Ah, the golden age of the 80s and 90s, when mullets ruled the kingdom and neon was not just a color but a lifestyle. Back when a kid could spend an entire summer riding a bike without a helmet (how did we survive?) and parents thought “screen time” meant five hours of cable TV followed by a trip to Blockbuster—it’s enough to make a grown man weep in nostalgic melancholy or laugh so hard he might just rupture something. Seriously, have you ever tried to explain to a teenager today that a “VCR” is not a disease caused by excessive exposure to video games?
Remember when your biggest worry was playing your record collection in an attempt to pause it perfectly to capture the right moment to record a song off the radio? Ah yes, “mix tapes”—where the thrill of being called a “friend” came with the caveat of having to decode your crush’s feelings through the meticulous arrangement of 12 songs on a TDK cassette. Meanwhile, today’s youth express their love through a quick Snapchat or a TikTok dance that fades faster than a New Kids on the Block reunion tour. Don’t get me wrong; I love seeing my old friends, but do I need to don a filter that makes me look like I’ve just woken up from a 30-year nap in a cryogenic chamber? No, thank you!
Let’s not even discuss fashions—those glorious days of parachute pants, flannel shirts, and shoulder pads that could double as weapons in a bar fight. If you weren’t sporting multiple rubber bracelets and a scrunchie that could launch a satellite, were you even cool? And for what? So we could fit in at the local mall, hoping to catch a glimpse of the latest episode of *The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air* before retreating to the arcade to rack up high scores on *Pac-Man* and *Street Fighter*? Times were simpler then, and frankly, the mullet trend was an existential statement about our desire to feel free... or maybe just really confused about hair care.
Now we’re in a world where kids act as if they invented everything. They can barely comprehend a world without smartphones! I mean, we survived an era where our only way to connect was with a landline phone attached to the wall and a chat bubble that exploded every time someone caught your mom using the phone! And we did it without any assistance from Siri. Just picture it: you call your friend’s house and their mom answers. “Is Timmy there?” you ask, only to be met with a 45-minute saga that starts with “What do you need him for?” That’s right: today’s kids won’t know the joy of that sweet, sweet moment when you finally hear your buddy’s voice after surviving the gatekeeper.
So to my fellow Gen-Xers: let’s raise our cans of Surge and remixed mixtapes to the fact that we survived an era that was both brilliantly weird and utterly dizzying. We stumbled through adolescence without Google Maps to guide us and emerged with our irony intact. Now if only I could find my Walkman and pry myself from this relentless TikTok black hole. Ah, nostalgia—can’t live with it, can’t live without it.