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gen x nostalgia

Joy

People are sharing all the random things they 'haven't thought about since grade school'

"The flavor of the wooden spoon haunts me to this day."

via Twitter

Everyone's childhood is different. But there are common objects, sights, sounds, smells, and memories from elementary school that most Gen Xers and Millenials share.

Personally, when i think back to being in elementary school in the '80s, I remember the taste of the chocolate ship cookie we got on Fridays (with the pizza). The humiliation of getting nailed in the back during nation ball. And the grumbling, grinding sound that happened when you slipped a disk into the drive on an Apple IIe computer.

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elementary school nostalgia
Pop Culture

People are sharing the things that have been 'killed' by the internet

Here are 19 of the things people miss the most.

via Pexels

Teens taking a selfie.

Whether you think the internet has been a net positive or negative for the world, there’s no debating that it has changed nearly everything. The change has been so rapid and abrupt that humanity hasn’t really come to grips with this new reality. It’s like we’re constantly playing catch-up.

There was the first wave of the internet that completely wiped out physical media such as record stores and magazines. Then there was a revolution with social media that changed the way people interact and gave everyone a voice online.

Some point to Facebook’s addition of the “like” button in 2010 as the moment when social media became an addiction, with people chasing approval and dopamine hits. While others say that the addition of the “ share” button the same year completely changed reality because it allowed bad ideas to take wing.

Now, nearly 30 years after the internet became available to the average person, there is a generation growing up that never knew what life was like before the ’net. But for the rest of us, there are still memories of a time when people went to Blockbuster video to get a movie, dialed people on rotary phones and found an intersection on a Thomas Guide map.

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technology
Pop Culture

The 'Sunscreen Song' is 25. Here’s why the advice from the Gen X anthem is still important.

Remember the moving graduation speech that became an unlikely hit?

via SteffyWeffy777/YouTube

The video for "Everybody's Free (to Wear Sunscreen)."

On June 1, 1997, the Chicago Tribune published columnist Mary Schmich's fantasy commencement speech entitled, "Advice, like youth, probably just wasted on the young." In the piece, she lamented that "Inside every adult lurks a graduation speaker dying to get out," but most of us, "will never be invited to sow our words of wisdom among an audience of caps and gowns."

Next came her attempt to share the knowledge she's learned with the graduating "Class of '97." In the column she shares one piece of advice she is sure about—“wear sunscreen”—and a litany of wisdom that she admits “has no basis more reliable than my own meandering experience.”

Among Schmich’s observations is that we should remain close to our siblings, appreciate our youth and never be reckless with other people’s hearts.

The title of her piece suggests it would never be embraced by her target audience. But in a strange twist of fate, it would become a pop culture phenomenon that in the late ’90s was an inescapable part of youth culture.

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gen x
Culture

17 things we all used in the year 2000 but never do today

via notionscapital/Flickr and Hades2k/Flickr

Blockbuster video sign and pagers.

In “Back to the Future,” teenager Marty McFly goes back in time 30 years, from 1985 to 1955. But what if the film were made today and he went back from 2021 to 1991? I think the culture shock of a modern teenager going from a post-to-pre internet world would be much greater than the one that Marty experienced in the original film.

Would a kid from today be able to dial a payphone? Read a clock with actual hands? Look up directions on a Thomas Guide map?

A lot has changed since the dawn of the new millennium so a group of Redditors marked the changes in a post entitled: “What is something that was used heavily in the year 2000, but it's almost never used today?”

Here are 17 of the best posts.

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1990s
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