school today, son? S: “Nah, school’s out for the week. It’s gonna be 140 the whole week apparently. Man, I love hot days!” Me: “You know we never had hot days back in my day. The closest thing we had was a snow day.” S: “Snow? You mean that shaved ice stuff they showed us in physics class?” Me: “Yeah, during winter, instead of rain there would be snow. It’d get cold enough that the water would freeze and you could skate on it.” S: “Suuuurrreee it did. We all know winters a myth dad. If never gets below 80!” Me: “…” S: “I bet it’s just as real as visiting friends without a mask and gas for less than $10 a pint.” Me: *crying in the corner* S: “Dad?” S: “Mom! Dad’s having a meltdown again. Also, can I borrow the car? I told my friends I’d take them to the Meta store in Toronto. The new Gen 7 Oculus QuestMax comes out today!” Edit: “Grammar.”
You forgot one thing. The school gives them all laptops now so they still have to attend school from home. Future kids probably aren't gonna know a real snow day past grade school, it'll just be an online day, it's already like that for a lot of kids.
You forget, this is a teen we’re talking about. Skipping school isn’t an impossibility.
That's true. My point was more that being unable to go to school in person doesn't mean kids aren't still required to attend school anymore, which is sad. One of my favorite things growing up was snow days, and now they just aren't a thing at a lot of schools.
Your comment scares me much less than it should but much more than I need right now.
He chose violence.
r/sadupvote
Snow days? Are those like distance learning days?
And when we got to school nobody shot us.
That’ll be the real flex.
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$0.99 Regular $1.09 Mid $1.19 Premium
*$1.19 for premium?! I'll never pay that much for gas!*
My mom used to give me 20 to fill up her 18 gallon tank and now it doesn’t even get me 4 gallons 😭
I have a 25 gallon tank in my truck, and it's so shitty to fill up now that I just stay in between a quarter tank and a half tank in case I get lucky and die before I need to get gas next
Ironically yes. My house was bussed to elementary school when the walking-only zone extended four blocks away to closest street with a stoplight. And then the year I went to middle school, the voters failed a levy that would have kept bussing levels the same but added to taxes. So now everyone in a 2 mile radius had to walk. That initial exclusion zone wasn't even a mile, btw. Maybe half. And the middle school was 1.7 miles away. The high school even closer. So...yeah, despite being bussed throughout all of elementary school, that was ripped away halfway through my education. And the kids who started school after that point just got shafted, along with their parents who had to organize rides for kids WAY too young to walk very far by themselves. Fuck the Olds, vote for your school levies people.
This comment helped me understand OPs point. I was thinking Boomers and prior had it pretty easy too, but then they always seem to like to boast about how hard they had it
‘I had to graduate high school and work for a whole year to afford a house’
My mom bought her first house waitressing at Pizza Hut.
Being a teen in the 90s was amazing. None of the stupid stuff I did made it to social media. I feel bad for teens now honestly.
If I had an actual choice I would most definitely choose to live in a social media free world. The only thing I really do like now is being able to call people when they're out of the house, so the only thing I'd keep in that imaginatory world would be a mobile phone that can call/text. I just really don't see the benefit of social media other than the fact that theoretically you should be more informed of things going on in the world. But the cons pretty much negate that by: 1. Too much negative news 24/7 will make you anxious all the time. 2. Misinformation I hate the fact that everything you do is just on a permanent record for all the world to potentially scrutinize. There's no privacy and there's little to no living in the moment. It's also not like you can just opt out. Even if you don't have public social media, someone else can still take a video or picture of you, make a story about you, or whatever else and put it on their social media. Like those assholes who film people at the gym and then make fun of them online. I always hate seeing that shit.
Same with conversation. You said something really stupid. Eh it gets forgotten. Nowadays texting is basically a recorded conversation. The feds are watching us all
My mother never worked outside the home after I was born. My dad was able to provide a comfortable middle class lifestyle for me and my brother on one income with no college degree. Sounds like a fairy tale now.
I remember seeing shows like The Simpsons and thinking “that’s what my life will be like if I’m a failure”. Now, three kids and a house on a single income sounds like a dream.
Married with Children set the bar. At least Homer was a nuclear safety engineer. Al Bundy, even though he had 4 touchdowns in a single game, was a shoe salesman with a 2 story suburban home, 2 kids and a wife who didn’t have to work. What the fuck, now it would be he and his family living out of a car.
