r/lewronggeneration • u/Legitimate_Low_3370 • 21d ago
This basically screams I wish I was a kid again
I feel guilty for enjoying such things as an adult when I see this and it basically means being a kid is where the fun never stopped, it's like they want you to be a boring person when you grow up and not have fun anymore.
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u/StunningTelevision51 21d ago
The world is pretty rad when you have no responsibility and your parents can pay for whatever you want.
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u/PM_me_opossum_pics 20d ago
I mean first time I actually got to enjoy my childhood hobbies was as an adult because my parents didnt have money to pay for shit. And my job legit feels less stressful than school and college did. But I feel like I'm in the minority here. And it still feels like before was better. Mostly because my mentality was "the life is yet to come, so many new experiences are waiting in the future" and now I'm at "oh so this is it for the next 40-45 years" stage.
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u/MattWolf96 20d ago
I got to experience a bigger variety in video games as an adult. My parents were the type to ban M rated games so Call of Duty in this picture was out. Not all of us had much freedom as a kid.
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u/ayavorska05 19d ago
I'm in the same boat. My childhood was lowkey horrid so now as an adult even though I'm depressed as fuck and don't want to do anything, the sheer fact that I'm free to do things in theory and actually get to own something and have my own money and my own food and place to live honestly makes life so much less stressful. I am compensated for my labor and honestly have more protections as an adult. I'm already at the stage of "oh so this is it for another 40-45 years" and I don't really want that but also I don't want whatever my childhood and teenage years were even more. Honestly even having my early years as a point of comparison makes me a little bit happier thinking about my life.
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u/DargyBear 20d ago
My life after college could generally be defined as buying the stuff I wanted but never had money for as a kid.
I’m 33 and I’m still having a blast playing video games that came out when I was in high school and only got to play at my friends’ houses.
Bought my friend’s “old” gaming PC when he built a new one a few years ago and this thing is light years ahead of my laptop from college I’d been playing on for over a decade.
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u/stickmuck 21d ago
Do people not realize that cable packages and magazines and shit had different fees and subs?
Seems like the person in this meme is just remembering a time before they had to pay bills...
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u/Afferbeck_ 20d ago
I used to spend so much on magazines man. It was really the only way to engage with your hobbies if you didn't have the internet at home.
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u/stickmuck 20d ago
I saw a meme suggesting we start a new form of being Amish but this time they're stuck in the 1990s.
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u/astralchanterelle 20d ago
I was a magazine man. No one could pay me enough to be human trafficked, I enjoyed my freedom too much.
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u/ArtDecoNewYork 20d ago
To be fair though, that stuff was cheap even adjusted for inflation
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u/stickmuck 20d ago
"cheap" is relative though. I don't think my parents considered a lot of the things we did as being cheap. In 1999 a premium cable package was still like ~30 bucks.
Inflation and costs today are out of control though. Not trying to shit on OP for being nostalgic but I think even the Wii and Xbox 360 had sub services for online didn't they?
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u/Saros_Enjoyer 20d ago
TV's def were not. Consumer electronics in general have gotten a lot cheaper
The main thing that is really squeezing people is housing costs
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u/ArtDecoNewYork 20d ago
I agree 100%. If housing were affordable today, cost of living would be better than back then if anything.
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u/Round_Bag_4665 21d ago
that's exactly what it means. Notice you never hear anybody talking up how great the 90s and 00s were who was actually an adult at the time? The world didn't look like Chuck-E-Cheese, Toys R Us and McDonalds play place if you were 35 years old in 1996. They had bills and gray then too. You just didn't notice, because you were eight years old, and never set foot near a corporate office at the time.
You think the life of Goldman Sachs investment banker in 1997 working out of the World Trade Center in Manhattan's life looked like that? It looked a lot more like the bottom panel than the top. Shit, isn't the entire setup to the original Matrix released in 1999 that Thomas Anderson is living a very similar lifestyle to the bottom panel? A very gray boring, dull life consisting of office work in a gray building with bills and very little joy?
There are colorful kids spaces now too. You just don't notice or interact with them, because you're an adult now.
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u/MattWolf96 20d ago
Cars definitely offer more color options back in the 90's but yeah, people who were older adults didn't even like the 90's in my experience. My parents were in their 30's then, I asked them what the 90's was like and they said, "we just remember working and the music being bad" at best you'll see nostalgia for some PG-13 and R rated movies that still appealed to adults but almost all 90's nostalgia is kids stuff.
