25 "You Just Had To Be There" Aspects Of Pre-2020s Childhood That Older Adults Will Instantly Remember
Nothing makes me feel older than remembering the days of going to my family's computer room and popping in The Sims or logging into AOL Instant Messenger. It's wild to think kids today will never share these core memories. So when redditor u/Subject_Thorn asked the r/AskReddit community to share the things that 2020s kids won't ever experience, older adults had a lot to say. Here are a few that made me feel incredibly nostalgic.
1."Waiting for a new episode to come on at 7:30 and yelling into the kitchen that it's starting."
"Or actually wanting the commercial break to be longer so you could make it to the bathroom and back without missing any of the show. Also, if you missed an episode, you were just out of luck. If you were lucky, you could catch a rerun of it, but that was far from a guarantee."
2."I was at work the other day when our department's landline phone started ringing. One of my coworkers (my age-ish, 30s) called out, 'I'll get it!' I felt a weird sort of sad, nostalgic pang. You don't hear that much anymore."
"As kids, we would race to see who could answer the phone first. Nowadays, I do everything possible to avoid answering my phone."
3."Downloading a song for two hours and finding out it's a virus."
"Queueing five songs on LimeWire before bed and hoping at least a few get downloaded in the morning."
4."Waking up early on Saturday morning so you could watch the next episode of your favorite cartoon."
5."Calling your crush's house and politely asking a scary dad if you can speak with Tanya. And then they say, 'That depends, who's calling?"
"Or the anxiety knowing your crush is going to call and thinking your mom or dad was on the line listening."
6."Hearing your favorite song on the radio and waiting for it to come on again so you can record it on a blank cassette tape to listen to later."
7."Watching that ticker at the bottom of the TV to see if school was closed, only for them to cut to a commercial when it's time for yours to show up. I watched that thing like an NBA draft."
"I had to listen to the radio. If I missed my town, I'd have to wait a half hour for it to start again."
8."Driving to someplace new with an actual physical map."
"Or not even having that and instead, going off a crudely drawn map on the back of a napkin or some such with 'Turn right at the big red barn' style directions."
9."Going to the movie store."
"Ah, the smell of a Blockbuster on a Friday (or Thursday night if you were having a friend over on Friday): popcorn and brittle plastic. TAKE ME BACK."
10."Having to watch the nightly news with your parents because you only have one TV."
11."Dial-up internet and AOL chat rooms."
12."Life without smartphones."
"Before smartphones, there was no expectation for you to respond so fast and no location tracking. You could just disappear for a bit and get back to them later. Now the expectation is you just about always have your phone on you and are therefore reachable."
13."Buying a video game with everything it should have on it without providing an update or paying for extra content."
"My son got an Xbox Series S, and it took me half a day to download Fortnite, set up all the accounts, and work out how to set the parental controls so that he could play online with his friends. By the end, I was so fed up with going back and forth between my phone and the Xbox, inputting PINs and passwords, that I was ready to throw it out of the window.
It made me pine for the PlayStation days when you only had to worry about a scratched disk and whether your memory card had enough free slots."
14."Being responsible for zero parental contact and simply needing to come home when the streetlights came on."
15."Scheduling your television consumption around an ironclad TV schedule, pre-streaming and pre-TiVo/recording. Not to get all Boomer sounding, but I feel that the strict schedule and dealing with the consequences of being late/missing entire episodes had an enormous impact on society's overall sense of entitlement."
16."The joy of going to school without social media. I remember getting bullied in middle school and having a terrible time. But all that could have been so much worse if smartphones and apps were a thing back then. Kids today must be so stressed out just trying to tune it out."
17."Fixing the antenna to get a better picture on the TV or making one with a coat hanger."
18."Meeting family/friends at the gate at the airport instead of baggage claim or the curb."
19."Choking to death on smoke wafting over from the smoking section of every restaurant while you try to eat."
20."Exploration. As kids, we played video games, but we also went outdoors, finding forest areas to investigate. We enjoyed checking out odd areas people generally would never go into, such as those little wooded areas between roads. Our parents didn't care as long we gave them an idea of what we were doing ahead of time in case we got lost or hurt. We would have a small fire, just enough to roast some marshmallows, and then put it out and usually make it back in time for supper."
21."Developing a roll of film and all the pictures are bad."
22."Getting kicked off the internet because mom needs to make a call."
23."Having to check the newspapers to see when new movies were released and what theater they were playing at. Kids today won't ever experience that."
24."Snow on Christmas, at least most of the time. I'm almost as far north in the USA as you can get, and snow just doesn't stick around anymore. It snows once or twice in December, and it melts in a day. Twenty-five years ago, you were lucky if there wasn't a blizzard on Halloween."
25."Having a CD binder the size of Merriam-Webster's dictionary for road trips."
"Every time my best mate and I would drive out of the city, I'd make us a new one to capture the trip. RIP our CD folder."
Is there anything you grew up with that kids today will never experience? Let us know in the comments, or fill out this anonymous form!
Note: Responses have been edited for length and/or clarity.