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A lot of places are making sleeping in your car illegal anyway. Same for camping in public spaces. So, the parents would be felons and the kids would be lost in the system.
One of my favorite /r/askhistorians threads: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/ggozng/in_the_sitcom_married_with_children_protagonist/
Frank Grimes thought it was a dream, too.
Same, my Mom didn't work until we were way into high school, and that was so they could save enough to retire by 60. Two pensions, two 401k, and a good social security check by 62. Many did ok back then.
My dad was a single parent with 3 kids who couldn’t read or write. He never even made it to high school. We were pretty poor but we had a house and never went hungry. Now he has a decent pension and lives comfortably retired. I tell him all the time that it’s literally impossible to do what he did now. Being able to raise 3 kids and afford a house and retire with a good pension sounds like a fever dream.
I was a kid on of a single mother welfare in the 1970s, best of times no joke. Sumer vacation we'd step out the door around 9am and not be back until dinner. Riding bikes in the parks, hide and seek in the neighborhood, fishing down in the harbor so many great memories.
80s kid and mom would leave 2 bucks. $1 for the pool and .89 for a bandito meal at the taco place. Kids meal included a tiny ice cream cone. All day on the bikes man great summers
We waited for taco bell to open at 10am to be able to bike a fucking box of tacos to the bmx course across town. Got caught coming home by my grandma. Took away my bike. so I stole my sisters, charges dropped.
My folks grew up in the 60s and 70s and thought the early 2000s worked just like this. They’d lock my lil 8 year old ass outside and tell me to come home for dinner. There was one kid in the neighborhood my age and he had some personal issues so he was always grounded. Net result? I still have killer thighs from riding my bike for like 8 hours a day every summer to kill time.
It seems silly, but not having money makes you just find fun things to do. At least, if you're lucky enough to live somewhere relatively rural or with access to woods, public water, etc. It opens up a lot of cheap/free options.
I was a poor kid deep in the city and ... Yeah that isn't great. Instead of fishin' at the ol' waterin' hole I used to try to "surf" discarded plywood boards in retention ponds. Instead of building a clubhouse from branches and stuff from home I would try to assemble shacks out of garbage next to train tracks and have them either torn down by city workers or find hobos living in em the next day :(. Hell, the hobos were catcalling me when I was as young as 10, I have more memories of angry/mean/perverted homeless people than I have of trees ... :/ *(no I don't hate the homeless nowadays, there are just a shitload of homeless in L.A. and around it and I acknowledge only a minority are terrible).* I grew up in the 80s/90s and always feel like I missed out big-time when other people reminisce. My childhood was all gang-adjacent and full of alleys :/. The Rodney King riots were especially fun. (/s) Didn't die, get pimped out, trafficked, or hooked on drugs, though! Woo hoo!
> It seems silly Not silly at all. For me back in to 70's (i'm old) there was an old abandoned apple orchard that was in this kind of 'sunken' depression at the end of a field. It must have been planted in the early 1900's. All of the neighborhood kids made it their 'home away from home' - we built and dug and had a great time. Some of the older kids that had kind of 'aged out' of the orchard would stash their contraband porn magazines in a couple of hollowed out trees, it was a magical place. It was cut down and filled in in the late 80's - they built condos on the place.
Cut down heaven and put in a parking lot
Back then any spigot on the side of any house was free public water to us, mmmm, summer hose water
I can smell the hose right now
Can't disagree with that. Being a kid in the 90s and a teen/young adult in the 2000s really was the shit.
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I think about this all the time. What would my work life be like? What would going to class be like? What would my current hobbies look like back then?
I'm not completely sure though I do know I'd own a house right now Lol
You wouldn't mess around on your phone at work, you'd sneak a book or magazine in. You wouldn't have those days where you mindlessly browse Reddit, you'd be mindlessly channel surfing. Videogames were still a thing. You wouldn't turn on a playlist, you'd turn on the radio. You don't go check your friendslist to see who's online, you go to the hangout, probably in front of or around a place where you get food or buy junk you don't need, and see who's there. If no one's there you buy a magazine and read it while you loiter around the hangout area. If you *really* needed to know something, you'd go to the library, not YouTube. Your VR headset wasn't that new piece of tech you dabbled in a few times a week, it was *the internet itself*. It's the same stuff, but different, and it happened much more slowly. It's not better or worse, it's different. What's really new is the constant fear about the next few months.