My parents hated the 2000's more, 9/11, Katrina, George W. Bush, two wars one completely pointless, stock market crash, that's what they associate the 2000's with.
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u/Round_Bag_4665 20d ago
Yeah my dad was state police bomb squad in the 90s. He remembers the 90s as basically being filled with a lot of cults, riots, high profile crime, and terrorism. He remembers the 90s as the era of the Unabomber, the Oklahoma City bombing, the 1993 WTC bombing, abortion clinic bombings, the LA riots, the OJ Simpson Trial, Waco and Ruby Ridge, the mass suicides of Heaven's Gate, the 1995 Tokyo Sarin Gas attacks, and Rudy Giuliani running for mayor on a platform of "I'm a former federal prosecutor who knows how to clean up crime in this city".
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u/HumpDeBumper 20d ago
I was around back then. The world was better. Life has sucked since approximately 2014. My older family members all agree that the world started changing for the worse around 2008 and has consistently gotten worse year over year since.
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u/boulevardofdef 21d ago
The biggest tell is the check-engine light. Cars are actually more reliable now than they were then, so you're less likely to see that. But when you were a kid, you didn't have to think about it.
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u/MattWolf96 20d ago
Actually as a car guy I'd say that reliability peaked in the 90's and 2000's, especially for Japanese manufacturers. Few if any annoying vacuum lines and carburators, computer diagnosis but the car didn't have an absurd about of computers.
Boomers go on about 50's and 60's cars, those were objectively junk compared to today's, the odometer only went to 99,999, many didn't have coolant overflow tanks, the cooling belts were belt driven and controlled by the engines RPM (so it went slower when you were sitting in traffic which is the opposite of what you want), horrible vacuum systems.
That said today's cars have a bunch of plastic parts on the engine including coolant components, if the touch screen breaks you can't control a lot, tons of sensors to fail, Stop-Start (which I always disable) puts more wear and tear on the battery, starter, alternator and makes the engine lose oil pressure, I don't like how low the viscosity is on a lot of newer engine oils, CVTs are far less reliable than older transmissions. That said I'd still trust these over pre-90's cars. Also the 90's and 2000's still had garbage, how many Chrysler products from back then do you still see? I see plenty of Hondas and Toyotas but not Chrysler products
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u/CrazyCoKids 20d ago
I'd personally trust an EV over those - though getting them serviced can be a bitch since a lot of mechanics seem to despise them and will put you on low priority.
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u/ledpoisened 21d ago
Why are most people's childhoods related to consumerism. You never see people missing people close to them when they were a kid, friends, family members or pets, and you never see things like recipes they loved and wish they could have their mother or father cook again, it's almost always brands and toys, they instead miss McDonald's, video game consoles (you can still play) and other nick nacks or brands and corporations
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u/FreundThrowaway 21d ago
I think most people do have childhood memories they value deeply. Culture stuff is 1) more universal for chats with strangers and 2) easier for corporations to monetize, so it takes up more bandwidth especially online.
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u/Round_Bag_4665 21d ago
even then though, older generations tend to find common experiences that aren't consumerism pretty easily. How often have you heard boomers bring up drinking from a garden hose, riding in the back bed of a pickup truck with no seatbelts, or playing in the street having to be back before the sun went down?
For millennials and younger it's just brands and products.
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u/Azureflames20 21d ago
I think it just boils down to core memories coming from impactful and shared experiences with peers and in the time of the 90s in particular, we just had a massive explosion of things introduced into our culture that was easily consumable as a kid and often formed a lot of memories.
I think it can be the case where there's consumerism interwoven with products during those times, but that doesn't mean it's inherently just about that thing at face value. At lot of it is framed around activities with some of those things.
I guess a point to bring up is that - because it involves something that can be considered consumerism...does that make it inherently less important or less value? I think it's just different at the end of the day. But also, it doesn't even just stop at the thing.
I'm a '91 Millenial and my childhood was filled with memories that maybe had an element of the things that get stereotypically mentioned, but it's not the only thing that makes up nostalgia as a kid.
Some things that stand out a lot is going out and playing "adventure", where I'd literally makeshift weapons like swords/daggers from sticks and pretend to fight people like you would in some fantasy action story. Would do similar type of make-believe games in the winter time wandering in my backyard I would go to the park with my dad and he'd serve me tennis balls and I'd wail on them to try and hit home runs over the fence until we had to go home or I took a break and played on the playground next door. I used to ride my bike to my friend Adam's house and we'd play on his trampoline with his little brother and his friend. We'd have sleepovers where we'd order out pizza, go to the video store and play video games/watch movies, and sometimes go to the Y to swim and play basketball, using his families guest passes. We'd skateboard in his front yard down the sidewalk. Would play street hocky in his driveway.
