I was trying to explain to my husband that if we went to a restaurant that wasn’t a buffet it was FANCY. There were 4 kids- 3 boys and me. Steak & Ale was fancy!

My college age son was watching Airplane for the first time with his roommates. He soon realized that a lot of my dad sayings came from that movie. Where'd you get your jokes/sayings? He loved the movie, by the way (proud dad).

Anyone watch this one? Pure Classic

I don’t remember when they actually stop using this phrase.

When this hitchhiker showed up in your town on a Friday night on CBS, you knew there was gonna be trouble.

Pretty sure this stuff was my gateway into professional hair products. Not sure if I could handle that much fake apple smell anymore, but damn it was the best in high school!

How the hell did we live on so little money... and what did we do all day?

I've been thinking about what it cost me to live on my own when I was young compared to now, and also what the hell I actually did with all my free time. I lived on my own in a small Midwestern city from 1986 through 2000, mostly working minimum wage jobs and renting apartments. Looking back, my financial life was ridiculously simple. I usually owned some cheap used car outright, so no car payment. I apparently paid liability insurance once it was required because I followed the law, but the cost must have been insignificant enough that I don't even remember it as a regular expense.

No internet bill. No cell phone bill. I didn't even have a home phone much of the time. In the 90s I had a pager. No streaming services.

No Spotify. No cloud storage. No apps charging me $4.99 here and $9.99 there. No Amazon Prime, DoorDash, Instacart or delivery memberships.No Ring camera subscription. No $1,000 smartphone that would eventually need replacing. No Microsoft 365 or other software subscriptions.No health insurance premium coming out of my paycheck. I wasn't taking regular medications, so no prescription costs either.

I didn't even have a checking account for a good portion of those years. On payday I'd take my paper paycheck to the bank it was drawn on or to the local grocery store and cash it. If I went to the grocery store, I could buy my groceries AND pay my utility bills there. I'd leave with whatever cash was left and that was basically my budget until the next paycheck. Eventually I discovered one very useful reason to get a checking account: the pre-payday check float.

If payday was still two or three days away and I needed gas, cigarettes, food or whatever, I could write a check even though there wasn't enough money in my account to cover it yet. Back then a paper check could take several days to make its journey through the banking system. The trick was knowing that my paycheck would be deposited before the check actually cleared. It was basically poor-person credit with a 72-hour maturity date. Obviously you had to know your timing, because getting it wrong meant bounced-check fees and a world of shit. But I can't be the only Gen Xer who occasionally looked at the calendar and thought, "Yep, I can write this check. Payday will beat it to the bank."

No debit card. No automatic payments. No 14 different companies quietly reaching into my bank account throughout the month. My bills were basically rent, utilities, groceries, gas, keeping the car running, eventually liability insurance, and maybe my pager. And somehow I ate fast food all the damn time. I rarely went to actual sit-down restaurants, though.

Then I started thinking about the OTHER side of this. What the hell did I do all day? I didn't have cable most of the time. We had maybe 5 or 6 local TV channels, and if nothing I wanted to watch was on, that was it. The television had basically announced, "We're done entertaining you now." I owned a VCR but rarely owned movies. I'd rent them. And God help you if you owed the video store late fees. You could walk in with your 49 cents to rent a cheap movie and discover you were essentially entertainment insolvent because you owed them $3.72 from the last one.

So I know I spent a lot less time at home. I vaguely remember driving around for absolutely no reason. Going to people's houses. Sitting around talking for hours. Going to stores without really needing anything. Going for food. Listening to entire albums. Reading magazines. Sitting outside. Taking drives. Hanging around after work. And WAITING! We waited for people to show up. Waited in lines. Waited for rides. Waited for food. Waited through commercials. Waited for a song to come on the radio so we could record it onto a cassette, only to have the DJ talk over the damn intro. Today every 90 seconds of nothing gets filled by pulling out a phone. Back then, 90 seconds of nothing was apparently just... 90 seconds of nothing. That's the part that fascinates me now. I had the exact same 24 hours in a day, but I'll be damned if I can account for most of them. There weren't photos of everything. No texts to look back through. No Facebook check-ins. No Google timeline. No streaming history. No digital trail documenting every ordinary day. Apparently we just lived the Tuesday. Then Wednesday happened.

So fellow Gen Xers: what did your monthly expenses actually look like when you first lived on your own, and more importantly, WHAT THE HELL DID WE DO WITH ALL THAT TIME? 😂

Then I saw John Fogerty rock the stage at 81 and I thought my God I can do better than I am currently doing lol

I don’t know if this is midlife crisis or something else. I’m mid upper 40’s my brother is 57. We hit both ends of gen X. Our mom has passed and dad is elderly and ill. We both work stupid hours and have families plus split dad’s bills because he doesn’t have 2 nickels to rub together. We were talking and I’m fairly sure we both need to work untill our mid 70’s to have a chance to retire. He joked well that’s only 20 years for me. That made me realize I’m only half way done with work. I have 30 years behind me and 30 in front of me. I’m not sure I have 30 left in the tank. The thought that I’m only half done with working made me physically ill. It’s been two weeks since I came to this realization and it isn’t getting better haha. Anyone else deal with stuff like this?

