When I was a kid, adults used to bore me to tears with their tedious diatribes about how hard things were. When they were growing up; what with walking twenty-five miles to school every morning, uphill, barefoot, both ways,adda, yadda, yadda . And I remember promising myself that when I grew up, there was no way in hell I was going to lay a bunch of crap like that on my kids about how hard I had it and how easy they've got it! But now that I'm over the ripe old age of thirty, I can't help but look around and notice the youth of today. You've got it so easy! I mean, compared to my childhood, you live in a damn Utopia! And I hate to say it, but you kids today, you don't know how good you've got it!

When I was a kid we didn't have the Internet. If we wanted to know something, we had to go to the damn library and look it up ourselves, in the card catalog!!

There was no email! We had to actually write somebody a letter - with a pen! Then you had to walk all the way across the street and put it in the mailbox, and it would take like a week to get there! Stamps were 10 cents!

Child Protective Services didn't care if our parents beat us. As a matter of fact, the parents of all my friends also had permission to kick our ass! Nowhere was safe!

There were no MP3's or Napsters or iTunes! If you wanted to steal music, you had to hitchhike to the record store and shoplift it yourself!

Or you had to wait around all day to tape it off the radio, and the DJ would usually talk over the beginning and @#*% it all up! There were no CD players! We had tape decks in our car.. We'd play our favorite tape and "eject" it when finished, and then the tape would come undone rendering it useless. Cause, hey, that's how we rolled, Baby! Dig?

We didn't have fancy crap like Call Waiting! If you were on the phone and somebody else called, they got a busy signal, that's it!

There weren't any freakin' cell phones either. If you left the house, you just didn't make a damn call or receive one. You actually had to be out of touch with your "friends". OH MY GOD !!! Think of the horror, not being in touch with someone 24/7!!! And then there's texting. Yeah, right. Please! You kids have no idea how annoying you are.

And we didn't have fancy Caller ID either! When the phone rang, you had no idea who it was! It could be your school, your parents, your boss, your bookie, your drug dealer, the collection agent, you just didn't know!!! You had to pick it up and take your chances, mister!

We didn't have any fancy PlayStation or Xbox video games with high-resolution 3-D graphics! We had the Atari 2600! With games like "Space Invaders" and "Asteroids." Your screen guy was a little square! You actually had to use your imagination! And there were no multiple levels or screens, it was just one screen -- forever! And you could never win. The game just kept getting harder and harder and faster and faster until you died! Just like lfe!

You had to use a little book called a TV Guide to find out what was on! You were screwed when it came to channel surfing! You had to get off your ass and walk over to the TV to change the channel! No remotes! Oh, no, what's the world coming to?

There was no Cartoon Network either! You could only get cartoons on Saturday Morning. Do you hear what I'm saying? We had to wait all week for cartoons, you spoiled little rat-finks!

And we didn't have microwaves. If we wanted to heat something up, we had to use the stove! Imagine that!

And our parents told us to stay outside and play -- all day long. Oh, no, no electronics to soothe and comfort. And if you came back inside you were doing chores!

And car seats - oh, please! Mom threw you in the back seat and you hung on. If you were luckily, you got the "safety arm" across the chest at the last moment if she had to stop suddenly, and if your head hit the dashboard, well that was your fault for calling "shotgun" in the first place!

See! That's exactly what I'm talking about! You kids today have got it too easy. You're spoiled rotten! You guys wouldn't have lasted five minutes back in 1980 or any time before!

 

Good stuff.

We didn't have FPS either. We had rock fights.

 

Haha.. I used to love the safety arm. When I was about 3 or so, I would actually stand up in the front seat so I could see. Somehow, my mom always kept me from going through the front windshield when she hit the brakes.


10/10 for nostalgic purposes.

 

^ Yeah! We used to use string to tie rocks to pieces of plastic wrap or paper and throw them in the air to fall down like paratroopers.

 

Damm thanks raptor for reminding me how old I am

10/10

 

......and somehow we survived.

 

I'm 18 and I would have preferred to have grown up 20 years ago. I'm more of an outdoorsy person and I hate how everyone is into video games and there is no creativity in finding fun stuff to do.

 

Amen to that!

 

And no cable TV either! I remember when we had one - yes one! - channel. It was a CBS affiliate. We didn't get NBC and ABC until they put a tower on a nearby mountain.

I still don't watch TV on Saturday evenings. This comes from a childhood where one station would be playing Lawrence Welk from 7:00 to 7:30 while the other two played Hee Haw. At 7:30, they switched programs so one was playing Hee Haw while the other two played Lawrence Welk.

Still gives me shivers to think about.

 

When I was a kid, we didn't have those fancy "smart phones". If we wanted a cell phone, we got a Motorola RAZR or nothing at all. We couldn't even surf the web to get answers to test questions! We had to risk getting caught texting classmates.

Oh, and those fancy gaming computers? PUH-LEEZE! We had to do our gaming on Pentium 4 computers with 128MB graphics cards. Talk about primitive! Yeah, you heard right, those were SINGLE-CORE processors! And they weren't cheap, either! If you wanted a decent computer, you had to pay $500! That was a lot of money back then.

Cars that get 50 miles to the gallon? Back then, those were so futuristic that we imagined that anything that got that kind of mileage would have to have wings. We had to settle for 30 miles to the gallon and like it! Gas was only $2.50 a gallon back then though, so there was a silver lining to that cloud.

Google wasn't even a twinkle in Lawrence and Sergey's eye yet. If we wanted to find something out, we had to search on Yahoo! Forget Wikipedia. If we needed to know something, we had to use Encarta. Talk about awkward!

Our schools didn't transport us anywhere in charter buses, either. We rode the school bus. Uphill. Both ways. In three feet of snow.

Yeah, we had it rough when I was a kid. But that's what made me so tough.