 |
| Funny, my childhood wasn't awesome, especially considering I was frequently on the "loser" side of these sports matches. From Pinterest. |
All those memes that are supposed to make me feel better because I lived in a "real" generation often tends to celebrate things that are sketchy at best, and dangerous at worst. Like the ones who say "we survived lead paint", which makes me think "If you're more stupid because of lead paint, how would you know?"*
As for me, I knew people who did some of the dangerous stuff celebrated on those memes who either got seriously hurt or killed. No, not the ones mentioning "drinking from a hose"**, but the ones about riding without a helmet or being in a car without a seatbelt or those exposed to a lot of secondhand smoke and developed respiratory problems.
Still, there's a point about nostalgia that I can choose to be amused by, which is nostalgia for video games. Unfortunately, most memes these days are for the NES or later, completely avoiding us older folks who survived the Video Game Crash of 1983.
 |
| I always thought the dragons from Adventure looked stupid, and when my kids began to play it they called them "mean ducks", which really fits. From Reddit. |
 |
| Atari had more games, but Intellivision had more complex games. Of course, my parents got us a TI-99 4/A home computer instead. From Imgflip. |
 |
| In my day, everything was "Atari", but you get the idea. From Gameintensity. |
 |
| This should be "over 50", but it's a minor quibble. Us older folks led the way to making gaming an acceptable hobby. From greenstudio. |
 |
| And the truth is that you'll still end up playing just a few of them. Like, oh, Civ IV. Or WoW Classic. From Reddit. |
 |
| I wanted one of these so badly as a kid, but I never got one. I had to budget for what I was allowed to have, and Mattel Electronics Football never made the final cut. Still, my wife and kids got me one for Christmas two decades ago, and I still have it today. From Imgflip. |
*My dad drove a 1972 Chevy Nova for 8 years, and because the engine had issues, he used premium octane gasoline. Back then, the only gas that had the high amount of octane still had lead in it, so we drove a car meant for unleaded gas but with leaded gas. Ever since I learned of the dangers of leaded gasoline I've wondered whether my and my brother's development were stunted in any way due to my dad's usage of leaded gas. It's something I'll never know, as any residual lead will have leeched out of my system by now, but I also wonder just how many of my fellow members of Gen X unwittingly were impacted by the use of leaded gas.
**I mean, kids nowadays --including my own-- were allowed to come in and get a drink whenever they wanted. The cachet of drinking from a garden hose simply isn't there any more.
I really dislike that kind of "better in the old days" nonsense. At best, it's cherry-picking but mostly it's just smug. And also entirely insincere, especially when peddled by educated parents because if they genuinely believed it was better for kids to grow up experiencing all those kinds of risks, that's how they'd be raising their own children now. Which they are not. I'm all in favor of letting kids have a free-range childhood as opposed to an overprotective, hyper-controlled one but that doesn't extend to the kind of lunatic things I was allowed to get up to as a child.
ReplyDeleteI myself grew up in a pretty restrictive household, so I made a point to be a bit less restrictive than my own parents, but that didn't mean I was going to let my kids to really stupid things like play in the street. Our neighborhood has hills and the road has blind spots where you can't see much in front of you, and where our house is it'd be plainly dangerous to go play in the street when cars can come barreling by at 35 MPH/55 kph, well over the speed limit.
DeleteThose memes are basically designed as virtue signaling, saying that you're superior to kids today. And as you pointed out, the kids never made the rules, these so-called "adults who had it better off back in the day" were the ones that made them.
A bit late, as always, but the biggest impacts from lead exposure aren't from later in life. Sure, lead poisoning can be bad, extended exposure isn't good, but you can get rid of lead everywhere but your bones within a couple of years.
ReplyDeleteThe biggest issue with lead is exposure while the brain is developing, so from birth to about a year and a half. Any lead exposure after that has negligible impact on behavior. Later exposure has impacts on health, but that early exposure is the one that can impact impulse control, attention and focus, and (one of the few things it's useful for) IQ. So, you probably don't have to worry about your own IQ from what your dad did, just what was out there as you grew up. ^_-
Of course, I'm old enough that I was still a kid when leaded gasoline was phased out of cars and lead paint was banned in the US. (Yikes!) So I might have had some residual impact from all the lead in the environment, but I'll never know for sure. ("Squirrel!!!")
Delete