From Childhood to Adulthood: Connected?
We were connected to each other more than the internet...
As a child, I remember knocking on a friend’s door unannounced to ask if they were coming out to play. After reaching double digits in age, we advanced to using the landline telephones in our family homes, calling each other to organise a game of football or tree climbing escapades in the local parks. We built rope-swings and ziplines with whatever we could scavenge or ‘borrow’ from someone’s Dad who was a tradesman. We used spades and shovels to dig out BMW bicycle jumps and make death-defying obstacle courses. We came home covered in dirt, cuts, and bruises. I was particularly accident prone; in and out of the accident & emergency department of the local NHS hospital - a concussion from falling off a rope swing, a fractured cheekbone following a misjudged sliding tackle on the football field, and plenty of bad scrapes from cycling accidents.
I survived. I was never wrapped up in cotton wool by my parents. I had to be home by a reasonable hour and was punished with being grounded if I pushed my luck too far. My childhood was character building. I loved the great outdoors, pushing the limits of adventure with some risks and elements of danger.
When the Nintendo and Sega consoles arrived, we had access to all of them between our little gang. Cue group gaming sessions at different friend’s houses, with time limits encouraged or enforced by the parents. We didn’t really need that enforcement. The escapism into the world of gaming was fun, but we still cherished our time playing outdoors. We wouldn’t spend endless hours glued to screens.
Early teens hit, BB guns arrived on the scene, paintballing, chasing girls at the local arcade in the town centre, reveling at house parties on the weekends, and dealing with a strange inter-school rivalry that saw the occasional brawl at the school gates and on the buses. It was a wild time. Bullies had to be stood up to, lest they terrorised us indefinitely. At least the bullying only existed in physical reality without the cyber element. Fights were fought with fists and wits. Not bottles and knives like with today’s youth.
My first phone was a Nokia 3210. We snuck our phones into school and played the ‘snake’ game on our pixelated tiny screens in the playground. Still, the phones never took us away from our love of sports and socialising with each other in the flesh. We barely texted each other because it cost so much credit and ate into our paper-round wages!
As internet access came into our homes, we used dial-up modems to connect, and we chatted to each other on MSN messenger. We downloaded music with Napster (along with numerous computer viruses) and we printed out “cheat codes” for the PlayStations and PC games. My friends and I were still socialising in person. The new technologies had thus far only enhanced our lives, without diminishing our lived human experience, or creating any kind of anxiety, separation, or isolation whatsoever.
In the college years (16-18 years old for Brits) we went on our first “lads holiday” as a rite of passage: Zante, Greece. We passed out on inflatable lilos after drinking too many Mythos beers. We woke up sunburnt to a crisp and embarrassingly walking around like lobster men for the rest of the holiday. We snapped a few snaps on our disposable cameras or someone’s state of the art 5.0 megapixel camera. We could share them within our group of friends and have a chuckle. No fear of character assassination or getting mortified by a crucifixion of nasty social media posts.
We lived in the moment. From one moment to the next. We were rarely trying to capture the moment on film because it might have slipped away from us.
The local security guard came at us with a frying pan after we returned to the hotel singing Manchester football songs at 2am. He hit one of us with his baton. It left a nasty bruise. The holiday package tour hosts moved us to another hotel - for our safety. On the bar crawl - organised by the tour group - bartenders would say to us “oh we’ve heard about you Manchester lads causing trouble, please behave tonight…”
On the bus back from the foam party, we stuffed our short friend into the overhead luggage compartment. He never answered the hostess’s name roll call as we neared the hotel, so we had to come clean and they woke him up, then retrieved him along with some luggage. He was slightly ticked off. We were banned from joining any more package tours.
We were young and reckless. Cocky and arrogant. Inconsiderate and cheeky. We deserved what we got. It was self contained there and then, in Greece, by the Greeks (and some British tour operators). We were able to learn from it, mature ever so slightly. Move on with a little extra wisdom, and notch up some more life experience. We didn’t become an international incident. We weren’t ‘cancelled’ before we had even become fully fledged adults. We weren’t forced to make a groveling apology on social media, or virtue signal to a current thing, or otherwise be eternally shamed. The punishment fit the ‘crime’. End of.
Making mistakes makes us who we are. We are the sum of our experiences, shame, good deeds, guilt, and everything else in between.
I am grateful for having grown up in a world where I was only ever focused on curating my own reality, experiences and lessons learned.
I cannot imagine the minefield that youngsters must navigate in today’s world. From a tender age, devices thrust into their curious hands. Perhaps dulling the natural curiosity of childhood. Then the pre-pubescent social media presence ‘must’ be established, and the child sets about curating their image, rather than their direct lived experiences. So much time and energy is exerted on the portrayal of the online self-projection, that their actual reality is curtailed. Constant fear and anxiety about saying the wrong thing and being called out for it online, or perhaps even recorded. Nigh impossible to relax at a house party, because of only ever being 30 seconds away from someone’s unflattering Tiktok montage.
Immortalised for all time. Unforgiving. Unforgetting.
I deleted my Facebook and Instagram accounts almost ten years ago. I saw how toxic those platforms were becoming. I suppose I became somewhat of a social pariah at the time. Rumours swirled that I was going to off myself! People enquired as to where I had gone, why on earth had I left the wonderful world of anti-social media?!
Now my friends are all leaving these platforms in droves.
Is that the solution for the youth today? Is it easier said than done? Is self projection of image, the shop-window effect put out to the world, more important to the core self than being the self and the human lived experience? I can only answer that for myself.
Do kids still like to play sports and climb trees as much as we did in the 90s? Or are most content with an infinite scroll or a gaming chair + headset + controller? Where does it all lead?
In case you’re wondering about the photograph on the little piggy rollercoaster, I am the one on the right, my little brother on the left, riding at the front with the best seats in the house.
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Keep following the path that you believe in . Anyone "grown up" now and feeling the stress of
our NWO ....... remember that there are alternatives to just thinking about changing :-)
https://gab.com/groups/59814 Pong's garden (Ms. Ninja)