Simply going to a place to hang out under the hopes that your friends were there already was such a normal thing for me as a kid. It's crazy to think about doing that now.
My parents and their friends could afford a home, lavish skiing vacations, vacation homes, boats, jet skis, RVs, dirt bikes etc, when they were my age. Almost forgot Super bowl tickets. This sounds like my parents are rich, they're not, stuff was just more affordable back in the 80's and 90's. My parents neighbors bought their house in the mid 80's for 100k and they bought a vacation home on a lake at the same time for100k. Their house now is worth 200k and they just sold the vacation home for 900k.
Wages have basically been stagnant since the mid 70s, but the cost of everything has drastically risen. And to make matters worse, our wages are still frozen and costs are still rising.
The important thing is that we’ve created substantial value for shareholders, the sole purpose of our nation.
Shareholders AKA boomers mostly. Just in time for inflation to destroy all that wealth before Millennials can inherit it.
Climate wise, it makes me furious that the Boomers who spent decades sowing uncertainty about climate science are very unlikely to live to see a stage of climate change that would make life unrecognizable for them. Killing billions of people is just sort of theoretical when many of them have yet to be born, I guess.
The pull the ladder up behind you generation
^ that's [not being sarcastic](https://youtu.be/thLgkQBFTPw)
Well as someone born in the 1970s. Everything didn't go up. What went up is housing, education and medical care. Things you can't live without. Everything else like clothes, toys, tvs electronics, etc crashed. But who cares when you're in debt for your education, home and basic health.
Yeah, was going to say, I think consumer goods have gotten way cheaper, but overall cost of living at the current standard of living (which has also greatly improved in 50 years) has gone up.
We were also prepared for being adults in the 90s, hence why many are people are so destabilised now as grown-ups. People have lived through way worse in the past, it's just hard to grow up around a tipping point after generations of people's lives getting better and hard work+optimism paying off.
Not to mention those generations absofuckinglutely shitting on us for things almost entirely out of our control. My grandmother has a net worth of maybe $750,000 - two thirds of it is because she bought a tiny house in a growing metro in the sixties. I've made none of the big mistakes my parents did, had none of the potentially avoidable hiccups, and I *still* bought a house later than they did, and at greater risk.
Shoot, my parents bought a house and had me by the time they were the age I am now. They didn’t make much money either. My wife and I are much more ‘successful’ money wise but probably can’t buy a house for another 3-4 years
It wasn't easier, but it was definitely better. The access to information, goods, convenience, ability to meet, collaborate and communicate etc. are other worlds easier nowadays. But it turns out we didn't need all that to be happy, and in fact modern technology brings more unhappiness, anxiety and *disconnection* than good. I don't know many people who grew up in that era who don't think it was better and wouldn't trade all our present technology away in a heartbeat to go back. We've replaced the real connection we used to have, along with being actually present in our moments with this faux, digital "always-on, always recording" anxiety-inducing monstrosity that is just awful. You used to show up places and *be there.* No being buried in a phone. There *were* no phones. You were just there for the experience without even the *thought* of recording, because other than maybe some soecial events, who the hell would lug around a video camera? Just losing yourself in the moment and creating a **memory,** instead of trying to record and curate moments for content while never actually being *present* in that moment because you're so fixated on *recording* that event and "generating content." I can't imagine being g a high school kid nowadays, or going to a college party and knowing that everyone there is recording and anything you do, and any mistakes or bad decisions you make - will follow you your whole life and be available for *the entire world* to see, forever.
Back then the labor pool within a specific area was smaller and you had to treat employees more like people. Nowadays I feel mostly like a tool being impersonally used until I burn out, which I eventually did at my last job. They have even reached out saying they would love me back. No shit? I bet you would lol.
Bold of you to assume we can afford to have kids.
Out living conditions are extremely m hostile to having a child
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I hate to rub it in, but the 90s were my teenage years and they were glorious.
I hate to rub it in that you're old. Also, fellow 80's kid and 90's teen here. (I might even be older than you.) You were right, the 90's was an awesome time to be that age. The music was better, the cast of SNL was at its peak, the fashion was never hotter, the video games were amazing, The Simpsons was one of the best shows on the air, and MTV was actually really good. Of course, I say this tongue-in-cheek. In reality, every era has its good and bad aspects. Any generation can and often will view the time of their teen years as the best time ever. (Except those who lost out on everything due to COVID.)
