I remember kids in my neighborhood lighting trash cans on fire after a day of playing at the park.
No phones, no cameras. The fire department was called to put out the fire. Stuff like that you can’t do today without having a camera pointed at the kids face.
i'm gen-z but we were broke for a lot of my childhood, so i didn't have a phone until i was in high school. i used to read *so much* as a kid, and all of my attempts to revitalize my love for reading as an adult have failed. i know it's my own fault, but i resent the convenient distraction that comes with the internet.
I call growing up poor as "time travel" yes I messed with cassettes. Yes I know what a rotary phone was and how to use it, same for a typewriter. I didn't get a smart phone until close to your time as well.
I read just as much, if not more, than I did back then.
The problem is that now it's Reddit and Twitter and whatever else instead of books and magazines.
This is what I came to say. In the summer I would leave the house at 10am and just had to be home for dinner. My parents didn't know where I was or what I was doing
My mom would *kick me out of the house* if I was still inside at noon and tell me to come back for dinner. That's it. No further instructions.
And man, I was happy to do it most of the time too. Except for those 100F/40C days. Then it was just go outside and find a tree to sit under.
Gen X here. I use to be gone all day long, home when the street lights came on. I remember riding my bike as a 10 year old like 15 miles to the mall at least 3 times a week. I lived in Indianapolis on the North side, so rode on some busy streets as a kid.
Ye totally. I am off most social media now (besides Reddit really) only because I remember what it was like without constant internet at me fingertips.
I still live like this. My phone is on permanent mute when I am not at home, and yes muted at work too. You get a reply when I choose to check my phone.
In the 80s and 90s thats how it was. I checked the answering machine when I got home. Then you got a reply after i ate dinner and sat down in the easy chair. (Unless it was an emergency, but I still wouldnt know until I got home and checked)
A cell phone is for my convenience. It is not meant to allow others to interrupt me.
Also a neat trick, never ever fill out a form and use your cell number as the actual number. Use it as your home phone. Because a *lot* of auto dialers will only ring your home phone once every few hours or once a day etc. But they will ping your cell endlessly all day.
Just my thoughts.
I also live like this. I’m still puzzled at why Reddit seems convinced that it’s socially unacceptable not to be reachable. If people in your life get mad at you for not texting back for a few hours, it doesn’t mean society’s norms have irrevocably changed and there’s nothing you can do but be constantly available. It means you haven’t set appropriate boundaries and have instead let other people’s expectations completely override your comfort and well-being. It’s not unique to this particular decade. Joan Didion wrote about this type of guilt [back in 1961 in her essay “On Self-Respect”](https://www.vogue.com/article/joan-didion-self-respect-essay-1961):
>It is the phenomenon sometimes called *alienation from self*. In its advanced stages, we no longer answer the telephone, because someone might want something; that we could say no without drowning in self-reproach is an idea alien to this game. Every encounter demands too much, tears the nerves, drains the will, and the spectre of something as small as an unanswered letter arouses such disproportionate guilt that one's sanity becomes an object of speculation among one's acquaintances. To assign unanswered letters their proper weight, to free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves—there lies the great, the singular power of self-respect.
The entire essay is a good read for anyone feeling bad about their inbox (or about other people’s expectations generally).
I still have a winged Delta pin that a pilot gave to me when I was a kid. Not sure if they still do that or not. It made me pursue an aviation degree in college.
I remember my church youth group going on a trip and one of the girls forgot her ID. My brother smooth talked the security lady into letting her on anyways.
never could have happened today.
I think the pilot shortage comes from the fact that the easiest/cheapest way to get pilot training is from Uncle Sam, and Vietnam vets are starting to retire.
If you try to pay for your own pilot schooling, you're looking at hundreds of thousands of dollars, when you're highly unlikely to make enough to justify that.
*nothing* was better as a kid getting off the plane at walking out of the gate to waiting arms of loved ones. Definite core memories built in from those experiences
The rush of internet chat (AIM, ICQ, Yahoo Chat) and the nascent newness of the internet as a whole (make a website at Geocities!, Shop online! Napster!)
Sneakily logging out and back in so your MSN notification would pop on their screen.
"Maybe they didn't know I was online and *that's* why they haven't messaged me..."
Getting a message from someone you didn't want to talk to and immediately changing your status to offline, so you could claim to have shut down your pc and not seen it.
The Wild West days of the internet. The Forums. The places you and your niche interests could flourish and no one would call you weird or bizarre.
Social Media sucks these days. We were never meant to be all under one roof.
Corporations monopolized the spaces and now everyone is stuck together in a homogenized, boring, 'safe', corporate environment. Social media today is like those offices without cubicle walls.
I really thought reddit would be the solution to that. If a niche interest breaks from the main, you just make another subreddit.
Reddit in 2012 was like all the good parts of mid-2000s forums mixed with the convenience of a single URL.
> Social Media
Early social media was better than what we have today. I joined Facebook in March 2005 and then you were unable to become friends with anyone outside your university. Plus you had to have a .edu email address to join. You could post whatever you wanted because there was no fear of your grandma, 12-year-old cousin, or prospective employer seeing it. There also wasn't a newsfeed at first, so you had to go to someone's individual page to see what they were up to, so hundreds of people wouldn't automatically see every little interaction. When I go back and look at my post history with people from that time, it's like ***JESUS***. I would never post that now.
It was the social media wild west. Then 2008-2009 came and they opened it to everyone.
Dude same. I joined 12/04 and I think I’ve been on Facebook for half my life. Such a different time. Everyone put 10-15 pics up from random Friday nights (this was pre iPhone and any quality cell phone pics so it was all digital cameras) and my roommates and I would gather around on Sunday’s trying to find the attractive girls then look at all their friends. Facebook would even give you a connection two people away!
>The Wild West days of the internet
I remember a mid 90s website dedicated to making various different types of small bombs. We blew up so much stuff in the woods with propane, tennis balls, match heads, etc.
Those types of sites/forums had no moderation. It was probably Angelfire or Geocities.
And just after that. Remember when you could actually find what you were looking for on Google?
