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, they walked 25 miles to school every morning, uphill, barefoot, in the snow…yadda, yadda, yadda.
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 older, 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 freakin’ 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 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!
Child Protective Services didn’t care if our parents beat us. As a matter of fact, other parents also had permission to kick our bums if we misbehaved- 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!
We didn’t have fancy stuff 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 any calls or receive one. You actually had to be out of touch with your “friends”. Oh my gosh, the horror of not being in touch with everyone 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, a 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 LIFE!)
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!!!
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 brats!
There were no 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. 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 lucky, 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 “shot gun” in the first place!
See? You kids today have got it too easy. You’re spoiled rotten! You guys wouldn’t have lasted five minutes back in 70s or 80s or any time before!
(shared by a friend via email- original author unknown)
This is hilarious and oh so, true!
Just think if you were born even earlier like I was…That stuff sounds like heaven to me.
We’ve always used that “when we were your age we had to get up to change the channels on the TV AND we only got three stations” with our daughter – she cracks up when we say that!
HILARIOUS!! I got the “Safety Arm” MANY times growing up, LOL!
Very funny – in many ways life is easier, but in some of the more important ways I think life is going to be harder for them. I am scared to see my daughter grow up, go to school, drive.
Some of it was spot on, some of it not so much. I wonder how old the original author was!
ROFL!!! back in the day when beating your kids was alright and “bad” if you didn’t. Hubby’s family is like that hes got lots of great spoon stories… later they moved to a belt cause hte spoons kept breaking… very happy i was in a family of hippies that didn’t do that lol. Probably would have happened too often.
love it “had to shoplift it yourself…” !!! GREAT!!
Look, there are also advantages to being born in an earlier decade. Plus, when I’m older, I’ll tell my kids “When I was your age, when we wanted to listen to music, we had to plug in these things called HEADPHONES into these things call IPODS. You kids have no idea how good you’ve got it.” And my kids will tell their kids how good they have it, and so on and so forth. It’s an endless cycle. So don’t complain because EVERYONE goes through this at some point.
(P.S. Not all of us are obsessive gamers who only know C.O.D., or kids who only know how to communicate through facebook or texting. You make such generalizations in this article.)
I don’t communicate through facebook either…at the end I wrote that this was a funny email sent to me.
oh shut the **** up. if you had tape decks then you had microwaves and tv remotes. I grew up with all these things and i wish i could have grown up in the sixties and seventies. it would have been way better. hell even the late 1800s/ early 1900s would have been cool.
I thought it was awesome!! ROFLMAO every time I read it. I am 35 and did every single thing that was listed..
Hey, take the story for what it was, lighten up, it was supposed to be funny and it was hilarious and most everything was true in it..
funny your screen name is about quit your bitching, but what are you doing throughout your whole entire post, you hypocritical person your too funny, practice what you preach
This isn’t my post, it was shared with me (I think I wrote that at the end, have to check)…isn’t it funny? I thought I’d share it because it made me laugh.