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The life of a child who grew up in the 1990s looks undeniably different from that of a kid in the 2020s. Back then, the only way you could reach your friends was by calling a landline phone and asking their parents if you could speak to them. And let’s not forget having to wake up early on a Saturday so you don’t miss a new episode of your favorite cartoon.

It’s quite wild to think that kids today won’t get to know such things. Having a similar thought, redditor Subject_Thorn turned to the AskReddit community with a question, “What is something that 2020s kids will never get to experience?” Striking a nostalgic chord with many older adults, such an inquiry received over 3K comments in just a few weeks.

Scroll down to find the most popular answers that will shortly take you back to the good old days and a conversation with Subject_Thorn, who started this discussion in the first place.

#1

"Life Without Smartphones": 30 Things Today's Kids Will Never Get To Experience Privacy. Doing stupid things without the whole world knowing about it on TikTok.

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PeePeePooPoo
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7 months ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

I'm so glad my stupid years happened when there were basically no camera phones and internet...

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#2

"Life Without Smartphones": 30 Things Today's Kids Will Never Get To Experience Waking up early on Saturday morning so you can watch the next episode of your favorite cartoon.

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Libstak
Community Member
7 months ago (edited) DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

Or MTV..music videos and artist interviews, not the c**p they have today. In Australia we also had Video Hits which counted down the top 10 hits plus Sundays was Countdown with live acts, interviews, videos a countdown of the top 10, usually they played the top 3 or more.

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#3

"Life Without Smartphones": 30 Things Today's Kids Will Never Get To Experience Buying a video game and it has everything it should on it without having to provide an update or paying for extra content.

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CKB
Community Member
7 months ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

Or have a subscription and you don't actually own the game *looking at you Xbox game pass

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Bored Panda reached out to redditor Subject_Thorn, who started this discussion online, and kindly agreed to answer a few of our questions. Naturally, we were curious to know what inspired him to take this question to Reddit.

He told us, “I was actually in a nostalgic mood that night, so my mind was wandering. I work in an office in an adjacent IT role, so we use the Windows file system in various ways daily for our tasks, and last week I was reading about how kids today don't even know what File Explorer is because of the oversimplification of technology, primarily on smartphones and tablets.

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Kids today could never know that you can actually manually change video game files to adjust the game experience, nor how to actually do it. It's made me sure that to teach my future children technology properly, they will need to be exposed to a computer before, or at least around the same time, they are able to use a phone.”

#4

"Life Without Smartphones": 30 Things Today's Kids Will Never Get To Experience Developing a roll of film and all the pictures are bad.

shebacat , Razor512/Flickr (not the actual photo) Report

#5

"Life Without Smartphones": 30 Things Today's Kids Will Never Get To Experience Waiting for a new episode to come on at 7:30, yelling into the kitchen that it’s starting.

Calling your crushes house and having to politely ask a very scary dad if you can speak with Tanya. And then they say, that depends, who’s calling?

Icommentwhenhigh , nappy/Pexels (not the actual photo) Report

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General Anaesthesia
Community Member
7 months ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

"Please Mrs. Avery, I just gotta talk to her, I'll only keep her a while... And the operator says 40 cents more, for the next three minutes..." - Silvia’s Mother song by Dr. Hook & the Medicine Show

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#6

"Life Without Smartphones": 30 Things Today's Kids Will Never Get To Experience Violence fixing technologies. Remember when we used to slap the television 📺 for it to work properly or operate CPR on our consoles and game cartridges?

Joe_Winson , Leonora (Ellie) Enking/Flickr (not the actual photo) Report

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If he were to answer the question himself, he would say that something the 2020s kids will never experience is not being able to connect with other people instantly and lacking a stable or accessible internet connection.

Our interviewee shares, “I remember when I was little and I had just picked up Counter-Strike to play with friends from school, and we needed to install Steam to do it. In the process of that, we found that you can actually talk to other people on Steam! It was crazy that I could type on a chatbox, press enter, and they would see it a few moments later! It was like magic.”

He adds, “When I was young and we visited with my cousins, we would find YouTube videos we thought were cool to watch and some flash games like Stick Fight, and we would open several Internet Explorer windows and let them load so we could check them out later. We did this the moment we woke up, around 8 or 9, and the videos and games had only loaded by the evening!! And we would NOT turn the computer off or the windows with the media on them, so we could access them through our vacation without having to re-download them again. This is not a problem anymore in the developed world.”