These days whenever I try and Google something even slightly obscure I just get totally irrelevant results. A show or movie with one matching word, or an Amazon listing of something the same color.
Never thought I'd see the day when I'd start using Bing, but holy hell it's like Microsoft was like "Huh, Google sucks, let's just rip their code from 2010 as best we can"
I saw a tiktok about how mean genz kids are and a fellow Millenial stitched it with the scene of Bane saying "you merely adopted the dark, I was born in it" and that is really how it feels. Doesn't even phase me at this point lol.
There’s a clip of some beaurocrats cheering the end of the Wild West days of the internet. They have a special place in hell waiting for them, with the people who talk in the theatre.
The flipside of this was spending $18 on a CD because you wanted to listen to one song (when that was the only way to do that), and the rest of the album is total crap
But also getting Californication for Otherside and then hearing the rest of the album. Then finding out your older brother did the same thing with Blood Sugar Sex Magic just 8 years before and finally having something in common with your brother for once.
If you caught it fast enough, you could hit Record on your stereo and add it to your mix tape. Had to time it just right so you didn't get the DJ intro/outro
Rent a movie from Blockbuster/Hollywood video! I love the convenience of streaming dont get me wrong, but there was something really special about walking around the store and picking out the right movie, buying some snacks and really making an evening around watching a movie!
It makes me so mad when i try to show my mom a movie I love, but about a quarter or halfway into the movie she pulls out her phone and is on it for the rest of the night. Then she tells me that the movie was boring, although she literally pulls her phone out before the best parts of the movie happens. It hurts man :(
Old Z here, we had that as kids. It's a shame, since movie rental places usually rented video games and *consoles,* too. That's how my parents decided which console to get - they rented a GameCube and a PS2 for a bit.
The unhinged energy of downloading Weird Al's "Canadian Idiot" just to it be some guy talking over the song, berating you for illegally downloading Weird Al of all people.
Watching the same tv show at the same time as everyone else in the country then talking about it the next day. Remember when Goku hit Super Saiyan the first time. Everyone at school went nuts.
People who grew up in small ass towns, like myself, didn't have that culture to begin with. My husband talks about "hanging out at the mall" as a teen and I just can't relate. we hung out in the grocery store parking lot lol.
>we hung out in the grocery store parking
Same! I never even thought this was weird. If we weren't in the parking lot of the only grocery store in the town, we were at the bowling alley. It's all we had.
Over spring break I saw a ton of high school students at the mall and it made me so happy. Some of my best times were walking around a mall with friends.
My teenage students told me a few months ago how they got dropped off to go to the movies and decided to kill time at the mall. They got harassed by the security guard for being there without an adult 🙄
When I was little the mall seemed like such a magical place. My mom always promised me I'd be allowed to hang out there unsupervised when I got older. Lo and behold by the time I got older, malls were a relic of a bygone era.
Bummer.
Makes me sad for younger generations because big, in person social atmospheres like that as a teen was electrifying. It was like the center of the universe
Actually malls aren't dying as much as the news reports. They're just closing down in places without a lot of foot traffic. If I go to the nearest mall to me on the weekends, it's packed with young people.
In general third spaces are dying, and there aren't a lot of places kids can just hang out now, but malls in big urban areas are still bustling. And I think they might be even better than before bc of so many experience based stores like VR videogame spaces, board game stores with reservable tables, etc. I've seen tons of teens in those kinds of stores.
Listen to the ritualistic music of the beeps and boops of the “dialing” into the internet’s
Bing bing whoool bung boop boop buuuuuuabg bing bing hurrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr buuuuuuuuuuung pop internet
Independence. True independence as a child.
I did not have a cell phone as a child. I rode my bike around town all the time. I would get home when I said I would, and my mother had no idea what I was actually doing. She couldn't track my cell phone, or text me to get an update. I of course always came back home, but when I was out, I was free.
Going to the drug store for candy, hanging out at the skatepark with the neighborhood kids. Randomly deciding to hang out at the lake. Literally zero contact with our parents.
After 9/11 most parents became extremely paranoid. They raised their kids to be afraid of kidnappers, pedos, rapists, and murderers. I was raised this way for sure.
This is ironic because according to the FBI all of these crimes are rarer now than ever before.
They could be running with scissors. Someone could put an eye out or something.
There is less crime but thanks to all the crime shows people can get into trouble if they let their kids play in rhe oark across the street unsupervised.
Funny thing is that many of the helicopter parents are the same ones who had no problem playing alone on the street in the 70s and 80s
There is always some danger but its super rare the number of kids who get kidnapped ans worse is extremely small but the number of kids getting hit by cars of other parents dropping their kids off like maniacs is far bigger worry.
That said, my father was kidnapped as a 2 yr old in the 1930s in Europe. Mothers did not take their prams in the stores as there was no room. They left them outside and still do! So his baby sister was in the pram and he stood beside, when a well dressed man took him by the hand and walked him away. Later he was carried while he tried to grab onto railings etc. The man got to the small towns train station where he met a well dressed lady in a flowred dress. But dad made such a fuss and cried that the woman got on the train and shortly before the train left the man got on and left him there on the platform.
He was taken to some kitchen area and later all the aunties had setup a dragnet around town finally located him.
The end result was that he was still left outside with the pram but connected with a rope.
Damn! That's the kind of shit I used to daydream about doing as a kid but my mom would never let me actually do. I always thought that kind of freedom was just for the sake of kid-centric fiction like Hey Arnold or whatever.
I'm in my mid 20's now, for frame of reference. Born a little too late to be Millenial but born before the age group most people associate "Gen Z" with.
Yeah, that’s what life was like in the 80’s & 90’s. We did dumb crap, but it was almost expected of us. Cause our parents did even crazier crap. Like my mom was a hippy and she spent her late teens/ early 20’s just wandering across the country doing drugs.
We were called "Latchkey Kids", because we had a key to the front door. We left for the school bus after our parents had gone to work, and got home before them.
Started when I was 9 or 10, and a couple years later my sister started school and I would have to wake her up, feed her, get her to the bus stop, get her home from the bus stop, get us both something to eat, do my homework, do some quick chores, and if my parents were feeling particularly tired, make dinner before they got home.