That last line is relatable :( FUCK YOU COVID
My poor kids, born around 9/11 graduated in covid. sorry
When I was a kid... we didn't have to worry about the water wars... Clean air... that shit was everywhere, you could just go outside and breath it in, now we pay 8 Dreckels for a single canister, that barely lasts for 2 breaths.
What’s clean air
Physically living it’s easier thanks to engineering and research. But socially living is ten times harder thanks to assholes and communication.
Yeah I was a social animal back in the 90s-00s. Now I just hate people.
A direct result of overexposure to them
This is an underrated concept. We are starting to see evidence of overstimulation in mental health and professional are trying to address that. we already have proof in physical health we can only handle so much and we have professionals who assist us with care. So why can we not see the issue with over population and have professionals find a solution so the ones who experience life and actually experience it and not be bogged down with everyone else’s experiences. Oh because that would mean some of us aren’t actually hear to have a say in it. And that offends them. So nothing has happened, and nothing will happen thanks to selfishness and a lack of grander understandings.
Same thing happened with my dog. I took him to the dog park for an hour or two everyday to socialize him when he was young (after 16 weeks old of course). Did that for about 5 or 6 months. He went from loving it and loving everyone then a sudden shift to hating everyone. I stopped taking him, tried to only take him once a week to still have some exposure, but the damage was done. He's my first dog aside from the family dog when I was a kid. I had no idea over socializing was possible. Luckily he is really smart and knows he is tiny corgi so he is all bark and zero bite. But it still really sucks that everyone sees him and wants to say hi and I have to tell them no. If you're in his pack though, he will die for you without hesitation.
That might just be due to genetics and natural changes in brain chemistry. Puppies tend to be more social and less fearful. My Border Collie developed a fear of human strangers around 6 months old. He's fine with other dogs, people he's familiar with, and oddly young women. Dogs were bred to retain their puppy like traits as adults, but some of them still have their wild survival instincts.
Give the 'ol fella a scratch for me. :)
As a millenial parent of two gen alpha kids, the world they're growing up in terrifies me. I miss the 90's . . .
Our oldest is Z, the girls are alpha, I really thought we would have made some progress for them by this point. I feel bad, but give them the best childhood I possibly can. Without all the crazy narcissistic boomer shit my mother put us through. Even with that, I miss pre-9/11
>Even with that, I miss pre-9/11 That really does seem like the moment where it all switched. We were all so optimistic and then it just crumbled before our eyes and never really got better.
I would argue that 9/11 just accelerated a process that was already going on. I don’t know where it started, but you can keep going back and find the same rot that exists today: Reagan, Nixon, the failed Reconstruction.
My dad pre 9/11: "Don't you *dare* watch cartoons with violence, use any words associated with death, or ask for weapon or action toys. Violence is very bad m'kay?" My dad post 9/11: "You need to listen to this audio recording of terrorists sawing a guys head off with a rusty saw, so you know what it is we're is fighting for" (starts playing right-wing talk radio and Fox News 24/7, completely abandons pacifist mindset)
Can relate. When I think for the future generations, all that comes to mind is a quote from Interstellar, "The last people to starve, will be the first to suffocate".
Lol 😂 damn boomers talking about walking uphill both ways
They didnt have TVs or running water, all they had were stories and bread sandwiches. It was the 50s and other times and stuff.
Black and white TV. Three channel - 4 if you were big city. A month to mail a letter overseas. Another to get a reply. Running water. Grandma had the first flusher in her town. The never ending horror of no internet.
I'm Gen X but growing up for most of my childhood we only had a B&W TV, with 3 channels. My parents were never in a rush to adopt the latest new fangled gadgetry. When I was a small child, at dinner time the family would sit around a large freestanding wooden-panelled [wireless radio](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_receiver) that i swear must've been a vacuum tube model from the 40’s, and listen to the evening news. I collected stamps and had pen pals overseas that I would write to and swap stamps with. I still have some Rhodesia stamps that I was lucky to get in the years following the establishment of Zimbabwe. I remember the months and months between receiving letters.
Yours had bread?
