Ah, the good old days of the late 80s and early 90s, when life was a smorgasbord of VHS tapes, cassette players, and a perpetual air of cluelessness. Remember hoarding all those five-dollar Blockbuster rentals just to discover a world of cinematic gems like “Attack of the Killer Tomatoes” or “Teen Wolf Too”? It was like rolling the dice every Friday night—were we going to end up with an underwhelming B-movie or that glorious guilty pleasure we’d watch at least ten times before promptly forgetting it even existed? Spoiler alert: it was usually the former, and somehow we survived without a million streaming services reminding us of that fact.
Ah, but the real tragedy was trying to rewind those bad boys. If you didn’t return your tape in perfect condition, you'd be hit with a fee at Blockbuster, which was basically like being charged rent for your old roommate who always borrowed your favorite jeans and returned them with a mysterious stain. Oh sure, the technology of the time may have sucked, but at least it built character—totally different from the current "streaming" era that only builds impatience and rage when your Wi-Fi is slower than a snail on sedatives.
And let’s talk about music. What did we even do without Spotify or Pandora? Our hearts would race each time we pressed play on a mixtape made with the precision of a NASA launch plan. We spent hours standing next to the radio like creeps, whispered prayers to the deejay gods, all so we could hit "record" on our cassette player at the precise moment "I Want it That Way" came on. Today’s kids will never know the sweet taste of success—or the bitter disappointment—of capturing that one perfect song while simultaneously being ghosted by their crushes. They think ghosting is a modern phenomenon, but boy oh boy, did we get ghosted by our favorite songs more than we care to admit.
So here we are, braving the actual adult world, equipped with our bag of Quikrete and an 80s aesthetic that still clings to us like last month’s mustard stain. In a world obsessed with influencers and filters, it’s no small miracle we, the Resilient Gen Xers, survived without social media “validation.” Our validation was derived from surviving toxic friendships, hot summers spent in the sweltering sun chasing ice cream trucks, and a collective avoidance of adulthood that would make even Ferris Bueller proud. Even though we’re now one foot in a nursing home and the other in the pool of denial, I’d take a walkman and a pair of acid-washed jeans over a smartphone any day—if only I could remember where I left them...