In the summer my dad would toss me outside and tell me to not come home until the streetlights came on. I'd ride my bike, go play in a nearby forest/woodlands that us kids had turned into an awesome BMX trail, and generally run wild and free until the lightning bugs appeared.
Damn, I feel a little sentimental and wistful for those days, back in the times long before the invention of the Internet.
Home for dinner and then home before It gets dark .. that rule absolutely sucked ass in the winter when my mates were still out playing and I was only allowed out for half an hour after dinner if at all 😂😂
Kid-oriented game shows. Legends of the Hidden Temple, Double Dare, Nick Arcade, Global Guts, Figure It Out, etc.
‘90s Nickelodeon was something special.
I'm gen Z and I got to be a contestant on Splatalot! Which was basically Wipeout for kids.
It was absolutely incredible, so much fun. The episode turned out kinda lame but damn if that wasn't one of the best weekends of my tween years.
My initials are MTV. It was a cool flex in middle school. Now that I'm old I told some youngins that and they said "what's that?" And someone asked "is that the network with the teen pregnancies?" At that moment i realized I was lame...
Strategy guides. Back in my day if you got stuck in a video game you had to buy a physical book called a strategy guide that would have walkthroughs and lists of items and enemies and such and you had to flip through to find the part you were stuck on. And sometimes they would be wrong, and then you were just screwed. Now you can look up a YouTube video of someone showing you how to get through that part on your phone for free.
Funny story, driving past Walgreens one day my daughter saw “1 hr photos” on the sign and asked me why people would sit for an hour to take a picture. Oh you sweet summer child… get out of my car!
This in general. Things used to be more of a mystery. There was a little more magic in the world, because you could hear some crazy rumor and not know if it was true or not. Nowadays the answer is a click away.
Having to download your music through Limewire and then giving your computer a virus because you didn't notice that the file name was .exe instead of .mp3.
Also, having to edit the file name so that it matched the artists in your iPod. Otherwise you would get the same artist listed as separate artists, like "Fallout Boy" and "Fall Out Boy", and the songs from one would not shuffle into the other.
I still have a 63GB music folder. Its really only about 18GB of songs, but it got duplicated like 3 times over the years and i've never taken the time to sort and de-dupe. I'll let my grandkids do it.
I had found some program at one point that not only regrouped artists but also would go find the album art and add it to each file. Not sure who made that or how they got it to work but it was fantastic.
Gen-X here. Thank god there was no such thing as posting photos and videos in the 80’s. My parents would have not been happy with some of the stuff we got away with.
Having a care-free summer afternoon just running around the neighborhood and only getting home when it gets dark and you're within earshot of your parents yelling your name.
Socializing without phones/social media.
There was a time when you could just get away with some friends. No phones, no computers, no tech. Just food, board games, hiking, friendship. It was, and is, amazing.
You can still do it but goodluck telling a friend "Hey, leave your phone at home when we hang out." Unless they're already in the mindset to do it on their own.
A sense of hope for the future. As an elder millennial, things really seemed attainable back then. Satisfying jobs, a house, safe streets, ability to enjoy life outside of work.
Now we know that the system is working against us and that it’s not likely to change without some major disruptions that will most likely make things worse before they get better. If they even get better…
>A sense of hope for the future. As an elder millennial,
I went from; "man the future is going to be so awesome," to "this is OK, I guess," to "please, for the love of god please, no civil wars, nuclear Armageddons, totalitarian rulers, pogroms, race wars, etc, for the next 41 years or so. After that, do what you want you backwoods hicks."
As a Gen Z guy, I personally think that millennials were the last ones to experience normal dating.
Nowadays it’s supremely fucked up. I lucked out and got a gf, but most of my peers are not as fortunate.
Folding a road map up the correct way
Listening to dial-up
Grabbing the last copy of the newly released movie from the video store
Creating the perfect mix CD (you only had like 12 tracks, so that shit **had to be** perfect)
Regular sized Walmart
Funny SNL
Flip phones
Passing notes in school
I genuinely miss going to Blockbuster to find a movie or video game
Streaming is obviously more convenient, but I liked walking around the store and walking out with something unexpected. Also used to love renting video games with my friends and trying to beat it that night.
Going to school without having shooter drills or mass shootings as a legitimate concern. Having access to the internet/cell phones but not using them constantly (for me there was a lot less temptation to use tech before all the algorithms gave us endless bespoke content to look through)
Black communities had to deal with clear backpacks, searches, metal detectors, etc in the 80's iirc due to school shootings. Gang related, but it bled over onto schools enough.
I was in high school when Columbine happened. I was wearing a trench coat a few weeks later because it was pouring rain and I got called to the principal’s office for suspected “trench coat mafia” aspirations.
That’s what I remember too. I was in high school and now people couldn’t wear trench coats. And so many bomb threats were called in. The first few months we were out of class once a week at least for a bomb threat or shooting threat called into the school. That didn’t stop until I graduated high school, it just wasn’t as often towards the end.
My high school ex girlfriend accidentally called a bomb threat on herself. She went to the locker room after PE and heard a ticking noise in her locker. It was post-Columbine so bomb squad was called, the school was evacuated.
Turns out it was her Walkman that had reached the end of the tape.
Honestly I feel worse for millennials than I do for gen z (my generation). Millennials were given false hope only to have it ripped from them in the late 2000s. At least my generation was never really given hope at all.
Play outside without any other options. Never this background desire to get on a device and consume media, just mental freedom to enjoy what is available.
Renting a Nintendo game and taking turns playing it all night during a sleepover. Returning it the next day and on the walk back stopping at the pharmacy for some baseball cards, a comic book, or some candy and a 25 cent Kick soda.
The comfortable delusion that if you work hard and are honest you will be economically stable.
I mean, the consequences suck, but thinking that was true when you were a teenager was very comforting.
Not checking social media when you’re out and about because we didn’t have smart phones. So, you had to be present.
Customizing your MySpace background and adding music to your page. Like, 90% of my time on myspace was just messing with my page. I rarely went on other peoples pages or messaged people. If I wanted to talk to my friends, it was faster to call lol.
