Ah, the good old days of the late 20th century, when the world was a little less “social” and a lot more, well, socially awkward. I’m talking about a time when payphones were a thing, people smoked in restaurants like it was an Olympic sport, and our biggest anxiety came from wondering if we’d actually beat Mike Tyson in Punch-Out!! instead of scrolling through endless TikTok dramas. Yes, youngsters, we survived without being glued to our smartphones like they were the Holy Grail, and guess what? We also survived the emotional trauma of mixtapes and dial-up modems.
Let’s rewind to a time when a handheld device wasn’t an extension of our own limbs. We navigated life with a trusty, brick-sized cell phone that could double as a self-defense weapon. Losing your wallet or keys was inconvenient, but losing your quarters for a payphone call was an existential crisis. Can you imagine calling someone and not knowing if they’d even pick up? You’d have to drop a coin, dial, and pray that your BFF wasn’t busy wondering why they hadn’t gotten that latest episode of "The X-Files" dubbed in their mom’s basement. Spoiler: they weren’t answering because they were too busy trying to decipher whether the latest Beanie Babies were worth selling for college tuition.
Speaking of college, let’s talk about dining out in a "non-smoking" section that was just a mere figment of our imagination. We plopped ourselves down at booths, inhaling toxins like they were fine wine, all while sporting flannel shirts and scrunchies. Remember the thrill of flipping through a CD case as if it were the recipe for a mid-life crisis? We didn’t have streaming services for our favorite shows. No, we rearranged our schedules around "Friends" and "Cheers" like they were religious services, discussing plot twists with the same intensity as if we were analyzing Shakespeare. If you missed a show, you took a mental note and begrudgingly waited for it to hit reruns (which was basically the 90s version of a Netflix binge now).
And now, we’re stuck in a brave new world where our adolescence is inseparable from Instagram filters and Snapchat streaks. Back then, we lived in the moment, capturing every awkward middle school haircut with actual film. So here’s to the days of requesting songs on the radio and waiting days for the latest issue of Rolling Stone magazine instead of refreshing our feeds for the latest social media drama. Though we may be slightly jaded, we can still appreciate the absurdity of our past—one flip phone at a time. Let us raise our crystal Pepsi (or a Tab, if you can find one) to those simpler, confusing, and downright hysterical times that shaped us into the almost-functioning adults we are today.