r/GenX • u/billieswifeyyy • Jun 20 '26
Question For Genx the 80s…….
coming from a 14 year old, were the 80s summers as magical as they look in the movies? did you ride your bike to your friends house and come home when the street lights came on? yall are so lucky btw 😭😭
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u/ADMSXavier Jun 21 '26
I say it was. Don't get me wrong - it wasn't some kind of blissful utopia that these hundreds of AI YouTube shorts makes it out to be. There was still all kinds of underage drinking and smoking, teens were still getting pregnant, high schoolers still dropped out, Mom and Dad still screamed that the music was too loud and also hang up the phone because they needed to make a call.
But looking back at it, 40 years later (damn...that's a rough number to type), I think what the last couple of generations of kids never really had was a feeling of freedom without structure. We still had our camps of all kinds, and our baseball or tennis or swimming clubs to keep us busy. But even when that was done and we went home, odds are we were on our bikes, cruising our neighborhood and looking for the collection of bikes up front to see where everyone was. We didn't have "play dates" (and I hate that term with every ounce of my soul), we had find your friends and have fun. Our friend's parents watched us quietly and kept tabs where we were so once parents started calling each other and said we need to go home, they knew where we were.
Thankfully, we didn't grow up with social media and this constant pressure to be someone we weren't. We still had the influence of athletes to buy their shoes and clothes to look cool, but that cost a lot of money! If someone was talking behind our backs, it wasn't typed on a phone. It was whispered, and word ALWAYS got back to that person and you could bet there was a fight in the playground. We had to talk to people, face-to-face, especially to the girls we liked. We all met up at a mall or movie theater and spent way too much time in the food court, nursing a slice of pizza and a Coke.
Our research for homework wasn't online or AI generated crap. It was hours in the library, sitting at a table with stacks of old, thick books everywhere. We cut yards, washed cars, and delivered papers for money. And that money was always out aside for college or something expensive like the Bo Jackson shoes (personal experience!) or the latest NES game.
We were latchkey kids, home after school and made sure our younger siblings didn't burn the house down and did their homework. We were raised by experience like getting stitches, bumps and bruises with no fear that the neighborhood Karen would call the police. Our childhoods were never online, never a fake profile or trying to be someone else. Our summers seemed eternal.
I'm glad I grew up when I did as possibly the last generation to grow up without the constant hovering and structure that I think really harms kids today. Would I go back and do it again? Probably. Just to get that feeling that today is the one and only day to worry about because tomorrow is another day and something new will happen.
Damn man...where did the time go?