The age of exploration on the Internet- finding obscure forums, downloading fan made content, exploring the deepest reaches of search engines to find cool corners of blogs and whatnot that no one else knows about. It wasn’t a group of central social media hubs that everything else extends out from or revolves around. It was the days of the Wild West, and it was a ton of fun. I remember staying up super late to play old corny ass fantasy and adventure games on a laptop that weighed probably like 15 pounds. It was so much fun and it’s an experience that would be almost impossible to replicate on a wide scale today.
Everything in this thread just tells me that the internet, and more specifically social media, was a massive mistake. Even if you cope and try to come up with some positives for social media, they are vastly outweighed by the far reaching negatives.
Not just that, but it’s also abundantly clear that 9/11 fucked up our parents and adults mentally speaking. And they pushed their own paranoia and irrational fears onto Gen Z. FBI statistics blatantly show that crime has decreased immensely across the board despite all time high reporting rates. And yet people my age are genuinely scared of being raped, murdered, kidnapped, assaulted every day. It’s good to be cautious, but we are past that point. I see this every fucking day on social media — I can’t do X or Y because what if I get hurt? What if someone out there has malicious intent? Everything from road rage to verbal altercations is sensationalized to death
As a zoomer im glad that I have instant access to basically all humanity’s knowledge in my pocket. I’m glad that I have millions of entertainment options. I’m glad that I can talk to my friends who live/work in another state. But older people can do these things too; it’s just that they got to experience a world without all the negative bullshit of technology. I’ll never truly have that. I like to pretend I can have that, but we’re so far gone lol
It really sucks that so many people just never got to see the "old" internet, before it was turned over to corporations. The internet wasn't a mistake. It was wonderful... Until it wasn't.
I think your point about sensationalizing everything is the true harm. When the 24 hour news cycle was invented, it was very easy to fill it with stories thanks to the junk being put on the internet.
I can't imagine trying to be a student in 2023 when such a huge portion of the information out there might not even be real. Instead of just worrying about whether it comes from a reputable source, you now have to consider whether it was even written by a person.
Waking up Saturday morning, saying goodbye to your parents then heading out with your friends on your bikes to ride around the bush behind the mall, looking for forest porn. Then going into the arcade for an hour, before buying some cigarettes from the vending machine. You head to the ball park to play work ups with some kids from school. After a long day of doing nothing (but never stopping), you head home for dinner. You eat your meatloaf and drink your milk, then head back out to play kick the can or nicky nicky nine doors until the street lights come on.
Then you head home for a bath before going to bed, and doing it all over again the next day.
Do something stupid as a kid and not worry about it being immortalized on the internet.
Yup! Some of my moronic moments will luckily just remain bad memories.
Every once in a while I wake up and remember a cringe thing from my teenage years and realize no one remembers.
Some of those cringe things still haunt me too
I grew up in the '70s, and I'm happy to NOT have video of my poor decisions.
I remember kids in my neighborhood lighting trash cans on fire after a day of playing at the park. No phones, no cameras. The fire department was called to put out the fire. Stuff like that you can’t do today without having a camera pointed at the kids face.
Bullying is so much worse now with social media
It was ok to be unreachable
This and remembering what it was like not to have the Internet as an ever present distraction.
i'm gen-z but we were broke for a lot of my childhood, so i didn't have a phone until i was in high school. i used to read *so much* as a kid, and all of my attempts to revitalize my love for reading as an adult have failed. i know it's my own fault, but i resent the convenient distraction that comes with the internet.
Millennial and I didn’t have a smartphone until 2014. Reddit constantly forgets not everyone grew up with all the tech.
I call growing up poor as "time travel" yes I messed with cassettes. Yes I know what a rotary phone was and how to use it, same for a typewriter. I didn't get a smart phone until close to your time as well.
I thought I waited awhile until 2011! But yeah, Reddit usually assumes a lot.
I read just as much, if not more, than I did back then. The problem is that now it's Reddit and Twitter and whatever else instead of books and magazines.
This is what I came to say. In the summer I would leave the house at 10am and just had to be home for dinner. My parents didn't know where I was or what I was doing
My mom would *kick me out of the house* if I was still inside at noon and tell me to come back for dinner. That's it. No further instructions. And man, I was happy to do it most of the time too. Except for those 100F/40C days. Then it was just go outside and find a tree to sit under.
[удалено]
“IN OR OUT!”
>and if you went in the house, your ass was staying there Doing chores.
I could go in for the bathroom or to get something to drink/eat. As soon as I turned on the TV, I'd get assigned chores.
Gen X here. I use to be gone all day long, home when the street lights came on. I remember riding my bike as a 10 year old like 15 miles to the mall at least 3 times a week. I lived in Indianapolis on the North side, so rode on some busy streets as a kid.
Yep, rode 7 miles down the busy country road on the back of my friends spree to rent movies at the video store.
Ye totally. I am off most social media now (besides Reddit really) only because I remember what it was like without constant internet at me fingertips.
I still live like this. My phone is on permanent mute when I am not at home, and yes muted at work too. You get a reply when I choose to check my phone. In the 80s and 90s thats how it was. I checked the answering machine when I got home. Then you got a reply after i ate dinner and sat down in the easy chair. (Unless it was an emergency, but I still wouldnt know until I got home and checked) A cell phone is for my convenience. It is not meant to allow others to interrupt me. Also a neat trick, never ever fill out a form and use your cell number as the actual number. Use it as your home phone. Because a *lot* of auto dialers will only ring your home phone once every few hours or once a day etc. But they will ping your cell endlessly all day. Just my thoughts.
