The replies in a recent Twitter thread got the ball rolling for me today:
“I really wish I could convey to young people just how awesome it was to be a kid in the 80s and 90s, before cellphones and internet and social media exploded.”
“Living in a world where your mistakes weren’t permanently recorded online, where you could escape the wider world without explaining why you were offline and where you could just exist without being connected to anything bigger than yourself and the world immediately around you.”
“There was a sense of time to time and vacations meant reading a book, lying on the grass or hanging out with friends and not burying your head in a social media app that wreaked havoc on your brain and made you dysphoric beyond the ability of modern science to comprehend.”
Those of us born before the 80s get it too. Although we were not so young when the technological explosion of the last few decades hit us, we all have memories of those pre-plugged-in days…it’s just that those days seem so very far away to us now. We would just say “of course” when someone described lazy summer days outside with friends. That was all there was for a lot of us. If you were inside, you were going crazy (or reading a book, I suppose). Or maybe talking on the phone with your girlfriend. If you weren’t personally hanging out with friends (or cousins), you didn’t have much else to do at all.
No social media. No video games. No Netflix or Disney+. I was blessed to have grown up in a home with pool and ping-pong tables…but it was always with friends. People you could look in the eye and laugh with. Maybe listen to the latest Kiss album in the basement. Or wander the streets lighting off firecrackers and smoke bombs. Before bike helmets and seat belts. Didn’t need parents to walk me to the pool down the street (although, with my fear of the water, that wasn’t something I often did). We might even have watched Walter Cronkite tell us what was going on in the world every night at 5:30 (Central) on CBS. And what Walter told us was all we needed to know.
I can see good things in the youth of today, but I’m sad that they’ll never know the true freedom of not being tethered to something that isn’t quite real. Of course, it’s not just them – we’re all tethered to something now. The 24-hour news cycle. Social media. Video games. Streaming. But there was a time when us old people didn’t have it. Not even a hint of it. Life was tangible, and maybe we foolishly thought it always would be.
My advice? Make it so if you can. In as much as you can. Don’t pine for days of youth that never were. Live the days that are.