Ah, the '80s and '90s—the glory days when our biggest tech worry was whether we had enough change to avoid a long-distance phone call while channel-surfing through 400 cable channels that didn’t include anything remotely educational. Now, kids are stressing over selfies and TikTok dances, while we were just trying to upgrade from our Walkman to a Discman without breaking a sweat. Oh, to be carefree and clueless again, navigating the minefield of life armed only with a mixtape and a pair of neon leg warmers!
Let’s talk about fashion—because nothing says “I love myself” quite like spandex and scrunchies. We wore enough hairspray to give a beehive a run for its money, all while cramming into any garment that would fit over our burgeoning egos. Remember the thrilling experience of trying to zip up a pair of acid-wash jeans that, once on, made you feel like a human sausage? And if you had a flannel shirt tied around your waist, you were practically the life of the party, or the unfortunate victim of your older sibling’s misguided fashion advice. Looking back, we asked a lot from those outfits—namely, that they would keep our teenage angst at bay and maybe, just maybe, attract that cute kid with the skateboard.
And don’t even get me started on our idea of “entertainment.” We had video games that were an amalgamation of two pixels fighting over a 16-bit spaghetti monster. If you weren’t busy grinding your way through “Super Mario Bros” or traumatizing yourself with “Duck Hunt” (sorry, PETA), you were brazenly staying up past midnight listening to the radio for your favorite song, hoping to record it on a cassette. Yes, that’s right! We partied hard with a boombox that had the audacity to eat tapes if you didn’t treat it gently. Be grateful, Gen-Z, that Spotify and playlists exist; the only playlist we had came courtesy of a DJ on the local station, who was forever trapped in the ‘80s.
We survived the apocalypse of dial-up Internet connections—where the sound of a modem connecting could easily be mistaken for the wail of a banshee. Using Google? Ha! More like rummaging through your parents' '60s encyclopedias that are decorated with the musty smell of aging pages. If you needed answers, you asked “Ask Jeeves,” who invariably delivered answers that had the accuracy of a fortune cookie. And heaven help you if your mom saw your browser history when you were finally allowed to use the family computer! The horror was real, folks, and it didn’t involve a haunted VHS tape.
So here’s to you, fellow survivors of the '80s and '90s! We braved the world pre-digital, armed only with a SpaghettiOs lunch and a portable TV that was definitely too bulky to fit in our backpacks. Next time I hear someone talking about adulting and avocado toast, I’ll raise my sweet-and-sour pork-flavored candy and toast to the simpler times: an era where all it took to be “connected” was a rotary phone and a weekend full of unstructured chaos. Cheers to us, the generation that survived without "cloud backup" and whose greatest existential crisis was the question of what to watch on VHS before the tape finally rewound!