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This is one thing I will always appreciate of growing up Gen-X. Our moms would kick us out of the house after breakfast and expected us to be gone until the street lights started to buzz. A pack of us on BMX bikes, adventuring, exploring abandoned buildings, jumping off cliffs and into rivers or the ocean, etc. It genuinely ruled ams and I fully appreciate that it did.
I’m on the cusp (xennial) and it’s kinda crazy in hindsight. I had the exact same experience you described, but when it got dark, I’d go home and play with the Commodore 64 or Atari.
Same for me, but I guess I'm a little younger since my console was NES and, later, a Gateway 2000 computer.
I'm so glad that I had those experiences and so sad that my son won't. I hope that I can give him enough of a similar experience that he can at least identify with Calvin and Hobbes.
Us xennials are a special mini generation. Analog childhood, digital adulthood. The average xennial is quite proficient with computers and other tech, compared to those who were born before AND after. You see we had the childhood curiosity when the internet was starting to catch on. We learned how to navigate in DOS or early Windows. We had to figure shit out because these things were not easy to use.
I thought, when I was a teen, I can't imagine how good with this stuff the kids being born today will be. But I was very wrong.
This is so accurate!
Atari! Yars' Revenge, Asteroids, Frogger and Space Invaders were my jam.
I was born in the mid-90's and I was also more or less raised that way (until a certain age). I remember being able to get home in time for dinner after a whole day of playing outside just because it "felt" like it was almost dinner time. We would go to the nearby "forest" where we built huts, climbed into trees, made wooden swords out of sticks, and sometimes had "battles" with rivaling groups about certain areas in the forest. We'd be there for hours even in the pouring rain. There was a whole economy around these wooden swords and other services like building a hut. It was better than any video game ever could be