Ah, the 80s and 90s—a simpler time when our biggest worries were figuring out if we had enough quarters to play the latest arcade game and whether our big hair was too big. Back then, your biggest complaint was trying to avoid the Dreaded Nuclear Bomb Drills at school or getting gum in your hair while pretending to be a member of Salt-N-Pepa. If you weren’t sporting a pair of neon leg warmers and rollerblading to your friend's house with a Tamagotchi keychain twirling around your finger, then what were you even doing with your life?
Remember when snack time wasn’t a “health” crisis? A well-balanced meal consisted of a Lunchables platter featuring more plastic than meat, and you thought that sipping on Hi-C right after devouring a stack of Cosmic Brownies was a well-crafted diet plan? You simply washed it all down with an ice-cold Surge, feeling the sweet high of sugar and caffeine course through your veins like you were ready to battle a level in Super Mario. And don’t even get me started on those glorious days spent exploring digital worlds in Duck Hunt, where our biggest foes were pixelated ducks and the occasional, unstoppable cat who had zero respect for a universal lending rule: “One turn at the Nintendo, please.”
The decade of the Walkman and scrunchies had us frolicking into our living rooms for family TV night—where watching 90210 was a rite of passage and nobody questioned the "bizarre" plot lines of Full House. Who among us didn’t want to dress like Kelly Kapowski and strut around like you just finished a game of double-dutch? Only to get home and realize that your hair resembled a cross between a poodle and a bad middle-part hairstyle gone wrong. But that was okay! Because we had slap bracelets to distract us from whatever it was we were actually trying to achieve.
Fast forward to today, and what are our daughters doing? Staring into glowing rectangles as if they’ve become some sort of modern-day sorcerers. Their pillow fort is now a carefully curated Instagram feed, and their idea of “fun” is a TikTok challenge that requires too much coordination to even remotely resemble the moonwalk at a middle school dance. I’m just glad I grew up in a time where the harshest energy drink we had was Squeeze-It, and our biggest worries lay entirely in the fluorescent-colored candy stash hidden inside our backpacks. Honestly, I’d trade all this “adulting” nonsense for the thrill of duck hunting and the sweet, sticky embrace of Fruit Roll-Ups.