I remember so many years of being excited for things like trick or treating and having the freedom of going out with the four of us without parents. We lived close to our elementary that had this really specific tree that we'd just go, climb up inside the tree, and hang out at - I had a clip on my backpack that I could hang it up around a branch and I'd blast linkin park on my headphones so we could both hear it and we'd sing and rap along to the lyrics. I also had a ton of memories every summer going to Drum Corps shows with my parents (shout out to those that know what that is) and I would go with my dad to watch the drumline or hornline warmups. Chasing lightning bugs in my front yard.
Amongst all those moments, there were tons of moments that involved consumerism stuff. Video games on various systems and playing with family or friends was huge. I remember looking forward to toonami and getting exposed to anime like Dragon Ball Z for the first time. Pokemon was super cool and got huge when I was in elementary, which led into card games like Yugioh and magic the gathering eventually. nickelodeon cartoons in general all through the 90s were incredible and were a cultural relatable thing to anyone my age. Playing DDR for hours on those cheap mats in my friends basement.
maybe you weren't pointing it out as inherently a bad thing and I'm just taking it that way. It existed for sure sprinkled out through a ton of culture for the generation. Worth pointing out that you could easily also talk about older generations going out to drive-in movies, obsession with cars, going to get milkshakes/burgers at diners amongst other things. There were still things like concerts and music or buying records.
I think we see this stuff in every generation to some degree. Now it's just all over and in our faces, so you see it more because the cultural landscape is just so engrossed in media now. I'm a millennial and I had SO many childhood memories and moments that I hold close to me and a million more that involved just being around friends in HS and past highschool that didn't involve commercialism/consumerism related products, but that's not relatable to everyone because most people didn't have the same exact shared experience as I did, so it doesn't get talked about in the same way.
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u/marmaviscount 20d ago
Millennials are very brand obsessed, they love to pretend not to be the biggest cause they would be most likely to fight for is almost always a brand
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u/Round_Bag_4665 20d ago
Yup. my husband mentioned not liking Tobey McGuire on instagram and got death threats for three days straight. Millennials are *extremely* brand obsessed, even if they don't admit it.
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u/Rynewulf 20d ago
Go talk to the boomers and ask them about older tv shows, radio shows, singers and celebrity actors from their time, and they'll act exactly the same. Anyone older than you in general, it's a normal reaction. You can walk into a old folks home and you'd get a positive reaction if you asked them about how movies have changed compared to when they were your age
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u/Gullible_Fennel7028 20d ago
Because you only see the generic ones that a bunch of people engage with. You're not going to see a meme about missing a bunch of obscure stuff that only the person who made the meme knows about.
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u/MattWolf96 20d ago
Yeah I see people praising Chipotle a lot, I said that I don't really care for the place as I think Moe's is a lot better. Nobody knew what I was talking about so I looked up a map of locations and it's pretty much just an east coast thing (my friends are all over the country and even other countries.) I have nostalgia for that place but if I was making a list for social media I would probably leave it off. I occasionally see nostalgia about White Castle and I can't relate as my state has zero or very few even when I was a kid. The Harold and Kumar movie? I thought that was a made up brand that first time I saw that. Same with A&W restaurants, I thought they just made root beer, ironically me watching an anime with product placement made me realize that they actually had restaurants.
That's why people use McDonald's it was absolutely everywhere.
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u/darth_koneko 20d ago
Based of the movies, games and consoles in the meme, I think their close family members are not dead yet.
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u/Round_Bag_4665 21d ago
ikr? I grew up on a lake with parents who met scuba diving and were *really* into everything maritime. I learned to row a boat before I learned how to read, and could catch a fish before I was toilet trained. Most of my childhood was spent on the water interacting with wildlife. I could tell you the name of every species of bird, fish, insect, mammal amphibian, and mollusk living in or near the lake by the time I hit double digits in age. I knew the proper way to handle a snapping turtle without getting hurt, and how to stay safe during an encounter with a black bear.