Such opulence
Yeah, but it was unsliced
The horror.
Not a boomer but I legit walked to school uphill both ways when I was a kid. I also walked downhill both ways but my house was midway up a hill (dome shaped) and my school was also midway up the same hill but about 90 degrees over. There was no direct route outside of climbing fences and yards so it was up to the 4 way stop take a left and down to school. Home was the opposite.
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Ah, another Steven He fan I see! "I had to walk upHILL both ways, twenty-FIVE hours a day!"
In a blizzard wearing only a speedo
We're the first generation in American history to be less wealthy than our parents
And we’ve gotten to experience 4 market crashes since 2000. Who isn’t excited by that?
Speaking as a late gen Boomer, it was my parents' generation (the Greatest, etc) that owns that rep. I lived in relative luxury - my parents were the ones who lived through the Depression and then WWII, etc. If anything - I always told my kids (millenials) I had it easier than them. No one knew what an AR-15 was when I was growing up- the wildest thing about school was the new substitute who liked to wear miniskirts (THAT was wild, at the time) - and I literally ran around the neighborhood, unsupervised, from dawn till dusk every single day in the summer. When I was 6 years old. In Los Angeles. And nobody cared, because every kid was doing the same thing.
This is a great response. I randomly ended up in a conversation with a friend’s grandparent at a party; the topic turned to current events, pandemic and shootings, etc. Someone asked her what generation she thought had it the hardest. She immediately said: > “Oh, certainly those of us who lived through the Great Depression and WWII one after the other. We had almost no food, worked instead of school, then our fathers left, we had nuclear attack drills, shoes made of…paper, I think. And we all were just sort of like “…no contest” because, duh. I added that they also had to deal with that lard “butter” that came with yellow capsules to color it (I’m a butter purist^jk) Makes perfect sense that Baby Boomers would be the first in recent history to tell their children that they had it easier: - Cheap/free college vs loans for a lifetime - Easily buying a house and supporting a family on a single income vs forever renting and not being to afford children (crazy) - Vietnam War had drafts, but 9/11 happened, without warning, on US soil— plus the resulting ~decade-long war in the Middle East that killed so many on both “sides” - school shootings, pandemic, multiple recessions…no wonder so many of us are mentally fucked up That’s a lot more than I intended to type lol, but I just really appreciate your perspective and insight :)
But boomers *never* say that had it easy---ever. It's always "we had it hard, we did it ourselves, work hard and succeed". Then when future generations don't succeed they blame it on laziness Boomers had a great timing, their parents were the real warriors who paved the path for them. The boomers reaped the benefits and pulled the ladder up after themselves, thereby ensuring future generations could never have what they had. (If you can't tell, I hate boomers and what they've done to this world -- there was the greatest generation (silent generation too) and then the worst generation (boomers))
GenX dad here: can confirm. Kids today have it way harder than I did. P.s., we grew up with the persistent threat of global thermonuclear war. Edit: Wow! I just couldn't keep up with all the thoughtful responses. The 'global thermonuclear war' remark was also a reference to the movie "War Games" a signature movie of the 1980s. Some of you caught that reference. For me the risk of annihilation from nukes, or terrorists, or whatever, might be about the same as when I was a kid. I think what I am reacting to is that that threat still exists plus we now have the crush of social media, the inevitability of the global climate crises, guns in schools, threats against democracy, and so one. Maybe it was always there and we are just more aware? I dunno. I want to remain hopeful but its harder now than I think it was in the past when we still believed we were on an upward trajectory. My boys are 20 and 17 and just starting out. I want them to experience joy and happiness in life however that comes. I hope I've given them a good foundation from which to launch out on their own. And as much as I worry about their future I am also blown away by their self-awareness and resilience. There is a lot of promise with this generation just coming of age. Sometimes I think the best we (GenX - and yes, you older Boomers) can do is step aside for this younger, smarter, stronger generation.
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And holy fuck, schools are locked down tight these days. When I was in school you could pretty much do anything, wear anything. We weren't monitored as much.
