I'm new to Steem and I'm a millennial <insert-disappointed-face-emoji-here>. Millennials get a lot of negative attention. The narrative describes millennials as cellphone obsessed, lazy, uninspired, needy, whiny individuals who grew up in excess with parents who sheltered them from the real world. I've interacted with kiddos in their late teens and early twenties and have found my life experiences and perspectives to be worlds different. However, according to Pew Research "millennials" are defined as those aged 18-34 in 2015. Well shit, I'm 33. So I'm a millennial and it's going to take some time for that to sink in as I'm still in the denial stage. For anyone else born in the early 80s here are some experiences that I STILL think are uniquely ours:
VIDEO GAMES WERE DIFFICULT - I got my first NES when I was 5 and it came with the standard "Super Mario Bros. & Duck Hunt" combo game. In my day you only got so many lives and that was it. Game over. You couldn't buy more lives through the app store. You literally had to start over from the beginning. Kids with the skill and patience to reach later levels earned respect and nobody interrupted their stories about levels the rest of us could only dream of reaching. Conquering a game was a huge deal. Games had endings. It was an accomplishment. Beating "Mega Man", "Castlevania" and "Lifeforce" taught me that hard work and perseverance pay off. "Contra", "Mike Tyson's Punchout" and "Ghosts 'n Goblins" taught me that sometimes, no matter how hard I try, I'm just not good enough. These are vital life lessons.
WHY DO I NEED A CELLPHONE? - I didn't have a cellphone until I was in college. I didn't really want a cellphone when they got popular. Why would I want the burden of lugging this thing around and have the potential to be interrupted at anytime, anywhere? Texting made no sense. It was an anachronism that never was. Why were we taking technological leaps backwards? In terms of technological advances wouldn't we first invent a way to send short messages to one another before transmitting realtime, audible voice calls? Our cellphones didn't have touchscreens. We had to type words by pressing standard phone number pad buttons. Eventually cellphones got full, mini keyboards. And guess what? I still prefer a physical keyboard to this day. Touchscreen keyboards are much less efficient, far more error prone, and more dangerous. There was no need to look away from the road when sending a text with a physical keyboard. Old school cellphones saved lives.
TANGIBLE COLLECTIBLES - I collected all sorts of stuff. During my childhood I had sports cards, pogs, yo-yos, He-Man action figures, Boglins and even some Magic The Gathering cards that got thrown away when my mom found them. The point is that we had stuff. We had actual, physical stuff and it was awesome. Today people collect digital things and yes I would appreciate some Steem, thanks.
NO SOCIAL MEDIA - Younger millennials will never know the thrill of taking photos with a disposable film camera and possibly getting the film developed a few months later unless you forgot the camera existed. Even better was getting your photos back and every one of them was completely black. You want to capture memories? Well great, but you only get 24 of them. You want a sepia toned photo? Get your dad's old camera. You want to send a friend a short message? Write in on paper and sail it across the room when the teacher isn't looking. Want fun, social games? Make one of these. Want to send life updates and photos to every single person you've ever known in your life? Why? That's creepy.
CLOTHING HAD ROOM - Today it's really hard to walk into a store and find a pair of pants that won't strangle my ankles, denying my feet the circulation they so desperately need. We wore our clothes baggy. To us comfortable clothing started at XL and sized up from there.
MUSIC WAS PERSONAL - You had to buy music and you didn't get the luxury of hearing the entire album first. You only got to hear the best song or songs on the radio ahead of time. Nothing was more disappointing then shelling out $15+ to get one good song and 12 crappy ones. However, because of the actual investment in the album we would torture ourselves over and over with those 12 crappy songs trying to convince ourselves they weren't actually that bad. If you wanted to create a custom "mix" you could get a blank cassette and wait for the song you wanted to play on the radio and quickly hit the record button. My early mixes were fraught with commercials and radio personalities talking during intros and outros. My first ever mix CD didn't come until I was in high school. My dad's company had forked out a couple of grand to purchase one of the first ever CD burners on the market. It would burn an audio CD that would play in a standard CD player but back then mp3s didn't exist and songs were big. They were .WAV files and a typical song would be 30MB or more. How in the heck did I transfer so many large files? Floppy disks only stored 1.44 MB. Lucky for me I had an Iomega Zip drive and 2 Zip disks. Each held a whopping 100 MB which means I could transfer 5 or 6 songs at a time! 5 days later and a few trips to my dad's office and I had my very own, custom mix CD. Boosh!