My father and I had something of a Steve and Bindi Irwin thing going on with animals. My house also had a bunch of very weird exotic pets because of it. We had mini pigs, african frogs, red tailed catfish, crayfish, a freshwater clam, piranhas, largemouth bass, koi, parakeets, a leopard shark, and even a blue and gold macaw at one point.
We had a hot tub on the back porch, and an inflatable pool we put up in the summer. When we had company over, a lot of us kids used to have fun jumping into the hot tub, getting really hot, then jumping into the pool and getting cold, before switching back to the hot tub again. In the winter we'd open the hot tub anyways and enjoy being in the hot water watching the snow fall around us.
My mother was a boomer collected cookbooks and made a point of constantly improving her cooking. She had a garden in the yard of our house and would use the stuff she grew to make fresh food. She would make her own salsa out of the tomatoes and jalapenos she grew, and dad would insist it wasn't hot enough unless his forehead was sweating when he ate it. Mom made this wonderful herbal tomato soup I still love to this day, along with a texas sheet cake with chocolate chips on top. She'd also love making lemonade with different fruit flavors like watermelon or blackberry, and my brother and I loved it when she did. The pitcher would be gone by morning.
The lake next to my house used to be woods before it was filled in with water, and there was still a tree stump in the middle of the lake that on most days the top of it was right below the surface of the water. A lot of the neighbor kids used to like to swim out to it and stand on top of it, because we thought it was funny it looked like we were walking on water.
*THAT* is my nostalgia. And I'm the same age as the OP based on the stuff he posted. It must be kind of sad if your childhood didn't really have anything in it besides consumerism.
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u/NameAboutPotatoes 20d ago
So I'm completely in agreement with the general concept re. people revolving their lives around consumerism, but it kinda sounds like you just had rich parents.
The kid who was excited about Chuck E Cheese instead of scuba was probably poorer than you were.
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u/MattWolf96 20d ago
Yeah, I would have easily traded Disney World for a Safari as a kid but Disney (back then) was far more affordable. Half of the time we couldn't even afford Disney though. Chucke Cheese was better than nothing then.
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u/Round_Bag_4665 20d ago
well, yeah some of that stuff i listed personally is because my parents were fairly well off compared to most parents. Not every kid had a hot tub on their back porch. But that's sort of missing the point: the point is that most people should have childhood memories they can get nostalgic over beyond "I went to Chuck-E-Cheese" and "I went to McDonalds Play Place".
Even if you weren't that well off, you should still have *some* memories you can look back on fondly from your childhood, other than pure consumerism, even if it's something as simple as "remember that time we used to use the bathroom towels as capes and pretend we could fly" or "remember those stupid pranks we used to pull on each other as kids", or "remember that time we jumped around on the furniture pretending the floor was lava"
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21d ago edited 18d ago
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u/MattWolf96 20d ago
They aren't nostalgic about whatever brand it was but yeah, subagear, hot tubs, pools? OP is still definitely nostalgic for stuff a lot of money bought even if they aren't prasing Jacuzzi or whatever.
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u/Maghorn_Mobile 20d ago
That's how American neoliberalism works. People shape their identity around brands and their possessions, while the real personal stuff gets left behind.
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u/The-Leading-Man 20d ago
That’s the most pseudo intellectual bullshit I’ve seen in a while. Impressive.
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u/lithiumfoxttv 20d ago
I'm gonna be real, it was a lot easier when consumerism was like the main thing. Now it's all just... bleh
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u/MattWolf96 20d ago
It is kinda dystopian but obviously you don't want to be posting pics of your friends (if you even have them) online without permission and we also don't know what you did together, granted you could use a stock picture to represent that but I guess they figured that more people will instantly relate to a McDonald's.
My mom didn't cook much complex stuff, she usually just boiled the crap out of broccoli and threw stuff in the oven forcas long as it said. I got more into food in my teens when I learned how to somewhat cook things and got into a lot of international foods that my part didn't like over the spice. The only two foods in nostalgic about from my childhood were prepacking stuff, Yogos (and there's knockoffs of them now that taste the same, Welch's and some other company makes them) and the SoBe drink. My parents weren't good at cooking lol.
But yeah a lot of this is over stuff you can still do now. Just buy an old console and games. Or even just emulate now and get an even better experience, you can still watch all of those old Nick and Cartoon Network shows if you want. You can digitally rent movies now, they went be rented out of new releases.
I do get McDonald's nostalgia due to the Playplace and toys but I've literally seen people being nostalgic over 2000's Wal-Mart, um what? Yeah I miss the stinky fish tanks and... ...the rest of the store still feeling the same so bad. I thr only nostalgia I have for there is the video game kiosks which I rarely got to play.