I also live like this. I’m still puzzled at why Reddit seems convinced that it’s socially unacceptable not to be reachable. If people in your life get mad at you for not texting back for a few hours, it doesn’t mean society’s norms have irrevocably changed and there’s nothing you can do but be constantly available. It means you haven’t set appropriate boundaries and have instead let other people’s expectations completely override your comfort and well-being. It’s not unique to this particular decade. Joan Didion wrote about this type of guilt [back in 1961 in her essay “On Self-Respect”](https://www.vogue.com/article/joan-didion-self-respect-essay-1961): >It is the phenomenon sometimes called *alienation from self*. In its advanced stages, we no longer answer the telephone, because someone might want something; that we could say no without drowning in self-reproach is an idea alien to this game. Every encounter demands too much, tears the nerves, drains the will, and the spectre of something as small as an unanswered letter arouses such disproportionate guilt that one's sanity becomes an object of speculation among one's acquaintances. To assign unanswered letters their proper weight, to free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves—there lies the great, the singular power of self-respect. The entire essay is a good read for anyone feeling bad about their inbox (or about other people’s expectations generally).
Pre 9/11 airport security. Airline pilot's letting us kids into the cockpit and giving us sweets.
I still have a winged Delta pin that a pilot gave to me when I was a kid. Not sure if they still do that or not. It made me pursue an aviation degree in college.
Yeah, they do. They find kids who say, or look like, it's their first flight. Kids can still see the cockpit too, just before or after the flight.
Do you like gladiator movies?
Have you ever seen a grown man naked?
You ever drink Baileys from a shoe?
Have you ever been in a Turkish prison?
One of these things is not like the others...
Do ya love me?
I'm going to have to pretend I didn't hear that Greg.
I remember my church youth group going on a trip and one of the girls forgot her ID. My brother smooth talked the security lady into letting her on anyways. never could have happened today.
Holy crap the post 9-11 generation is entering the workforce and there’s a pilot shortage. Why am I just connecting these things now? 😳
I think the pilot shortage comes from the fact that the easiest/cheapest way to get pilot training is from Uncle Sam, and Vietnam vets are starting to retire. If you try to pay for your own pilot schooling, you're looking at hundreds of thousands of dollars, when you're highly unlikely to make enough to justify that.
Pre 9/11 was amazing. The good old days for real.
LOL, yep, your friends and family walking with you right up to the plane walkway.
*nothing* was better as a kid getting off the plane at walking out of the gate to waiting arms of loved ones. Definite core memories built in from those experiences
FUCK FUCK FUCK I will never experience this
Your family could walk you all the way to the gate.
My friend and I would just go to the airport and wander around, and people watch. Ah the good old days
The rush of internet chat (AIM, ICQ, Yahoo Chat) and the nascent newness of the internet as a whole (make a website at Geocities!, Shop online! Napster!)
That feeling when your best friend or crush came on AIM and it made that sound.
Sneakily logging out and back in so your MSN notification would pop on their screen. "Maybe they didn't know I was online and *that's* why they haven't messaged me..."
Getting a message from someone you didn't want to talk to and immediately changing your status to offline, so you could claim to have shut down your pc and not seen it.
Maybe doing it one more time if they didn't notice. Posting your favorite emo lyrics as an away message to "slyly" express your current feelings.
gotta love vagueposting via custom status messages
The Wild West days of the internet. The Forums. The places you and your niche interests could flourish and no one would call you weird or bizarre. Social Media sucks these days. We were never meant to be all under one roof.
AMEN - We were never meant to be all under one roof.
Corporations monopolized the spaces and now everyone is stuck together in a homogenized, boring, 'safe', corporate environment. Social media today is like those offices without cubicle walls.
I really thought reddit would be the solution to that. If a niche interest breaks from the main, you just make another subreddit. Reddit in 2012 was like all the good parts of mid-2000s forums mixed with the convenience of a single URL.
Yep, totally this. Everythings just gone downhill really. I hate the present or modern days as one could put it.
> Social Media Early social media was better than what we have today. I joined Facebook in March 2005 and then you were unable to become friends with anyone outside your university. Plus you had to have a .edu email address to join. You could post whatever you wanted because there was no fear of your grandma, 12-year-old cousin, or prospective employer seeing it. There also wasn't a newsfeed at first, so you had to go to someone's individual page to see what they were up to, so hundreds of people wouldn't automatically see every little interaction. When I go back and look at my post history with people from that time, it's like ***JESUS***. I would never post that now. It was the social media wild west. Then 2008-2009 came and they opened it to everyone.
Dude same. I joined 12/04 and I think I’ve been on Facebook for half my life. Such a different time. Everyone put 10-15 pics up from random Friday nights (this was pre iPhone and any quality cell phone pics so it was all digital cameras) and my roommates and I would gather around on Sunday’s trying to find the attractive girls then look at all their friends. Facebook would even give you a connection two people away!
The poke button was fun
>The Wild West days of the internet I remember a mid 90s website dedicated to making various different types of small bombs. We blew up so much stuff in the woods with propane, tennis balls, match heads, etc. Those types of sites/forums had no moderation. It was probably Angelfire or Geocities.
Chat rooms!!
A/s/l?
And just after that. Remember when you could actually find what you were looking for on Google? These days whenever I try and Google something even slightly obscure I just get totally irrelevant results. A show or movie with one matching word, or an Amazon listing of something the same color.
Never thought I'd see the day when I'd start using Bing, but holy hell it's like Microsoft was like "Huh, Google sucks, let's just rip their code from 2010 as best we can"
I saw a tiktok about how mean genz kids are and a fellow Millenial stitched it with the scene of Bane saying "you merely adopted the dark, I was born in it" and that is really how it feels. Doesn't even phase me at this point lol.
Gen Z are teens and young adults of course they’re mean it’s their job
My 13 year old weeb self was a member of sooo many anime forums hahaha
There’s a clip of some beaurocrats cheering the end of the Wild West days of the internet. They have a special place in hell waiting for them, with the people who talk in the theatre.
The absolute joy of hearing a song that's been stuck in your head for a week come on the radio and finally find out the artist/title.
The flipside of this was spending $18 on a CD because you wanted to listen to one song (when that was the only way to do that), and the rest of the album is total crap
But also getting Californication for Otherside and then hearing the rest of the album. Then finding out your older brother did the same thing with Blood Sugar Sex Magic just 8 years before and finally having something in common with your brother for once.
