I mean, I was pretty young at the time, but good god even I can see how we’ve been obliterated by inflation. There’s a specific chocolate here in the UK, a tiny little one for children called Freddo the Frog. Just a little cartoon chocolate frog, nothing fancy.
Their price has multiplied by a factor of TWENTY in the past 20 years. And I know pretty damn well that the amount everyone is getting paid has not increased by a factor of 20. Sure this is just a small irrelevant little chocolate bar and other things have inflated less, but like. It’s probably the easiest thing to notice.
But yeah also playing in the street or taking a bike ride around town with your friends was a thing when I was a kid. Sure we were all probably a nuisance, but these days… I don’t think I’ve seen anyone playing outside in ten years. The places we’d ride bikes got bought up and removed. And even the idea of allowing children to play outside feels… socially unacceptable.
Also early Youtube and Facebook were COMPLETELY different beasts that just didn’t have the millions of hours of design work put into them to suck people in and keep them there. Oh, and flash games were a really big thing too if you wanted to play on the computer. They were amazing. And big-name games were in a really good spot, paid DLC and the pay-to-win blight hadn’t really started, and stuff like World of Warcraft, LAN Halo, and other games you could play over at a friend’s house were at their peaks from a social point of view.
…I know nostalgia is a trap, but god, it really isn’t hard to think of things to be nostalgic for from that time, and I was only born in the very late 90s. At least I’ve got plenty of friends online these days though.