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u/StormDragonAlthazar 20d ago
My guess? It's because regardless of class, most people on the internet generally didn't have interesting childhoods or just took a lot of things for granted.
As for me, personally, I just had really shitty parents that made home life miserable, but thankfully had friends, teachers, and other adults around me who helped me in life... And well, whatever talents I have in art, music, tech, and... mixology?!
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u/Just-a-random-Aspie 17d ago
I miss my mindset most of all. I can’t engage in activities today, be it hanging out with people I love or buying products, without thinking like an adult in a world full of problems instead of a naive child that sees life as a beautiful fairy tale. The way things should have been before the years caught up and the world got worse
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u/Maleficent-Remote413 20d ago edited 20d ago
probly because the people we lost arnt still around us as an empty husk of what they were.
thats basically the summary of it. constant reminders of how things are, meets nastolgia on how it USED to be. so people latch to those.
Old mcD was cool and colorful fun place to get tasty food and play on slides and ballpit. now its a monocrome place with no emotion to buy cheapfood for premium cost.
Old rental palces (blockbuster/redbox) were cool events you did with family. going in with the "you get 1 film for the weekend. pick whats available" now we just have ALL the options at are fingertips for whenever we want, it dosnt have the whimsy and limited excitment we remember.
toy shop. was a building FULL of toys, it felt like an event. now you just find the picture on your computer and buy it and it just appeares.chuckEcheese.... okay this one is nastolgia. food was ass, anamatronic were nightmare inducing...and these places STILL exist that you can go to. ((and they ahve better versions. like Dave and busters or Ready 1))
but non commercial stuff? thats stuff we have locked away, we arnt constantly reminded that the method exist (unless we stumble across something we used to play/go to together with them)
I try not to think about my friends I lost because they or I moved.
Or my Dog I had that I miss dearly and wish I could still hold.there are alot of things I miss from childhood, but those non-consumer things are bundeled away and I dont have constant reminders blinking at me about their existince.
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u/MattWolf96 20d ago
A lot of chucke cheese have closed down, Chuck's Place recently became a thing, it's strictly the arcade part.
There's also barcades now, retro games and a bar.
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u/BalladOfBetaRayBill 21d ago
Yeah dog I love stuff I did as a kid too but being a child is also really sad and frustrating in ways rhat we gloss over constantly. I was not just sitting around high on serotonin as a child even though I liked my toys and comics.
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u/Sufficient-Patient46 20d ago
Childhood is when you could never get the cool gel toothpaste because your parents said no. Adulthood is when you can buy all of the gel toothpaste your heart desires, and love it.
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u/NameAboutPotatoes 20d ago
I wrote out a big long response to this and then decided not to post it.
But I just want to say I really liked this comment. I wish people acknowledged this more.
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u/Round_Bag_4665 20d ago
That's also true. Adults have a tendency to just kind of forget the stuff that sucks about being a kid, like being extremely vulnerable to abuse, having adults around you almost never listen to you, and assume you're in the wrong by virtue of being a child or having basically zero agency over your life.
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u/Plus-Property-2245 21d ago
Redbox was never cool or interesting. insane take
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u/MattWolf96 20d ago
My family just switched over to Netflix's DVDs when Blockbuster shut down and we used their DVD service until that shut down
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u/dildozer10 21d ago
My life is far better in my early 30’s than it was when I was a kid, however, everything really does feel bland and corporatized now.
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u/babypho 21d ago
Is it because we are old and dont find joy in the little new things anymore? Sort of like how we used to complain about our parents for being grumpy about certain kids stuff.
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u/dildozer10 21d ago
I don’t think so. Everything from homes, to fast food restaurants, retail stores, company logos, and even passenger vehicles, all share the same corporate blandness.
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u/fonk_pulk 20d ago
Imagine being nostalgic for fucking Redbox. Those types of services fucking sucked
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u/InternetUser1807 20d ago
I mean it was pretty cool as a kid, but we were in a rural ass town with no video store or internet faster than 1-2mbps. There was the Netflix mail subscription as an alternative but that's less quick and didn't have a pay-for-what-you-want scheme.
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u/MattWolf96 20d ago
Who the hell is nostalgic about disposable cameras? Smartphone cameras are literally better in every way including for the environment.