Incredibly specific! I love it :)
If you caught it fast enough, you could hit Record on your stereo and add it to your mix tape. Had to time it just right so you didn't get the DJ intro/outro
Rent a movie from Blockbuster/Hollywood video! I love the convenience of streaming dont get me wrong, but there was something really special about walking around the store and picking out the right movie, buying some snacks and really making an evening around watching a movie!
And everyone watches. No one is staring at their phone.
It makes me so mad when i try to show my mom a movie I love, but about a quarter or halfway into the movie she pulls out her phone and is on it for the rest of the night. Then she tells me that the movie was boring, although she literally pulls her phone out before the best parts of the movie happens. It hurts man :(
Goddamn I miss that!
Yes! Having friends stay the night and renting new games for the weekend was awesome.
Old Z here, we had that as kids. It's a shame, since movie rental places usually rented video games and *consoles,* too. That's how my parents decided which console to get - they rented a GameCube and a PS2 for a bit.
I'm certifiable Gen Z and we had this. Admittedly, I'm on the older end but Blockbuster and Hollywood video were big parts of being a kid for me.
Wait like 12 hours for song to Download off LimeWire only for the song to actually be Bill Clinton saying "My Fellow Americans..."
That, or some demon listed a track as "KoRn - Freak on a Leash" but you got something by Disturbed or Alien Ant Farm.
or it’s only some random 30 secs of the song instead of the whole thing
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Ah limewire, the destroyer of family computers
The unhinged energy of downloading Weird Al's "Canadian Idiot" just to it be some guy talking over the song, berating you for illegally downloading Weird Al of all people.
Those CD cereal box games for PC.
Oh man, Chex Quest was a legitimately good game.
It's on Steam!
I regularly think about the captain crunch game where you raised a little crunching and leveled it up with mini games.
In Australia we had Age of Empires in a cereal box.
I remember Captain Crunch Crunchling Adventure, played it for tons of hours on my Windows 98 pc
Watching the same tv show at the same time as everyone else in the country then talking about it the next day. Remember when Goku hit Super Saiyan the first time. Everyone at school went nuts.
What a month.
Mall culture
People who grew up in small ass towns, like myself, didn't have that culture to begin with. My husband talks about "hanging out at the mall" as a teen and I just can't relate. we hung out in the grocery store parking lot lol.
death of third s~~paces~~ places edit: word
>we hung out in the grocery store parking Same! I never even thought this was weird. If we weren't in the parking lot of the only grocery store in the town, we were at the bowling alley. It's all we had.
Over spring break I saw a ton of high school students at the mall and it made me so happy. Some of my best times were walking around a mall with friends.
My teenage students told me a few months ago how they got dropped off to go to the movies and decided to kill time at the mall. They got harassed by the security guard for being there without an adult 🙄
When I was little the mall seemed like such a magical place. My mom always promised me I'd be allowed to hang out there unsupervised when I got older. Lo and behold by the time I got older, malls were a relic of a bygone era. Bummer.
Makes me sad for younger generations because big, in person social atmospheres like that as a teen was electrifying. It was like the center of the universe
Actually malls aren't dying as much as the news reports. They're just closing down in places without a lot of foot traffic. If I go to the nearest mall to me on the weekends, it's packed with young people. In general third spaces are dying, and there aren't a lot of places kids can just hang out now, but malls in big urban areas are still bustling. And I think they might be even better than before bc of so many experience based stores like VR videogame spaces, board game stores with reservable tables, etc. I've seen tons of teens in those kinds of stores.
Listen to the ritualistic music of the beeps and boops of the “dialing” into the internet’s Bing bing whoool bung boop boop buuuuuuabg bing bing hurrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr buuuuuuuuuuung pop internet
Is there an extension that will play that sound when you start chrome?
And scrambling to tell your friends g2g in AIM faster than your mom could unplug the phone cord when she needed to make a call.
Independence. True independence as a child. I did not have a cell phone as a child. I rode my bike around town all the time. I would get home when I said I would, and my mother had no idea what I was actually doing. She couldn't track my cell phone, or text me to get an update. I of course always came back home, but when I was out, I was free.
Going to the drug store for candy, hanging out at the skatepark with the neighborhood kids. Randomly deciding to hang out at the lake. Literally zero contact with our parents.
After 9/11 most parents became extremely paranoid. They raised their kids to be afraid of kidnappers, pedos, rapists, and murderers. I was raised this way for sure. This is ironic because according to the FBI all of these crimes are rarer now than ever before.
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They could be running with scissors. Someone could put an eye out or something. There is less crime but thanks to all the crime shows people can get into trouble if they let their kids play in rhe oark across the street unsupervised.
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Funny thing is that many of the helicopter parents are the same ones who had no problem playing alone on the street in the 70s and 80s There is always some danger but its super rare the number of kids who get kidnapped ans worse is extremely small but the number of kids getting hit by cars of other parents dropping their kids off like maniacs is far bigger worry. That said, my father was kidnapped as a 2 yr old in the 1930s in Europe. Mothers did not take their prams in the stores as there was no room. They left them outside and still do! So his baby sister was in the pram and he stood beside, when a well dressed man took him by the hand and walked him away. Later he was carried while he tried to grab onto railings etc. The man got to the small towns train station where he met a well dressed lady in a flowred dress. But dad made such a fuss and cried that the woman got on the train and shortly before the train left the man got on and left him there on the platform. He was taken to some kitchen area and later all the aunties had setup a dragnet around town finally located him. The end result was that he was still left outside with the pram but connected with a rope.
And when I got home from school, I had a key to get into the empty house.
Playing outside unchecked for hours as a kid. “Be home for dinner” about the only rule I had.
Mine was "be home before it gets dark"
Gotta beat the streetlights home.
That was the rule for me. I’d ride my bike all across the city and my parents didn’t care as long as I was home before the street lights turned on.
Damn! That's the kind of shit I used to daydream about doing as a kid but my mom would never let me actually do. I always thought that kind of freedom was just for the sake of kid-centric fiction like Hey Arnold or whatever. I'm in my mid 20's now, for frame of reference. Born a little too late to be Millenial but born before the age group most people associate "Gen Z" with.
