Ah, the sweet taste of nostalgia, like the leftover crumbs from your favorite Dunkaroos stuck in the couch cushions. Remember the days when our biggest dilemma was whether to spend our lunch money on a bag of Cool Ranch Doritos or a McDonald’s Happy Meal? And now here we are, about a thousand years later, navigating a world that demands we download another app for grocery lists. Can someone please remind me when I signed up for this high-tech rollercoaster? I miss the days when the most complicated device we had was a phone that could only call home—if we snagged the corded rotary model, of course.
Riding the wave of pure ’80s and ’90s magic—or should I say, mediocrity—is almost as exhilarating as trying to explain to my teenagers the concept of a Walkman. "Wait, you mean music wasn’t just free and on-demand? You didn’t have TikTok for every single situation?” they ask with a look on their faces that suggests in this new world, we Gen-Xers must have been living like cavemen. Yes, kids, we walked uphill to school both ways, and when we wanted to hear our favorite bands, we had to literally *wait* for the radio to play them—and then rush to hit ‘record’ on a blank cassette like we were defusing a bomb.
And let’s not even dip our toes into fashion. Anyone still clinging to their parachute pants or mom jeans? Yeah, let’s not. The moment I see someone wearing a fanny pack slung across the chest like it’s the hottest new trend, I can’t help but be reminded of my cousin trying to revive that retro look at every family BBQ—only to be met with the sound of crickets. And let’s talk about grunge! If I hear “Smells Like Teen Spirit” one more time during a coffee run, I might just collapse inward like a black hole of flannel and angst. In my day, that song was the cosmic soundtrack of teenage rebellion—not the universal signal for “welcome to the 90s nostalgia party!”
So here we are, a generation stuck somewhere between VHS tapes and streaming services, lamenting our lost youth while our bodies crack and pop like an old cassette that hasn’t been rewound. Yet somehow, we adapt like the ultimate chameleons, sprinkling sensibility from our childhoods into adulthood, all while scrolling through Instagram—because heaven forbid we miss our chance to flex our youthful exuberance through the lens of filtered selfies. So grab your avocado toast, iron that “I Survived the Y2K Scare” t-shirt you thrifted, and let’s raise a glass of Tang to make-believe we’re cooler than the TikTokers! Because if there’s one thing we’ve mastered, it’s surviving a world that just doesn’t understand the joy of looking for a lost mixtape.