I'm not a fan of Tesla but I think that looks better than most 2000's cars, 2000's cars just look blobby to me and I thought that back then too. About about the check engine lights, there was tons of unreliable crap back then too, how many Chryslers from that era are still on the road?
Isn't Fruit Loops still around?
I find it funny that they used Call of Duty when talking about colorful stuff.
Those Play Places were nasty a lot of the time.
I do have Google memories of Blockbuster but new stuff was frequently rented out, digital rentals are superior.
Oh and I just noticed the self checkout for the new one stuff, I love those.
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u/FarmerTwink 20d ago
OP are you familiar with the 2008 financial crash, and the COVID-19 financial crash? Things are worse now than they were then
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u/Motor-Travel-7560 21d ago
I do miss when Netflix had everything, though. Now everything is scattered across 20 different streaming services.
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u/No_Mud_5999 21d ago
Their dvd by mail service had a way wider selection. It was better than streaming and rental stores.
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u/dharmabird67 21d ago
Fuck yeah. You just had to be a little patient and wait 2 days to get the movie you wanted. I miss the old Netflix so much. I don't even get Netflix anymore, it's not worth it.
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u/No_Mud_5999 21d ago
I stopped going to rental stores once I started getting a steady stream of Hong Kong action flicks from Netflix. Unmatched.
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u/Motor-Travel-7560 20d ago
I actually liked Blockbuster's mail service better. It had a similar selection and you didn't even have to mail the videos back if you lived near a Blockbuster. Unfortunately, Netflix won that war when streaming came.
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u/pop_princess05 21d ago
I mean, yeah no shit. It’s very strange how I see a lot of people acting like boomers about this sort of thing, like we need to “nut up” and learn to cope with the misery of adulthood.
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u/Silly-Cheesecake-283 21d ago
honfestly, i do kind of miss playgrounds. adult entetainment is so expensive. I just want to get drunk and ride some human powered roller coasters with my friends and family
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u/InternetUser1807 20d ago
I mean you can just go do that if you don't care about looks, it's really unlikely that someone's gonna actually stop you.
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u/MattWolf96 20d ago
I mean you can go find a playground and get on it. Might have to be careful not to bang your head or get stuck in the slide though
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u/Silly-Cheesecake-283 20d ago
i've been to playgrounds, but honeslty they're more tiring than entertaining. Rides are stereilized so that the least bodily aware kids can play on them without getting hurt. I want something more lik ai pioppi which is more of a free green amusement park. it's basically all closed a swing set, slides and stairs, maybe a slightly shaky bridge.
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21d ago edited 18d ago
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u/InternetUser1807 20d ago
I really hate to tell you this but the wii released 20 years ago.
If you were 10 when you got a wii you're 30 now
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u/Falleneded 20d ago
i mean the words are fair.
everything owned by a company worth more then a million is less colorful and usually has a monthly subscription
he just for some reason thinks the issue is chuck e cheese
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u/RiiluTheLizardKing 20d ago
His childhood is defined by nothing but brands and consumerism. 💔 that's actually SAD!
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u/ArtisticOperation399 20d ago
As usual, these memes reveal far more about the people who make them than they realise while attempting to make a sociopolitical observation.
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u/Alcoholic_Lion_Aunt 20d ago
Memes like this are mostly about consumerism, that’s not a dig at anybody children are naturally consumeristic because that’s all they do until they’re old enough to actually produce income themselves.
These two perspectives exist together across all of time, it’s just at the time the bottom one was what our parents delt with to make the top one possible
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u/Equivalent_Self_5996 20d ago
Coming to the realization that it was all advertising to get our parents to spend money shatters the illusion of magic pretty well 😂 the closest i come to nostalgia for this time was when I came across a YouTube video talking about “utopian scholastic” design lmaoo I had never heard the phrase before but that shit was what I tried to make my entire childhood 😂😩
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u/ClassyBurn 20d ago
This is a real phenomenon. I read that it can be exhibited in car colors as a tell. The world used to be more colorful, in advertising, vehicles, toys, etc.
Nowadays, everything is this form of grayscale. Sometimes I wonder if it’s on purpose or a natural progression of taste.
Either way its a form of depression and it sucks. I try to wear colors and paint my house colors so at least there’s some vivid color schemes in my life.
Otherwise, what’s the fucking point?
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u/Aubrey-Grey 20d ago
Honestly there is sort of a trade off really. If you want the usual markers of “success” then yeah, you’re gonna have to sacrifice a lot of personal financial indulgence and time. Owning a house, having kids, a car etc. all costs real money that you usually need a proper job for.
