Ah, the 80s and 90s: a glorious time when the only thing dimming your glow was the flickering screen of your old tube television, and the only “viral” thing was that awful mullet your cousin Eddie insisted on sporting. Back before the Internet stole our souls and turned us into keyboard warriors, we had the good fortune of growing up dodging real-life responsibilities like they were those angry ninjas in Street Fighter II. Honestly, if only ‘real adulting’ came with a cheat code!
Remember when mixtapes were the highest form of flattery and not some overhyped microchip? Crafting that perfect compilation of “I’m Not a Girl, Not Yet a Woman” and "Ice Ice Baby” was the ultimate expression of your undying love—and took approximately four hours. You had to wait for your favorite song to come on the radio and pray that no one would call the house and ruin your masterpiece. A little truth for you: it was an intense romantic relationship. If only the people you were trying to impress could appreciate the artistry behind that weird cassette tape loop. And today? Today, they have Spotify playlists that practically scream, “I have no commitment to anything, even my music!”
Fast forward to today, and I see kids plopped on their couches, eyeing a screen larger than my entire living room, swiping away songs like they’re fishing for compliments on Instagram. I get it; society has moved on, and we’ve traded in our psychic ability to sense when a pizza would arrive for the “convenience” of food delivery apps. Sometimes I wish we had an app for all the mental gymnastics we had back then. You know, one that could morph my awkward crush into something less awkward, like having him show up out of nowhere, all hunky and cool like a character in a John Hughes movie. Spoiler: it never happened. Reality checked me right into awkward town.
So, here we sit, scrolling through our feeds, trying to catch a glimpse of those halcyon days when life was somehow simpler, if not just as perplexing. Will we ever find out how we survived without smartphones and the constant need for likes? Probably not. We traded our boomboxes for earbuds and, let’s be real, our legwarmers for sweatpants. But one thing’s for certain: the nostalgia of longing for those days continues to live on, right alongside my collection of Beanie Babies, which are definitely going to pay for my retirement... right?