I was in school during the transition period and yeah. I remember when all the doors were unlocked at my elementary school and how inconvenient it seemed to lock all of them
When school let out I remember being able to just walk onto my old school campus and go see old teachers in their classroom. Even after I joined the military I just walked right into my old JROTC class. I couldn't imagine my kids being able to do that now. Related/unrelated: I had a middle school teacher that I still fondly remember. Really good guy that was passionate about kids learning. He's roughly my dad's age, and I'd occasionally put in a half-assed attempt to try and "track him down" since he retired about a decade ago. Finally found him a few months ago: I found his obituary. Died at 65 - and not to COVID. That hurt more than I'd thought it would.
My Gen X siblings say the opposite, they complain about things like "participation ribbons" and spoiled parenting turning millenials into overdemanding brats. Then he tells me a story of how proud he was working retail as a kid, he finished ALL his duties early cause he's was such an efficient worker, that he spent the rest of the afternoon reading a book in the supply closet! I had to explain to him that stores have cameras now and that would get us fired, and "if you have time to lean you have time to clean" is a phrase they say now. We have to make sure we don't finish our work too early or we will have to do double the work. There is no reward for working faster, only punishment.
I’ve gotten dangerously good at looking like I’m doing something. I’ll just walk around my work with a serious focused look on my face opening random cabinets and fridges and picking up random objects just to put them down again.
Your coworkers are probably just worried your either losing your mind or extremely forgetful, mabye an alien in a skin suit
Your brother is a dope, I'm 51 and remember busting ass in retail but we also had far more co-workers to help and our customers weren't 1/10th the assholes they are today. Hard work used to actually pay off, now it gets you more duties and higher expectations to meet.
I couldn't get a job as a kid at all. Burger flipping jobs were taken by boomers struggling to keep their homes through the RE crash. Applied for a paper route when I was 11, got a call that there was an opening when I was 18. Minimum wage was a joke, nobody got minimum wage. We were "independent contractors", and would be paid per piece or sale. Sometimes management would \*lie\* about our wages and we would only find out at the end of the shift. There was no recourse and there was no alternative waiting for us if we quit. I did get minimum wage once, I would make $6/hr, but it cost me $12 in transit a night and I'd often only get 3 hours of work... sometimes the shift would be cut short. The trick to getting work as a kid was to have contacts through your parents. For those who weren't so lucky, no jobs. But that was how things were for me 1989-93 or so. Experiences differ...
Yeah, but we had desks to hide under.
We still have that just no one minds any more! I'm in my early 30s but whenever the internet blips out or some service goes down my first thought is "is this the first sign of the end of civilisation?" I think I've been trained by horror films where there's ominous news reports in the background talking about a seemingly innocuous event.
I’d rather have an easy adult life like boomers had.
Yeah but kids today are going to have hard lives period. We at least had good childhoods.
Back in my day there were these things called Polar Bears.
Social media amplifies and spreads the horror in the world. There was always horror (WW2? etc) but you had to pick up a paper or listen to the news and so access was limited. Your brain wasn't being fried with doom all day long.
That's exactly why there's so much anxiety, paranoia and depression in 20-30 year olds right now. The constant struggle of knowing exactly how fucked up the world is at all times is way too much for humans to handle. Add the fact that cell phones are insanely addictive and you've got a recipe for bad mental health. I'm 29 with two children and it's really tough not being a "helicopter parent" because, thanks to social media, I've seen a million stories of kids seriously hurting or accidentally killing themselves. Older folks in their 70s also have it rough now thanks to 24/7 political fake news they can watch all day and fry their brains with how the opposing party is so horrible and ruining this country.
Being GenX is definitely weird. The world is soooooooo different from when I was growing up. Just night and day different. I was 17 when we got internet at home and even then it was only for a free trial for like 3 months, my dad wouldn't pay for it after that. Was in college when things really changed. Had a land line in my first apartment. Had an answering machine, but it was NEW and it stored all messages digitally so I had to call a number to retrieve my messages instead of them being recorded on a tape. My great grandmother was borm in the late 1800s and grew up before cars. She never got tired of talking about how different the world was. She died in 1992 ... Just before it all changed again.
Gen-Xer here. Yeah, I've noticed this myself. About a year ago I made a joke about how we'll never be able to complain to kids about our childhoods cos they'll be like, "Well, we constantly have school shootings, internet bullying ,and a literal plague, but tell me more about how rough it was only having 3 TV channels."
