People would go in carnivals and shove their face in the same water barrel to grab an apple with their mouth. Completely bonkers in 2021.

Paying $0.25 per text message.

People spending thousands of dollars on beanie babies

Paying $1.29 so 9 seconds of a song played when your phone rang.

Going on road trips without a phone

Leaving your young kids unsupervised most of the time. I remember at 5 years old sitting in the parking lot of the bowling alley in my dad’s car for 3 hours while he was inside bowling. Also. Most of the time, my parents had zero clue as to where I was. I would leave the house in the morning on my bicycle and be home for dinner. Suited them just fine

Hitchhiking. My parents gave me permission to hitchhike when I was 14. We lived 15 miles from my high school and I never took the bus.

Chat-up culture. I know we have “pick-up” artists and click-bait websites offering “loopholes” into the female mind nowadays but chat-up culture was pervasive around the millennium. It suggested that being a twat with a few prepared lines would ‘get’ you any person you wanted.

Girls Gone Wild. Would not fly in today’s environment filming drunk girls doing… things.

My high school had an area that we were allowed to smoke. A designated smoking area for kids under 18.

Not 20 but 21 years ago they let me – a former child – enter the cockpit during a commercial flight

25 years ago, I had a gym teacher who did not think asthma was a thing and wouldn’t let me have my inhaler at hand in class. I walked every mile because I didn’t want to die.

This is a little more than twenty years ago but, smoking In hospitals. What the fuck.

Frosted tips

People dying of Chronic Myeloid Leukemia. 20 years ago it was 100% fatal in less than 5 years. Now it’s treated with a once-a-day pill with no side effects for most people…fucking miracle science right there.

No care or concern for concussions in sports. I was knocked out cold for two minutes on the football field, nobody told me, and when I came to we just resumed the game like nothing had happened. I didn’t even know I was out for those two minutes until a year later when people were telling football stories. I thought I had just gotten knocked down and got back up right away.

Waiting until after 7pm to talk for free.

Not password protect your devices

Agreeing with your friends to meet at a specific place at a specific time, then sticking to it because you had no way to communicate in the interim

Being at home at your TV at a certain time to catch a show, and expecting everyone to leave you alone so you could watch it with no interruptions. You could be out with friends and you’d look and say “oh it’s 7:30 I got to get home to catch my show!” And nobody looked at you like a strange social outcast.

Fucking dial-up! That shit was absolutely fucked up.

That OxyContin wasn’t habit-forming and it was a miracle drug