Buckle up, buttercup, because this Gen Xer has had it with your avocado toast, TikToks, and your constant need for affirmation from internet strangers. Back in my day — yes, I said it, my day — stuff made sense. It worked. And when it didn’t, we didn’t write a review about it; we just smacked it until it started working again or gave up and went outside like feral little analog gremlins.
Let’s start with phones, shall we? Phones used to be for calling people. You had to memorize numbers. You’d twirl that rotary dial like a damn magician, praying no one had a zero in their number because that took forever. And if you were lucky enough to get a cordless phone? You felt like a god. Now your phone is a surveillance brick that tracks your every move and listens to your conversations so it can sell you pants after you think about pants. Creepy.
Music? Don’t even get me started. We had mixtapes. Real ones. With tape. If your tape got chewed up, you didn’t cry — you pulled out a pencil and performed surgery like a cassette-cardiologist. We had to earn our playlists. No skipping a thousand songs because one had too many sad vibes. If you wanted a song, you sat by the radio with your finger on the record button like you were defusing a bomb. And when the DJ talked over the intro? You lived with it. Character building.
And TV — oh, sweet linear TV. If you missed a show, you missed it. There was no pause. No streaming. No “let me just watch one more episode.” If you got up to pee during a commercial, you had 90 seconds and the bladder of an Olympic sprinter. Now kids are binge-watching 12 seasons in a weekend while complaining that the intro’s too long. Too long?! We used to respect intros. We sang them. Together. As a family.
Let’s not forget toys. You know what toys we had? Metal. Sharp edges. Paint with lead in it. We built character by surviving our own toys. Lawn darts! Chemistry sets that could dissolve your skin! We didn’t need participation trophies; we needed tetanus shots.
Social media? HA. You know what we called social media? Outside. You went to a friend’s house, knocked on the door (like a psychopath by today’s standards), and asked if they could come out and play. If their mom said no? You went to the next friend. Repeat. It was the original version of “leaving someone on read.”
And don’t even try to tell me about “influencers.” In our day, the only influencer was that one kid with a Slipknot shirt, a mohawk, and a chain wallet who dared to rollerblade in the street. He didn’t need likes — he had scars.
You know what else used to be better? Childhood. Our parents didn’t just let us go outside — they kicked us out. “Don’t come back until the streetlights are on,” they said. That was our only rule. No GPS tracking, no Life360 alerts, just a vague sense that if you were screaming loud enough someone’s mom might hear you.
And we were out there like little suburban Mad Max extras, riding our cheap BMX bikes with foam pads on the crossbar like we were Evel Knievel reincarnated. No helmets. No supervision. Just a horde of dusty, sunburned kids with scraped knees and pockets full of questionable candy, terrorizing the neighborhood with bottle rockets and bad decisions.
Adults used to cross the street when they saw us coming — not because we were dangerous, but because we were unpredictable. You didn’t know if we were playing tag or re-enacting a scene from “The A-Team.” And you didn’t want to find out. Free-range Gen X kids were feral. We drank from garden hoses. We climbed trees we knew had wasp nests. We launched off makeshift ramps built from plywood and two bricks, and if you survived, you became legend.
Half of us didn’t even know cars had seatbelts until we were teenagers. You got tossed in the back of a station wagon with your siblings, three Happy Meal toys, and the family dog, and you just rolled around like luggage. No booster seats. No five-point harness. Just the sheer will to survive and maybe a crumpled paper map sliding around under your butt.
And God forbid it was summer and you had to wear shorts — those metal seatbelt buckles would brand your thigh with a Chrysler logo hotter than the surface of the sun. That wasn’t just a seatbelt. That was a warning from the gods. You learned. Once.
So yeah, seatbelts. Optional. Much like adult supervision, water breaks, and sunscreen under SPF 8. But we lived, baby. And now we have the bad backs and mysterious scars to prove it.
And let’s talk about Saturday mornings — the one sacred time of the week when children ruled the living room. You’d tiptoe out like a ninja at dawn, blanket cape trailing behind you, and plant yourself in front of that wood-paneled Zenith TV that weighed as much as a Buick. Why? Because you had one job: Be quiet. Don’t. Wake. The parents.
You poured yourself a sad little bowl of dry Cheerios — no milk, because if you spilled any, that carpet stain would outlive you — and settled in for the holy trinity of Looney Tunes, He-Man, and Thundercats. You didn’t have a remote. You were the remote. You turned that dial with a satisfying clunk and knew that if you didn’t like what was on? Tough. You only had like seven channels and three of them were static or a preacher yelling at you.
And commercials? You watched them. You memorized jingles, you dreamed of sugary cereals with toys inside that your mom would never buy, and you begged for Nerf guns, Slip ‘N Slides, and dolls that peed for some reason.
Lunch? Oh, please. No DoorDash. No lunchables with pre-cut deli meats. You made your own PB&J with whatever bread hadn’t gone stale and the peanut butter that was basically a brick in a jar. Knife bent? That was your problem. No crusts cut off. You got the whole sandwich, and if you were lucky, maybe a warm juice box that tasted like sugar and metal.
You packed that lunch in a tin lunchbox with a thermos that always leaked and had the unmistakable smell of old soup and defeat. And you carried it yourself. Uphill. Both ways. In the snow. (Okay, maybe not everywhere, but you get the point.)
So yeah, don’t talk to me about your personalized meal kits and on-demand cartoons. We survived our childhoods fueled by artificial flavors, questionable safety standards, and sheer spite. And now we are unstoppable. Slightly creaky, emotionally repressed… but unstoppable.
So yeah, everything used to be better. Not because it was perfect, but because it was gloriously flawed. And we were too busy living to notice. Now excuse me while I go find my Walkman, slap in some Pixies, and yell at a cloud.
You’re welcome.
Not going to lie, this post was mostly generated by ChatGPT. But, I thought it was hilarious, so am posting here. I did some minor editing/combining of prompt responses.