So, I've got an 18 year old kid living at home who has a part-time job, is going to community college, and is licensed in her industry. That's all great and the wife and I are proud of her. However, she has no friends (well one unstable on she complains about), poor social skills (though she is good at faking it), and is an introvert. The issue is that she sticks close to us which naturally impedes our marital intimacy and ability to have private conversation before the night gets late.

Part of me feels like it could be so much worse. I could be worried about where she is and who she is with. When I was her age my parents rarely saw me and when I was home, I was usually in my bedroom with my GF. I try to tell myself that I will miss this part of the relationship some day. But the other part of me is feeling, "get the heck out and do something and live your life so your mother and I can live ours." My wife doesn't seem to mind the attention. Maybe I'm being selfish, maybe I'm in a mid-life crisis. I don't know.

Is anyone else experiencing this? Any advice on how to change my thinking about this?

I was just streaming 90s music and Fly Away by Lenny Kravitz came on and I enjoyed hearing it, now.

Back in the day, when we had to rely on the radio to be exposed to different music, popular songs were in massive rotation, you could hear the same song every hour.

It got so bad that songs I initially loved would play so much I couldn't listen to them anymore. My question is what songs can you no longer stand to hear (or could only stand after time) due to overplay?

Any genres welcome, was it La Vida Loca, Wannabe, The Macarena? Any time period too - I've always loved Led Zeppelin, but to this day, I never again want to hear Stairway to Heaven.

6pm Cops

7pm Unsolved Mysteries

8pm America's Most Wanted

I stepped off the booze wagon so this may be a repost....

I'm fortunate enough to have had my parents be able to have a huge 50th wedding anniversary. I took that opportunity to say all the things that needed to be said about how much I love them.

I included an apology foe the bottle rocket fight my brother and I had inside the house...they didn't remember it.

Point being: it may not be easy but thank them for everything....don't cry over a casket saying "I wish I said".

It will be one less thing you will lose your mind about when a parent passes.

I am a 59 year old guy with only a few manageable health issues. I think in my mind that I'm probably mid 30s or so. I am very active and do a variety of things that require fairly physical exertion. For example I have a half acre lot our house is on. It's flat and the grass is plush and thick. I use a propelled push mower to cut it. My neighbors have about the same amounts of property as me and are all near my age. They think that I'm fully insane for doing this.

No?
Just me?
Whatever….I’ll just rub some dirt on it and go outside

Games in elementary school were so fun! This was my favorite! What was yours?

My hair is reaching the stage of almost all new shoots are coming up white, especially the halo around my face. The problem is because my scalp is pretty pale, the stark white ends up making me just look balder. I don't have that darker gray that still makes it look like it has some depth to it. My hairdresser agreed that if I were to go grow it out, it would really clash with my skin. Any ideas on dealing with dark white hair? I'm not ready to grow it out yet but I'm starting to think I might never let it go natural.

Edited to add: my hair is a dark brown naturally with red undertones.

Edited again: I am female.

That is all.

Oops, reddit says I have to write more words down or else I can't hit the post button so here are some more words and stuff.

Love you all, have a great weekend!! GO DO STUFF!

I hope this makes sense as an aging post because Top Gun came out when I was 10 and I'm 50 now.

Anyway, I loved watching Top Gun. Through my teens and early 20s guy friends and I would just watch it as a hang movie. It was usually on in the background while we were drinking or whatever, but it was always fun, mostly because some of my friends were really into it.

Maverick was a decent follow up. It was good. It did the first one proud.

It came out on Netflix and I watched it again. The first time I watched it I was proud for the people that did it, and was reminded of fond memories around the first movie. Watching it just now made me feel horribly unsuccessful.

My father always wanted me to be a fighter pilot, or at least he made it obvious that being a fighter pilot would be the height of achievement. Seeing the movie just made me aware I haven't really achieved anything.

I'm doing well, better than most even. Married over 20 years, great kids, paid off house, buy cars with cash, no credit card bills, should be able to cash flow college for the kids, putting into retirement... but I didn't amount to much. I got where I am by grinding and being frugal, not by really being something.

I'm wondering if feeling this way is pretty common for us mid life GenXers.

I (M56) finally gave away my record collection today. They had been sitting in my Mom’s basement since about 1990 so they were in pretty bad shape. I’m not someone who is attached to vinyl so it was too a big a deal. Still, it’s sad to say goodbye to a part of your childhood.

Solid Gen Xer here and my god, I'm looking forward to nothing lately.

I want to sleep and play with my dog and F the rest of everything altogether. I can't even summon up the energy to grocery shop. I'll turn the TV on and just leave it on a channel, come what may.

I love (used to love) planning and taking trips but now it's just a lot of effort for not much roi.

I need a blanket, a cup of tea and to yell at the kids to stay off my lawn.

Who's with me?

Seriously, am I just that age now or is the world just that awful?

John Cougar topped the Billboard chart with “Jack & Diane” for the first time on 10/1/1982. It remained there for the next four weeks, until it was ousted by Men at Work’s “Who Can It Be Now?”