Everything was better back then—that’s what the older folks say, and while not everything, these ten things certainly were.
Freedom
The sweet thrill of being unreachable. No mobiles, no emails: once you left home, your boss, mother-in-law, or ex simply couldn’t reach you. As kids, we’d just tell our parents we were out playing with friends and would be back by dark—no calls, no tracking, just doing our own thing. Personal space and time felt so much more accessible, something young people today rarely get to experience.
Music
Affordable concerts. No flashy laser shows, no flying over the crowd or a thousand backup dancers, but great music—and you didn’t have to sell a kidney to get in.
Connections
The joy of finally meeting a friend you hadn’t seen for days, weeks, or months, and excitedly catching up on everything that happened. Today’s youth are constantly connected, which often makes friendships feel more surface-level.
Travel
Before 9/11, showing up an hour—or even 40 minutes—before your flight was enough, with no long security lines. The discovery itself felt more personal, relying only on a guidebook and a paper map, leading to more genuine interactions with locals.
Campfires
Big campfires! I don’t want to sound like a boomer—I’m just Gen X—but we didn’t spend our youth glued to screens. We camped, climbed trees, built forts, and roasted bacon. Recently, I invited my twenty-year-old niece and her friends to the family plot, and they were amazed when I lit a big campfire. None of them had ever seen one in real life—"only in movies"—which is honestly pretty sad.
Hobbies
For boys, tinkering with old beat-up cars was a favorite pastime. Today, you can’t even open the hood without risking a costly trip to the dealership, even for an oil change. For girls, it was flipping through Popcorn and Bravo magazines with friends. Back then, if you liked a guy from a boy band, you might catch his music video once a week on MTV or cut out a picture from a magazine—no endless online photo searches. We valued music and movies more, which kept fandom healthy.
Experiences
Drive-in movies! They were rare even then, and now almost extinct, but they had such a unique vibe. The open-air cinemas by Lake Balaton were just as magical and always a big deal.
Words
Freedom of speech. Nowadays, we have to be careful not to offend anyone—like a vegan colleague—by casually mentioning how delicious the chicken stew we made over the weekend was. True story.
Slamming the Phone
Poor young people will never know the intense satisfaction of slamming down a landline phone. It packed a punch whether you cut someone off mid-explanation or ended a passionate monologue by aggressively hanging up. Today, we just awkwardly "hang up" on smartphones, but the click and the buzzing line were way more satisfying.
Hope
The belief that your life would be better than your parents’. It wasn’t easy for us either, but today’s economic climate feels bleak and makes it especially tough for young people who don’t come from well-off families.