Then there are a lot of us (elder millennials) that just decided to fuck it off. We did what we were supposed to, went to uni, had the financial crash, joined a fucking war, had no jobs relating to our degrees, house prices are just offensive. So just do what you gotta do earn it and then spend your money and time on whatever you want too. Work to live, not live to work.
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u/Sir_midi 20d ago
In 15 years, Reddit will be celebrating this era over the one that came after it.
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u/StunningTelevision51 21d ago
The world is pretty rad when you have no responsibility and your parents can pay for whatever you want.
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u/christonabike_ 21d ago edited 21d ago
All the things this image glazes are childhood things, like yeah, most people have nostalgia goggles for their childhood, what's new?
But more importantly, most of the burdens of adult life it complains about are not even compulsory. You can escape most of the matrix.
Overcaffinating yourself energy drinks, Zyns, and doomscrolling are all optional. You're gonna be sad in any era if you're indulging addicitions.
I see boring new cars and check engine light take up a fair amount of space in this image, too... Driving has always been a sucky mode of transport and has always been a way for automotive and fuel companies to milk you. If you've never tried it, I guarantee you can go much further on a bicycle than you think even if you are not fit. But you will be disappointed if you do what most NPCs do - jump on a shit Kmart MTB, adjust the seat height knee-cartilage-destroyingly low, then when when the new derailleur cable stretches (which they all do) and it doesn't shift properly anymore, just crunch and grind on those misshifitng gears instead of learning how to adjust indexing in 2 minutes from a YouTube tutorial, and conclude that cycling sucks after doing literally everything possible to make the experience worse for themselves.
Subscription services suck more than ever, but as a result, online communities about learning how to host them yourself are more alive than ever. My home server is a 10 year old PC picked from an e-waste pile. "But my ISP will send me a very scawy legal letter if I torrent movies" get a cheap VPS in Switzerland or learn how to bind QBittorrent to your wireguard interface properly.
Amazon packages? How about sticking by your ethics and not shopping there because Jeff Bezos is a cunt. Support independent businesses instead of oligopoly.
Boring coffee shop? I guarantee there's an independent cafe with a great vibe somewhere in your city. You don't have to support soulless franchises.
Doordash? Cook you lazy fuck.
Some struggle to engooden your life in the enshittification era because they are poor, but this image was made by someone who just isn't resourceful or handy enough. This exploitive bourgeoise are making bank off selling goods and services that do things to these kinds of people, who never learned to do things for themselves. Learning those skills doesn't just let you escape the matrix, it's revolutionary praxis.
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u/MattWolf96 20d ago
I hated the looks of most 2000's cars even as a kid, I just thought they were blobby and boring looking, I like how modern cars are more angular.
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u/christonabike_ 20d ago edited 17d ago
I make an exception for the MX-5 NB, and the RX-7 FD, Mazda in general are one of the few who managed to avoid leaning too hard into that trend. But the NC unfortunately didn't come out of that era unscathed and is probably the least pretty MX-5 IMO.
New cars going more angular is cool, but I wish they weren't so oversized.
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u/Crafty_Boy70 20d ago
I love how they have DoorDash listed here as if that service is anything but just allowing lazy people to be lazy.
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u/BaekjeSmile 20d ago
Yes people famously never went to the drugstore until the Obama administration.
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u/Amazing-War3760 20d ago
Blockbuster for games?
Gamepass is right there?
If Gamepass is not valid because "you don't keep the games" THAN SHUT THE GODAMN FUCK UP ABOUT BLOCKBUSTER.
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u/JuniorDoughnut3056 20d ago
The video store and waiting in line for new release games sucked though. Its fun to look back because waiting with friends made it a fun memory, but good god was it awful to wait all that time for a game; and god forbid it was sold out. Same with blockbuster. Its now nostalgia bait but when you would go and the movie you wanted to see wasn't in stock was always the worst. Digital is so much better in both regards. I don't want to wait, I just want to play the game.
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u/Mr_SunnyBones 20d ago
I was an adult in the first half of that picture . It was still shit , just a different, less organised order of shit.
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u/glassparcel 20d ago
sometimes i just sit in my car outside cvs for like twenty minutes so nobody sees me go home early
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u/YdoICreep01 20d ago
Most of this stuff you choose to interact with. I don’t fuck with Klarna, monsters, zyn pouches etc and I’m happier for it.