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#7

"Life Without Smartphones": 30 Things Today's Kids Will Never Get To Experience Hearing your favorite song on the radio and waiting for it to come on again so you can record it on a blank cassette tape to listen to later.

Having a CD binder the size of Merriam Webster’s dictionary for road trips.

Taking a CD Walkman on a walk and making sure you didnt walk too fast or the CD skipped.

Lopsided_Platypus_51 , James Case/Flickr (not the actual photo) Report

#8

"Life Without Smartphones": 30 Things Today's Kids Will Never Get To Experience The joy of going to school without social media.


I remember getting bullied in middle school and having a terrible time. But all that could have been so much worse if smartphones and apps were a thing back then.

Kids these days must be so stressed out just trying to tune it out.

moenblast , Caleb Oquendo/Pexels (not the actual photo) Report

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CKB
Community Member
7 months ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

When we were kids, we had a bad day at school, get home, close the door and it was done for the day. Tomorrow would be a new day. Thanks to social media though there is no escape. It is constant and continues. I feel sorry for the kids today.

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#9

"Life Without Smartphones": 30 Things Today's Kids Will Never Get To Experience Driving to someplace new with an actual physical map.

DIABLO258 , Dominika Roseclay/Pexels (not the actual photo) Report

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Adrian
Community Member
7 months ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

You should still keep paper maps in the car for when you don't have a signal (yes, I know you can download maps, if you remember).

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Having said all this, the redditor doesn’t think that childhood was better back then compared to now. “I don't believe in the "good old days" sentiment. Kids now will experience different things than my generation did, and they will be similarly nostalgic about their unique experiences the same way I am. And their kids similarly after them, and so on.”

#10

"Life Without Smartphones": 30 Things Today's Kids Will Never Get To Experience I was at work the other day when our department's landline phone started ringing. One of my coworkers (my age-ish, 30s) called out "I'll get it!" I felt a weird sort of sad nostalgic pang. You don't hear that much anymore.

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Sam Juan
Community Member
7 months ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

At work the other day, I transferred a (much younger) co-worker a line to make a phone call to a client. I told her to listen for the dial tone before dialling the number, and she responded "What's a dial tone?" I died substantially that day 😑

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#11

"Life Without Smartphones": 30 Things Today's Kids Will Never Get To Experience Going to the movie store.

kphill325 , Grant Baldwin/Flickr (not the actual photo) Report

#12

"Life Without Smartphones": 30 Things Today's Kids Will Never Get To Experience Exploration.


As kids we played video games but we also got outdoors. Sometimes finding areas of forest to go and investigate. We enjoyed checking out odd areas people generally would never go into such as those little wooded areas in between roads. Our parents didn't care as long we gave them an idea of what we were doing ahead of time in case we got lost or hurt.


We would have a small fire just enough to roast some marshmallows and then put it out and usually make it back in time for supper.

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Corvus
Community Member
7 months ago (edited) DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

I loved exploring creepy abandoned buildings (both houses and industrial)... nowadays I realize how dangerous it could have been. Still, good memories.

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#13

"Life Without Smartphones": 30 Things Today's Kids Will Never Get To Experience Meeting family/friends at the **gate** at the airport instead of baggage claim or the curb.

Infuryous , Philip Tellis/Flickr (not the actual photo) Report

#14

"Life Without Smartphones": 30 Things Today's Kids Will Never Get To Experience Dial up internet and AOL chat rooms.

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#16

"Life Without Smartphones": 30 Things Today's Kids Will Never Get To Experience Being disconnected.

There were periods of my life growing up, hours or even days at a time, where there was genuinely no way to reach me or my parents. In the 90’s, growing up, most people didn’t have cellphones. They existed but they were *really* expensive. I remember when my mom got her first cellphone. She always turned it off when she got home and stuck it in a drawer. Why would she need a cellphone at home?

We had the internet but it was slow and we had limited access to it, often on a family computer visible to everyone and maybe for an hour or two.

And if you go back a little further than that, answering machines were expensive and uncommon so you either reached someone or you didn’t. There was no constant demand from everyone for everyone.

I definitely remember calling a friend to hang out, their parent answering, and telling me they were already hanging out with someone else. “Okay, cool, I’ll try again later.”

I had no way to reach them. Which meant they got to be fully present with whoever they were with and weren’t talking to me or anyone else while they were with that friend.