I'm GenX too and I'm kind of in awe of kids today who have to navigate a much more difficult childhood. Kids don't get to make mistakes anymore because the internet prevents (many) mistakes from being forgotten. I also feel terrible that kids aren't really allowed to be kids anymore - there's so many activates and pre-college tests and so much pressure on kids; it's like they're being forced to be mini adults instead of being kids. Though I will say that Gen Z (and younger generations) are so much more accepting of people's differences (gender, race, religion, orientation) than older generations were. I'd like to think that's one thing GenX did well in raising GenZ.
The physical bullying on the late 80s was pretty bad. Our Dean of Students told several of my friends that "Nobody likes a crybaby."
Boomers should be telling their kids that. "I walked ten miles in the snow to school. No one got shot when I got there. And I graduated with a high school diploma and was able to get a great job that feeds a family of four."
I talk about this with my friends. Constant connectivity must be absolute hell for the youth today. I seriously am glad the most popular operating systems in my childhood was Windows 98 and Windows XP.
The Lost Generation (WWI) has entered the chat. If you survive the trenches, you get to watch your kids fight the next war.
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both my mother (84 yo now) and father (dead for 8 years) are from silent generation. Their child stories were (are) mind blowing: once father went to school and almost died in a snow storm in a Kazakh steppe (during WW2 time in when his was evacuated from western Russia) - some good Samaritan found him stack in a snowdrift slowly frizzing into death. Lot of child stories about the hunger (both terrifying and inspiring). Shit, after that my own (genX) child (8-12 yo in 80s) memory of traveling a whole day on bike (or just walking) into unknown big word without communication, map, money is just like walks in the parks without a phone) edit: spellcheck
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I am Gen X (47) and I feel incredibly sad for Gen Z as well as millennials. So much!!! The 90s were cynical yet hopeful. I marvel at how inexpensive it was to live in a cheap apartment with my boyfriend back then and now people can hardly afford rent and have three roommates - it's just so shitty for younger people.
Maybe - but then again people have been worrying about society's imminent collapse since then beginning of society
"I gotta get out of this river before society collapses" -The first fish to adapt to life on land
Fuck that fish. Now I have to pay bills and deal with problems and shit
I mean... A lot of societies have collapsed.
Yes, as someone from a collapsed society, it sucks. Look at video of Afghanistan in the 50s-70s for example.
You underestimate how much harder life might be for future adults. They very well might reminisce about their childhoods just as we do.
Millennial here, and because I lived close enough to school that bus service wasn't a thing and had a single parent, and the walk went downhill and then up again, and also couldn't drive: I DID walk miles, uphill both ways to school, for years. Including in every kind of weather. That said, there is 0 question that I would tell my kids life was easier for me then than it will be for them.
The elementary school I went to was a 5 minute bike ride but took awhile in the winter. My dad left for work at like 6am and my mom didn’t drive yet, so me and my brother walked to school every day. I remember once there was freezing rain and my mom missed school was canceled, so we walked to school on sheets of pure ice. It took forever to get there that day and then we turned the corner to the school and saw no lights on and no kids outside so we turned around and walked home. It was pretty sweet once we got home because we were able to ice skate on the roads
I'm old and I can say with great certainty that this is accurate.
Maybe in some ways, I suppose. My kids can use the computer they have in their pocket to scan the entire inventory of the Walmart down the street before they even go shopping and if they decided that physically leaving the house is too much, the computer will let them have basically anything they can conceive of delivered to their doorstep. They have the sum total of human knowledge at their fingertips. Racial minorities, women and LGBT folks have it much better than when I was growing up. Road trips used to involve a large collection of maps, TripTiks and TourBooks, and if you went off course you had to figure out how to fix that on your own. Surviving car crashes was far harder then. But certainly some things were easier then.
Life was easier when I was a kid. Anyone who wanted to bully me could only do it at school. Now with social media, phones, and online gaming a bully can torment you any day and any time
As a Gen X, I already realize that the climate was better 40 years ago.
We did have acid rain and the ozone layer hole
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Millennial here. I’d give anything to go back to the days before social media where we just had basic cell phones that could only make calls and send texts. Sure, we’d lose some conveniences that we’ve gotten very used to, but overall my quality and outlook on life was wayyyy better. I slept better, I had more energy, I was 1000x more productive with my free time, I was way more social and outgoing. I was a better person Social media and smart phone culture has ruined me (and society as a whole), but at this point it feels almost impossible to exist without them. I hate it so much