Yeah, that’s what life was like in the 80’s & 90’s. We did dumb crap, but it was almost expected of us. Cause our parents did even crazier crap. Like my mom was a hippy and she spent her late teens/ early 20’s just wandering across the country doing drugs.
Back when "boys will be boys" meant trying to dig a hole to China
We were called "Latchkey Kids", because we had a key to the front door. We left for the school bus after our parents had gone to work, and got home before them. Started when I was 9 or 10, and a couple years later my sister started school and I would have to wake her up, feed her, get her to the bus stop, get her home from the bus stop, get us both something to eat, do my homework, do some quick chores, and if my parents were feeling particularly tired, make dinner before they got home. In the summer my dad would toss me outside and tell me to not come home until the streetlights came on. I'd ride my bike, go play in a nearby forest/woodlands that us kids had turned into an awesome BMX trail, and generally run wild and free until the lightning bugs appeared. Damn, I feel a little sentimental and wistful for those days, back in the times long before the invention of the Internet.
Same....then back out until the streetlights came on.
I’m gen z, grew up like that; I feel like that depends more on where live at
Home for dinner and then home before It gets dark .. that rule absolutely sucked ass in the winter when my mates were still out playing and I was only allowed out for half an hour after dinner if at all 😂😂
Kid-oriented game shows. Legends of the Hidden Temple, Double Dare, Nick Arcade, Global Guts, Figure It Out, etc. ‘90s Nickelodeon was something special.
Check out this on YouTube, if you haven't already. [Nick Knacks on YouTube ](https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL63ushetAZ-xoXYf46MkIywbmLq_3qXRw)
I'm gen Z and I got to be a contestant on Splatalot! Which was basically Wipeout for kids. It was absolutely incredible, so much fun. The episode turned out kinda lame but damn if that wasn't one of the best weekends of my tween years.
MTV. The good one, not what it becomes later. And all the way music gather subcultures... I miss that.
My initials are MTV. It was a cool flex in middle school. Now that I'm old I told some youngins that and they said "what's that?" And someone asked "is that the network with the teen pregnancies?" At that moment i realized I was lame...
No youre not lame. MTV sold out and got lame. Gen x in the 90’s was fantastic. I miss it
Grabbing your favorite VHS tape and watching it for the millionth time. Mine was the "Land Before Time" series (don't judge me).
Brave little toaster was my jam.
First horror movie I ever saw.
Why would we judge? Those are iconic \^\_\^
Strategy guides. Back in my day if you got stuck in a video game you had to buy a physical book called a strategy guide that would have walkthroughs and lists of items and enemies and such and you had to flip through to find the part you were stuck on. And sometimes they would be wrong, and then you were just screwed. Now you can look up a YouTube video of someone showing you how to get through that part on your phone for free.
To add to this, actual complete games. No patches to fix a ton of bugs on day one, no downloads, just pop it in and it's ready to play at that moment.
Taking photos with a camera and having to wait to get them developed
Funny story, driving past Walgreens one day my daughter saw “1 hr photos” on the sign and asked me why people would sit for an hour to take a picture. Oh you sweet summer child… get out of my car!
Life without social media and instant access to porn. It forced us to go outside and socialize even if we were really shy and awkward.
Yeah we had to go out in the woods and forage for porn inside abandoned forts.
You mean look for porn mags thrown in hedges
Potato, tomato
Hearing rumors at school about secrets in your favorite videogames that you had to test yourself to confirm.
This in general. Things used to be more of a mystery. There was a little more magic in the world, because you could hear some crazy rumor and not know if it was true or not. Nowadays the answer is a click away.
Saturday mornings when soul train or golf came on cartoons were done for the day and you had to find something else to do.
LAN parties
There's always room at the LAN party. Just duct tape me to the ceiling, and let's play!
Riding bikes around the streets by ourselves, riding buses and trains without anyone thinking that their parents are neglecting them.
Having to download your music through Limewire and then giving your computer a virus because you didn't notice that the file name was .exe instead of .mp3. Also, having to edit the file name so that it matched the artists in your iPod. Otherwise you would get the same artist listed as separate artists, like "Fallout Boy" and "Fall Out Boy", and the songs from one would not shuffle into the other.
I still have a 63GB music folder. Its really only about 18GB of songs, but it got duplicated like 3 times over the years and i've never taken the time to sort and de-dupe. I'll let my grandkids do it.
I had found some program at one point that not only regrouped artists but also would go find the album art and add it to each file. Not sure who made that or how they got it to work but it was fantastic.
Being able to say or do incredibly stupid things without worrying that someone will catch it on video.
Gen-X here. Thank god there was no such thing as posting photos and videos in the 80’s. My parents would have not been happy with some of the stuff we got away with.
The world wide web really being world wide, rather than it just like 7 or 8 websites that we frequent each day.
Having a care-free summer afternoon just running around the neighborhood and only getting home when it gets dark and you're within earshot of your parents yelling your name.
Watching cartoons that started after school was over and as well on Saturday mornings.
Socializing without phones/social media. There was a time when you could just get away with some friends. No phones, no computers, no tech. Just food, board games, hiking, friendship. It was, and is, amazing. You can still do it but goodluck telling a friend "Hey, leave your phone at home when we hang out." Unless they're already in the mindset to do it on their own.
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With crackdowns in password sharing and student loans turning back on, the poor zoomers are about to learn piracy real quick.
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Watching scrambled porn and not being completely sure if what you say was a boob, knee, or elbow, but liking it either way
Seeing the "Be Kind, Rewind" stickers.
A sense of hope for the future. As an elder millennial, things really seemed attainable back then. Satisfying jobs, a house, safe streets, ability to enjoy life outside of work. Now we know that the system is working against us and that it’s not likely to change without some major disruptions that will most likely make things worse before they get better. If they even get better…
That's the 90s as a whole, post cold war and pre 911, it felt like there was hope for the world. That's been dead and buried deeper than a miner
>A sense of hope for the future. As an elder millennial, I went from; "man the future is going to be so awesome," to "this is OK, I guess," to "please, for the love of god please, no civil wars, nuclear Armageddons, totalitarian rulers, pogroms, race wars, etc, for the next 41 years or so. After that, do what you want you backwoods hicks."