That level of disconnect is something that, in hindsight, I really miss. You were wherever you were with whomever you were with and that was it. People took hours to reach and that was normal and, I think, a really good thing.

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Me. Just Me.
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7 months ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

And you could have a full conversation over email with someone because they were far away and you didn't want to pay the ridiculous rates for long distance. The conversation still took days because you only checked your email once per day, but it was still faster than mailing letters back and forth.

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#17

"Life Without Smartphones": 30 Things Today's Kids Will Never Get To Experience Being responsible for zero parental contact and simply just needing to come home when the streetlights come on.

inspiredguy40 , Dennis Yang/Flickr (not the actual photo) Report

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Scrappychick
Community Member
7 months ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

People say uts because it was safer for children back then, failing to realise that there were still creeps out there doing grim things but no social media so if it wasn't in the evening news you'd not hear about it

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#18

"Life Without Smartphones": 30 Things Today's Kids Will Never Get To Experience Getting kicked off the internet because mom needs to make a call.

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Adrian
Community Member
7 months ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

Or having your connection drop when your download is at 90% because someone picked up the phone in the kitchen...

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#19

"Life Without Smartphones": 30 Things Today's Kids Will Never Get To Experience Having to check the newspapers to see when new movies were released, as well as what theater they’re playing at.

Kids today won’t ever experience that.

kimchiman85 , Jordi De Smedt/Flickr (not the actual photo) Report

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Carl Roberts
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7 months ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

Welcome to Moviephone.Please say the name of the movie you'd like to see....NOW

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#20

"Life Without Smartphones": 30 Things Today's Kids Will Never Get To Experience Snow on Christmas, at least most of the time.

I’m almost as far north in the USA that you can get and snow just doesn’t stick around anymore. It snows like once or twice in December and it melts in a day. 25 years ago you were lucky if it wasn’t a blizzard on *Halloween.*

But don’t worry, climate change isn’t real! /s.

Faust_8 , Chris Short/Flickr (not the actual photo) Report

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#21

"Life Without Smartphones": 30 Things Today's Kids Will Never Get To Experience Having to listen/watch the nightly news with your parents because you only have one tv.

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James016
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7 months ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

We still have only 1 TV in the house so we have to watch my son's weird YouTube videos and he in turn has to watch the news or whatever we are watching in the evening.

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#22

"Life Without Smartphones": 30 Things Today's Kids Will Never Get To Experience Fixing the antenna to get a better picture on the TV. Or making one with a coat hanger.

GuppyGirl1234 , ErnestDuffoo/Flickr (not the actual photo) Report

#23

"Life Without Smartphones": 30 Things Today's Kids Will Never Get To Experience Downloading a song for 2 hours and finding out it's a virus.

GabbyCivility , Cheryl Cox/Flickr (not the actual photo) Report

#24

"Life Without Smartphones": 30 Things Today's Kids Will Never Get To Experience A life without immediate gratification. I feel like 90s/00s kids might be the last to have experienced what its like to have to wait for that good thing you want.

Mrbrowneyes97 , Kindel Media/Flickr (not the actual photo) Report

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keyboardtek
Community Member
7 months ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

And we used to actually build stuff like model cars and planes, things out of wood. We learned that a project that takes time and attention and thought resulted in something very gratifying to do.

Andrew Keir
Community Member
7 months ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

Things you *make* are yours, in a much deeper way than things you just *buy*

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Sven Horlemann
Community Member
7 months ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

I think this is a big one. It is a completely different way to perceive things, your sourroundings - and it changes your attitude towards those, too.

HistoryLover(she/her)
Community Member
7 months ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

Don’t worry. As a high school student who filled out the FAFSA in January, I can assure you, we are still waiting for the good thing we want.

Max Fox
Community Member
7 months ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

The older people in the 1980s were saying The. Exact. Same. Thing. Kids today seem to believe that in the 1980s, kids all got up early and went down to the fishin' hole with Mike. No, there were hours of TV on weekend mornings, and kids prefered hanging out in the the malls, not in parks or riverbeds. I bet that 80% of those people talking about playing outside until it got dark were, in fact, Mall Rats.

Alicia M
Community Member
7 months ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

And it took so long. It seems like all I did as a kid was wait. My kids rarely have to wait for anything.

Petra Schaap
Community Member
7 months ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

and so grateful for that! I can wait! Its so much more fun to wait a bit when you're looking for something. So much more satisfying. I still dont buy cds and movies online, if i dont have to. Its so much more fun to find them in a recordshop somewhere. But many of my generation dont care.

