Let me take you back, dear reader, to a time so idyllic it might as well have been a sepia-toned advertisement for broken bones and unfiltered tap water. I grew up in an era devoid of safe spaces—those cushioned havens where today’s youth retreat to knit their feelings back together after a harsh word. Trigger warnings? We didn’t need them; we had gravity, and it was a stern teacher. I drank from the garden hose, a practice that, in retrospect, might explain my current obsession with antibiotics. Peanuts in class? Tossed like confetti at a particularly nutty wedding. Helmets? Oh, please. We wore our scars like medals, signing each other’s plaster casts with the enthusiasm of autograph hunters at a circus of the maimed.
In those days, children fell down. Frequently. It was practically a national sport, second only to arguing over who got to be Mario when the Nintendo—yes, the original, with its charmingly blocky graphics and zero save functionality—finally graced our lives. Before that, we battled on Atari, a console so primitive it made modern gaming look like a PhD in quantum physics. But let’s not kid ourselves: we spent more time outdoors, scuffing knees on concrete, or indoors with a book, squinting by lamplight because energy-saving bulbs were a dystopian fantasy. Board games reigned supreme, and if the power went out mid-Nintendo epic, well, you prayed to the gods of electricity and hoped your parents didn’t notice the controller-shaped dent in the wall.
Television was a communal affair. No pausing, no streaming—when the commercials ended, you bellowed “It’s on!” like a town crier announcing the plague’s retreat. Families gathered, glued to the set, watching shows that didn’t require a degree in cultural studies to decipher. Delivery? Next-day was a pipe dream; you waited weeks for a mail-order catalogue, then months for the item to arrive, slightly damaged and smelling of regret. Skip the Dishes? We skipped to the kitchen, where fast food was a rare treat, not a lifestyle, and eating healthy was less a choice than a consequence of having no other options.
Communication was an art form. Home phones ruled, their curly cords a battlefield for teenage privacy. Texting? We wrote letters—yes, with pens—and waited days for a reply. Social media was the chatter over the backyard fence. To find friends, we pedalled our bikes through the neighbourhood, a quest as perilous as any medieval pilgrimage, yet undertaken with the carefree abandon of youth. Sleepovers on the trampoline, under a sky unpolluted by Wi-Fi signals, were the norm—parents leaving the back door unlocked, a gesture of trust now unthinkable in our age of perpetual panic.
Chores were non-negotiable. No pocket money, just the grim satisfaction of a job well done—dishes washed, lawns mowed, all under the watchful eye of discipline. Spankings were administered with the precision of a Victorian governess, and somehow, miracle of miracles, we survived. Lessons were learned, character was forged, and we didn’t need a therapist to unpack the trauma. Lunches were packed, teachers taught rather than preached, and the school library housed no porn—unless you count that one National Geographic with the topless tribeswoman, which we ogled with the innocence of anthropologists in training.
Ah, but the world has turned, hasn’t it? Once a place of relative calm, it’s now a circus of outrage, where people glue themselves to roadways as if tarmac is the new canvas for protest art. Gender, once a simple binary, has become a labyrinthine debate—women with penises, men with pregnancies, and female athletes pitted against biological males in the name of inclusivity, a policy that sounds noble until you realize it’s just bad sportsmanship with extra steps. Underage girls lose healthy breasts to surgical zeal, children are medicated into submission, and obesity stalks the land like a particularly sluggish plague. Immigration, once manageable, now strains under unsustainable waves, while diversity is heralded as salvation even as it fractures cohesion. Muslim values, once foreign, are repackaged as Western, and the government—bless its meddling heart—hands out drugs to addicts and freezes accounts of dissenters with the enthusiasm of a tax collector on overtime.
We didn’t live with fingers poised over the outrage button, ready to shriek at every slight. Anger was rarer, life simpler. There were no apps, no endless scrolling, just the rhythm of days unburdened by digital noise. Sticks and stones were real, and hurt feelings were a badge of resilience, not a call to arms. Today’s children, poor mites, inherit a world where common sense is an endangered species, and I can’t help but wonder if we’ve traded our bruises for a padded cell of our own making.
So here I sit, a relic of a bygone age, typing this on a device that would have seemed like witchcraft in my youth. The past wasn’t perfect—far from it—but it had a certain rough charm, a grit that’s been polished away by progress. Or so I tell myself, as I sip my filtered water and adjust my helmet for the short walk to the mailbox. Nostalgia, it seems, is the last refuge of the curmudgeon. And I, dear reader, am its willing prisoner.