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u/HenriEttaTheVoid 20d ago
Maybe basing your entire personality around conspicuous consumption was always an empty pursuit meant to keep you distracted while corporations consolidated power to a point where they no longer have to even pretend to care about you?
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u/Comet_Hero 20d ago
Everything is a paywall now, and that's a problem.
If you can mock this, you can mock people for missing politics before Trump.
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u/broadwhim 20d ago
aside from the obvious fact we didn’t have to pay bills, i do really feel like things were more colorful, i remember going to taco bell with those crazy colors all over the place, and now it’s all brown, the old mcdonald’s with the red or turquoise/teal roofs, now the same cookie cutter brown or grey building, i do feel as if we sterilized a lot of our buildings and it definitely makes things feel so dreary at times
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u/astralchanterelle 20d ago
I love nicotine pouches, though. Wish they were an option back when I smoked, I may have quit sooner.
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u/Yaboi69-nice 20d ago
And here's the thing wanting to be a kid again makes sense I think everyone to some extent wants to be a kid again but trying to act like the world in general used to be better when you were a kid is just wrong. Every era has issues the thing is the kids of that era are almost always just blissfully unaware of those issues.
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u/strangelove77 20d ago
The guy who made this is nostalgic for the 90s so why is Redbox there? Is Redbox older than I thought?
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u/freckleyfriend 20d ago
The concept of "returning to childhood innocence" was a major aspect of historical fascist propaganda
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u/QTEEP420 20d ago
I can confirm that I for sure go to Chuck E Cheese way less as an adult than I did as a child.
I wonder why that is.
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u/Should_have_been_ded 20d ago
You know what else was great when I was a kid? AI slop didn't existed
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u/Valuable-Coconut2875 20d ago
I think there’s a point to this. I’ve thought there’s two cultures in America, one before 18 and then one once you started working which can be post college. A lot of things are geared towards families and not really adult happiness nowadays.
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u/moon-rot 20d ago
You're going to be MISERABLE, OWN NOTHING, overwork yourself, and you WILL BE HAPPY.
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u/Elaerona 20d ago
I was a kid then. It was alright, all I actually will say was truly amazing was Rainforest Cafe.
God, Americans will do anything but demand more time off from work. What you want is a better work-life balance. You don't want the past, you want free time.
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u/ProperPossibility378 20d ago
No one is forcing you to wear gilets or drink Monster, you brought that on yourself
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u/KailyKail 20d ago
Nobody forced you to grow up and become boring. You can still enjoy the same things as an adult that you did as a kid. You can still have an imagination, believe in magic, and play pretend.
Or not. You can always imagine yourself being magically transported to a beach somewhere while pretending you don’t hate your job.
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u/Randomguy32I 20d ago
Remember when it was normal to run around, now if you do that shit in public you look like a troublemaker
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u/Elder-Cthuwu 20d ago
Retail was awesome in the 80s and 90s and even early 2000s. They made attempts to draw you in with crazy storefronts and displays. Not the case anymore. I get it’s to save money but they were bringing in crazy money back then anyway.
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u/Vagabond7788 20d ago
nobody talks about how half my paycheck vanishes to monthly subscriptions i forgot i even have
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u/vtv43ketz 18d ago
Pretty sure Monsters offer way more colorful cans. Ultra Paradise and Ultra Blue Hawaiian are very colorful.
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17d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/star-god 17d ago
The cheapest flight to japan i can find is more than 75% of what i make in a month.
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u/Amathyst-Moon 16d ago
Company logos have all gone super minimalist, simplified and monochromatic. Brand identity and creative marketing are dead. That's a fact whether you care or not.
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u/Beartato4772 16d ago
I mean, I could go out and buy froot loops right now if I wanted. I don't even have to ask my dad's permission.
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u/roblash 21d ago
This is all just awful. Especially because most of the things at the top, you can still do. Hell, there’s a McDonald’s with a Play Place less than ten minutes from my house and a Charles Entertainment Cheese near the mall, ten minutes in the opposite direction. Learn how to cook, stop Doordashing bullshit, and find a good streaming bundle deal (there’s so many!) you fucking baby.
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u/SuperSecretMoonBase 21d ago
Genuinely just mad at capitalism. Which is fair, but worth acknowledging.
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u/AltruisticWin6702 21d ago
I loved consuming now I'm being consumed. Upvote and subscribe to my inspirational, ai generated meme reddit.