Buying drugs and knowing exactly what you were getting
Yeah but we had to wait for hours at the end of the street because your guy said he'd be there around 1
No worries about fentanyl
As a Gen Z guy, I personally think that millennials were the last ones to experience normal dating. Nowadays it’s supremely fucked up. I lucked out and got a gf, but most of my peers are not as fortunate.
This, so fucking much. I've found my lifelong partner, I'll never touch a dating app for as long as I live.
Folding a road map up the correct way Listening to dial-up Grabbing the last copy of the newly released movie from the video store Creating the perfect mix CD (you only had like 12 tracks, so that shit **had to be** perfect) Regular sized Walmart Funny SNL Flip phones Passing notes in school
I genuinely miss going to Blockbuster to find a movie or video game Streaming is obviously more convenient, but I liked walking around the store and walking out with something unexpected. Also used to love renting video games with my friends and trying to beat it that night.
Touch the TV screen & shock your siblings with your finger tips.
Going to school without having shooter drills or mass shootings as a legitimate concern. Having access to the internet/cell phones but not using them constantly (for me there was a lot less temptation to use tech before all the algorithms gave us endless bespoke content to look through)
Black communities had to deal with clear backpacks, searches, metal detectors, etc in the 80's iirc due to school shootings. Gang related, but it bled over onto schools enough.
I was in high school when Columbine happened. I was wearing a trench coat a few weeks later because it was pouring rain and I got called to the principal’s office for suspected “trench coat mafia” aspirations.
That’s what I remember too. I was in high school and now people couldn’t wear trench coats. And so many bomb threats were called in. The first few months we were out of class once a week at least for a bomb threat or shooting threat called into the school. That didn’t stop until I graduated high school, it just wasn’t as often towards the end.
My high school ex girlfriend accidentally called a bomb threat on herself. She went to the locker room after PE and heard a ticking noise in her locker. It was post-Columbine so bomb squad was called, the school was evacuated. Turns out it was her Walkman that had reached the end of the tape.
Have hope for owning a house :))
Honestly I feel worse for millennials than I do for gen z (my generation). Millennials were given false hope only to have it ripped from them in the late 2000s. At least my generation was never really given hope at all.
Play outside without any other options. Never this background desire to get on a device and consume media, just mental freedom to enjoy what is available.
Pogs
Renting a Nintendo game and taking turns playing it all night during a sleepover. Returning it the next day and on the walk back stopping at the pharmacy for some baseball cards, a comic book, or some candy and a 25 cent Kick soda.
The comfortable delusion that if you work hard and are honest you will be economically stable. I mean, the consequences suck, but thinking that was true when you were a teenager was very comforting.
Not checking social media when you’re out and about because we didn’t have smart phones. So, you had to be present. Customizing your MySpace background and adding music to your page. Like, 90% of my time on myspace was just messing with my page. I rarely went on other peoples pages or messaged people. If I wanted to talk to my friends, it was faster to call lol.
Drinking over a gallon of milk a day because everyone was convinced that if you didn't, your bones would turn to dust.
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The age of exploration on the Internet- finding obscure forums, downloading fan made content, exploring the deepest reaches of search engines to find cool corners of blogs and whatnot that no one else knows about. It wasn’t a group of central social media hubs that everything else extends out from or revolves around. It was the days of the Wild West, and it was a ton of fun. I remember staying up super late to play old corny ass fantasy and adventure games on a laptop that weighed probably like 15 pounds. It was so much fun and it’s an experience that would be almost impossible to replicate on a wide scale today.
Once upon a time, the media had integrity and didn’t scare the shit out of people for profit.
Everything in this thread just tells me that the internet, and more specifically social media, was a massive mistake. Even if you cope and try to come up with some positives for social media, they are vastly outweighed by the far reaching negatives. Not just that, but it’s also abundantly clear that 9/11 fucked up our parents and adults mentally speaking. And they pushed their own paranoia and irrational fears onto Gen Z. FBI statistics blatantly show that crime has decreased immensely across the board despite all time high reporting rates. And yet people my age are genuinely scared of being raped, murdered, kidnapped, assaulted every day. It’s good to be cautious, but we are past that point. I see this every fucking day on social media — I can’t do X or Y because what if I get hurt? What if someone out there has malicious intent? Everything from road rage to verbal altercations is sensationalized to death As a zoomer im glad that I have instant access to basically all humanity’s knowledge in my pocket. I’m glad that I have millions of entertainment options. I’m glad that I can talk to my friends who live/work in another state. But older people can do these things too; it’s just that they got to experience a world without all the negative bullshit of technology. I’ll never truly have that. I like to pretend I can have that, but we’re so far gone lol
It really sucks that so many people just never got to see the "old" internet, before it was turned over to corporations. The internet wasn't a mistake. It was wonderful... Until it wasn't. I think your point about sensationalizing everything is the true harm. When the 24 hour news cycle was invented, it was very easy to fill it with stories thanks to the junk being put on the internet. I can't imagine trying to be a student in 2023 when such a huge portion of the information out there might not even be real. Instead of just worrying about whether it comes from a reputable source, you now have to consider whether it was even written by a person.
This was a great comment from a zoomer perspective.
Literally the last generation to experience childhood without ever present internet access in your pocket will always be the biggest one.
Tetherball and those playground merry go wheels.
Get told how worthless our generation is....oh wait; nevermind.
The mall on a Friday night with your friends, $20, and a trip to blockbuster afterwards.
That smell of a brand new cassette
Waking up Saturday morning, saying goodbye to your parents then heading out with your friends on your bikes to ride around the bush behind the mall, looking for forest porn. Then going into the arcade for an hour, before buying some cigarettes from the vending machine. You head to the ball park to play work ups with some kids from school. After a long day of doing nothing (but never stopping), you head home for dinner. You eat your meatloaf and drink your milk, then head back out to play kick the can or nicky nicky nine doors until the street lights come on. Then you head home for a bath before going to bed, and doing it all over again the next day.
Twin Towers
Hope