Best old school perk is doing all your stupid kid shit at a time where cameras weren’t ubiquitous.
Or at least not permanent.
I grew up in the early 2000s and while starting somewhere around 2005 cameras and the first social sites became a thing, nothing of that exists today. Myspace and SchülerVZ (German Facebook clone) were super popular, but don’t exist anymore. Camera phones didn’t have an easy way to export photos and most hard drives from back then just died at some point. There’s hardly anything left. And that’s a good thing.
This is one thing I will always appreciate of growing up Gen-X. Our moms would kick us out of the house after breakfast and expected us to be gone until the street lights started to buzz. A pack of us on BMX bikes, adventuring, exploring abandoned buildings, jumping off cliffs and into rivers or the ocean, etc. It genuinely ruled ams and I fully appreciate that it did.
I’m on the cusp (xennial) and it’s kinda crazy in hindsight. I had the exact same experience you described, but when it got dark, I’d go home and play with the Commodore 64 or Atari.
Same for me, but I guess I’m a little younger since my console was NES and, later, a Gateway 2000 computer.
I’m so glad that I had those experiences and so sad that my son won’t. I hope that I can give him enough of a similar experience that he can at least identify with Calvin and Hobbes.
Us xennials are a special mini generation. Analog childhood, digital adulthood. The average xennial is quite proficient with computers and other tech, compared to those who were born before AND after. You see we had the childhood curiosity when the internet was starting to catch on. We learned how to navigate in DOS or early Windows. We had to figure shit out because these things were not easy to use.
I thought, when I was a teen, I can’t imagine how good with this stuff the kids being born today will be. But I was very wrong.
I was born in the mid-90’s and I was also more or less raised that way (until a certain age). I remember being able to get home in time for dinner after a whole day of playing outside just because it “felt” like it was almost dinner time. We would go to the nearby “forest” where we built huts, climbed into trees, made wooden swords out of sticks, and sometimes had “battles” with rivaling groups about certain areas in the forest. We’d be there for hours even in the pouring rain. There was a whole economy around these wooden swords and other services like building a hut. It was better than any video game ever could be
The bikes are non negotiable. Also there’s some sort of bully involved.
That’s absolute bullshit. I’ve never met anyone who turned their bully into a friend while they were still in school together.
I did. Okay, not so much a friend, as a guy who would talk to me regularly and treat me and my friends with respect, occasionally tagging along with us. He’s still in my Facebook friends list to this day.
Back in elementary school there was a kid who was easily twice as big as everyone else. He’d push his way around and demand he get whatever he wanted. He finally crossed me one day, and I punched him as hard as I could right in the stomach. When he stood back up, I did it again. He never crossed me or my friends again, and became generally friendly with us. Bullies don’t concede without force.
I turned an eighth grade (Catholic elementary school) bully into a ninth grade (public jr high) “we’re pretty cool now,” likely because he was scared as fuck to be in this rough public middle school, and I’d been getting bullied my whole life so it was nothing different for me.
Mine tried, I was too nice to tell him to fuck off. He was a conservative shitheel by my high schools standards, and that’s a place I took some shit for voting for Obama (class of '13). I ditched all those fuckers when I went to college and came out though so idk. I hope he got better, I didn’t say hi when I ran into him between my fwb’s place and my classes in college though.
Or finding a dead body
Nostalgia is bittersweet & I love it as much as anyone but the bigger picture is this: capitalism grows like a weed or a vampire & every generation had freedom without cameras like that until gen-Xers, who were the last, which is why it feels like such magic now even tho then it was just life & being outside
I’m a millennial. I remember a time without cameras everywhere. I also grew up in the poorest part of WV and I’ve seen my own childhood home in like 10 documentaries on poverty so…
I agree for the most part, but as an early millennial, we had that freedom too. Society didn’t truly go crazy until some time after 2000 in my opinion. I turned 16 that year.