Alicia M
Community Member
7 months ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

When I was a kid, The Wizard of Oz came on television once a year, and it was an event. We didn't have a way to watch things on demand. We only had what was on TV, and most the time it wasn't good. Also, waking up early on Saturday mornings to watch the cartoons and trying not to wake my parents.

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#25

"Life Without Smartphones": 30 Things Today's Kids Will Never Get To Experience Watching that ticker at the bottom of the tv to see if school is closed only for them to cut to commercial when it’s time for yours to show up. I watched that thing like an nba draft.

loves_spain , Dennis Sylvester Hurd/Flickr (not the actual photo) Report

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Doyle Alan
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7 months ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

I live in Canada and in my area, three flakes of snow and the kids are off school. When I was little we would have two or three feet of snow before they'd call a snow day.

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#26

"Life Without Smartphones": 30 Things Today's Kids Will Never Get To Experience Mystery.

“Just Google it” has ruined any sense of wonder in the world.

Lookslikeseen , Kindel Media/Pexels (not the actual photo) Report

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keyboardtek
Community Member
7 months ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

Remember when we all thought that free access to information on the internet would topple totalitarian countries and make everyone educated? Then all the criminals, Fascists, conspiracy nuts, and idiots took it over.

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#27

"Life Without Smartphones": 30 Things Today's Kids Will Never Get To Experience Oh, uh, losing hours of work because you forgot to hit save.

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Stygtand
Community Member
7 months ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

That can still happen. Spending 3 hours on photo documentation, only to find out the server f****d up. F**k you microbizz you know what you did!!!!

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#28

"Life Without Smartphones": 30 Things Today's Kids Will Never Get To Experience Choking to death on smoke wafting over from the smoking section of every restaurant while you try to eat.

Santos_L_Halper_II , Centophobia/Flickr (not the actual photo) Report

#30

"Life Without Smartphones": 30 Things Today's Kids Will Never Get To Experience That windows opening sound in pc.

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#31

"Life Without Smartphones": 30 Things Today's Kids Will Never Get To Experience Scheduling your television consumption around an ironclad tv schedule, pre-streaming and pre-TiVo/Recording.

Not to get all Boomer sounding, but the strict schedule and dealing with the consequences of being late/missing entire episodes, I personally feel, had an enormous impact on society's overall sense of entitlement.

Ok_Heat_3964 , Jo Naylor/Flickr (not the actual photo) Report

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Alicia M
Community Member
7 months ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

You had one chance to see what you wanted. My dad was a TV guide person. He got real joy out of planning all of his TV viewing for the week. He always tried to get me involved too. Wanted me to sit down and look at the guide with him, and pick out my shows. 😂

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#32

"Life Without Smartphones": 30 Things Today's Kids Will Never Get To Experience Apartment kids having friends outside all the time on bikes and skateboards, no phones just knowing their building and knocking. This was only 13 years ago but damn.

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New Everywhere
Community Member
7 months ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

One of my fondest childhood memories is when the adults who were friends in the complex would hang out on a weekend night and all us kids would be out playing late. That's when hide and seek would be truly epic

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#33

"Life Without Smartphones": 30 Things Today's Kids Will Never Get To Experience Pagers, Digi-pets.

HeadGullible7082 , Hades2k/Flickr (not the actual photo) Report

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Jill
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7 months ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

I always wanted a Tamagotchi but never got one because I was afraid my forgetfull a**e would accidentally "unalive" it. :(

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#34

"Life Without Smartphones": 30 Things Today's Kids Will Never Get To Experience Life without smartphones. 


But, also think that this is more "1st world problems" type of answer. So, please no hate. .

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Me. Just Me.
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7 months ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

I think cell phones are still a wonderful thing we have. Like everything, there are pros and cons. The problem is what is on these phones. It's reassuring that you likely have a phone on your person if you are in an emergency. It's depressing that you are immediately greeted with a "look what everyone else is doing that you are not" message just because you tap on one app. It's nice to have quick and easy communication with our loved ones. It's horrible that we are immediately reachable by our bosses just as quickly. Sometimes it's how you use the technology that makes it what it is.

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#36

"Life Without Smartphones": 30 Things Today's Kids Will Never Get To Experience Miniclip, Club Penguin,.

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Alicia M
Community Member
7 months ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

I forgot all about Club Penguin. I used to play some ice block game.

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