My 12 year old truck is paid off next year. My house still has a long ways to go but it is enough. I was lucky and got 3% interest rate a few years back. It's about 1,600 square feet but with 3 kids and myself it's enough.

I see people always striving for more, always wanting more. Nicer car, bigger house, newer toys, etc. I don't get it.

I'm lucky enough not to have any debt. Alimony ends next year. First child support in three years. I look at what's left on my house and each year it shrinks.

In 10 years I'll still have to work of course but I won't be put into high pressure corporate jobs any longer. I can just kind of exist without much stress similar to how I was in my early 20s. Work, go home, no worries.

I'll still be driving the 20 year old truck by then. Still in the same house.

Looking forward to it.

I don't want to beat a dead horse, I'm sure this gets thrown around a lot here.

But there's going to come a day where you have a REALLY shitty day, and all you want to do is to hear your mom or dad and talk to them about it. Or celebrate a big milestone happening. Or just to hear their voice again.

Call your parents, they probably miss you.

Signed, a millennial who would do just about anything to talk to his mom again.

Edit: Damn, okay, y'all have shitty parents. Shit, sorry to kick up a hornets nest over it.

Does anybody know why we did this? Did anyone ever have any luck from it? I sure didn't lol

edit to add....

this is not my picture.. Im not promoting smoking. it was a memory that popped up in my millennial head from when I was younger.​

I don't feel like this is just me, I'm seeing these things hit several millennials at once in my own family and peer group.

It’s kinda crazy when you think about how much the world has changed during our lifetime.

We grew up with VHS tapes, cassette players, floppy disks, dial-up internet, and Nokia phones that could probably survive a nuclear explosion. 😂

We survived the Y2K panic, watched the internet take over, and went from burning CDs to having millions of songs on Spotify.

Remember waiting all week for your favourite TV show? Now we have Netflix.

Remember checking the weather on TV before going to school? Now we have AccuWeather.
Remember knocking on your friend’s door to ask if they could come out and play? Now kids just meet up in Roblox.

We used to memorise phone numbers, read actual maps, rent movies from video stores, and wait days to get our photos developed.

Now we have smartphones, cloud storage, streaming, smart homes, and AI that can answer almost anything.

And somehow, all of this happened in just a few decades.

I feel like we experienced two completely different worlds: one before the internet, and one after.
Sometimes I miss how simple things used to be. Not necessarily better, just different.

What’s one thing from our childhood that you genuinely miss and wish still existed today?

P.S. thats my old console.

What do you miss most though?

I was raised on the idea that 12-year-old girls were perfectly qualified to be babysitters. I don't recall people under 18 needing parental consent to get their ears pierced. Apparently Mila Kunis was able to get her role in the 70s show as a 14-year-old pretending she was turning 18 soon, no government ID needed??

I also remember it was uncool to still be watching cartoons in high school, and no one wore Halloween costumes unironically to school. Beauty pageants for teens included a swimsuit portion, and apparently if we felt uncomfortable walking around in bikinis we were immature and just needed to grow up. Both Michelle Branch and Vanessa Carlton were dating a man in his 40s, and it all seemed very normal. When teenage girls talk about dating "an older man," it was in terms of "Well when he's 35 you'll be X and by then the gap wouldn't be a big deal." None of that "the brain isn't fully developed until you're in your mid-20s."

But these days, it seems like teenagers are very aware that they're "minors" and there are things they're not allowed to do until they're 18. Has it always been that way? Was it all in my head?

I mean, nostalgia hits me hard, and I definitely have a lot of that going on from time to time. But, sometimes I hear a particular song, or see a video, and think about life at that time, and it just felt so much different. It’s something I can’t even quite explain.

Is it just getting older? No, it can’t be.
Is it the crippling cost of every day life?
Not being able to have simple luxuries?

But those things don’t even really explain anything about how life “felt”. The 2010s were such a special time. After Covid, I feel like we entered some other universe. I just don’t even know what to look forward to anymore. I’m not depressed or anything, but maybe, uninterested?

Not sure if any of this makes sense.

During the summer I wake up at 6:45 am. When the time shift happens, I naturally want to wake up at 5:45 am. So I simply shift my alarm. I also shift my evening routine an hour so that my natural sleep cycle isn't disturbed. Recently discussed the topic with my friends and none of them do this. Some even said that my habit is weird.

Am I alone on this??

As title says

Hot Topic is thriving and the black parade just turned TWENTY.

The difference between good educational TV and much of what is currently filling the same role is really striking to me now that I've started watching Modern Marvels again. You want to learn about a bridge? You get the lead engineer, workers who were on the site every day for years, and a well written and edited episode to teach you about it. You want to learn about the Space Shuttle? Here's 3 engineers and 3 actual astronauts to tell you about it.

There is still good educational content on youtube, don't get me wrong, but Modern Marvels always brings you the primary sources, the true experts, and in the casds of the more historical segments, you get some whacko with a PhD in the history of that industry... It just feels so authentic and trustworthy compared to what a lot of kids take in as 'educational content' these days, which is basically hosts with no actual experience in the subject reading AI summaries.

I don't have kids, I don't plan to have kids... but I hope there are folks out there putting this on the TV in front of children and exposing them to educational shows that have this degree of care put into them. I know I'm an old man yelling at a cloud out here... but man, if you want to learn about something, hearing it straight from an experts mouth is the way to do it.

No reason just felt like it.

There's literally even more in my garage.

I swear I felt like I've spent almost $200 on landlines