Looking backward
I see a bunch of them with the Like and Share option at the bottom that go something like this - group of kids, picture roughly from 70s or early 80s based on clothes, outside and the tag lines are lengthy tomes to days gone past, childhood activities that I engaged in as did many of those of my or older generations and inevitably they end with "I am glad I grew up then and not now or Too bad kids these days will never know the joy of" like and share.
Yes I had fun doing those things that most parents today would not let me do - run around the neighborhood without supervision, without cell phones, with streetlights to guide me to my curfew for most of my childhood. I rode in cars without seatbelts to go to the beach with baby oil, SPF no where to be found. I drank from and partook in opening fire hydrants, played tag in the street with parked cars for base and on coming traffic being dodged. I made my own play dates by knocking on doors and asking if someone could come out and play. I watched R rated movies by sneaking into the theaters and watched like 6 movies on hot summer days while paying for one - the a/c was a good thing. I jumped subway turnstiles and no one tracked my phone, since they didn't exist, to know that the place I claimed to be was no where near where I actually was. TV was on when I did my homework and the phone was attached to my ear as it was to the wall cord.
That nostalgia is great - it doesn't mention that crime rates in NY where I grew up were about double than they are now, so no people it wasn't "safer" as that statistic applies nationwide. It doesn't acknowledge that kids disappeared, that pedophiles existed but we did not talk of those things, that kids were abused. We did not know the sexual predator moved in because there were no sex crime registers to alert us to that. You knocked on doors and for the most part you were safe but no one told us to watch it even when they probably should have. Teachers sometimes abused kids physically and verbally and we kept it to ourselves because rarely was our side taken so it continued and for some scarred forever.
We do not talk about the crack vials I saw rolling around subway cars or that the kids who were in need of special services were highly unlikely to get them or even be identified to need them, they were odd, weird, tortured often, too often. There were kids who were gay when we were growing up and there were kids were transgendered it is just that we did not think of what they needed, we did not think of them at all or if we did we were too often told they were abnormal. Those children do not look at these memes with fondness, that was a dark time for them.
There were good times then and there were many things that we have evolved from, sadly not enough and not all of us. This nostalgic look is often about our need to hold on to our youth, our wonder at the great times and people that were and may still be in our lives and for some a false reality of a time that exists as "perfect" but in reality at best was "perfect" for them at the expense of others.
Kids today will grow up and see their own version of memes, whatever they will be in the future - holograms per chance. They will pine for days of apps that were not virtual reality based, for days when they do whatever it is they are doing today. They are not missing out they are growing up doing the things they need to that make them happy. Their kids will roll their eyes and not see what the "advantages" were just like ours smile and nod at our stories.
It is good to share our stories with our kids, they will see us as the kids we once were, funny, confused at times, feeling things they might be feeling. They will get a kick out of how "hard" life was, goodness how did we survive without On Demand and streaming services?. They will find us retro. We all wish we had the freedom of childhood that you appreciate so much more as an adult. It is not better it is just different.
I look backward, kind of like I flip through pictures, to smile at that moment in time not to pretend that it represents every moment of that time. It is ok that our kids are not growing up like us for me - they are growing up like them and maybe we could learn a few things from that too.
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