Getting older and nostalgia - what do you miss?

I really miss not being expected to be available 24/7

I try not to be snide, but I smile when I read a 36 yr old calls himself "old". I only wish I was that "old" anymore. Im turning 62 this year and its hard not to be nostalgic for many things of the past. The latest thing I thought of was when I was a young married man and my kids would coming running to the top of the stairs when I arrived after work yelling "Daddy's home!". They were only 2 and 4 at the time. Now there are 3 of them and the oldest one is turning 37. If there's one thing that's a constant reminder its that life is really friggin' short. VERY short. Whatever you want to do, do it now, before its too late.

If I had to pick a single thing that I miss the most, it would be that kind of magic that Christmas (and holidays in general) used to have. As I've grown up, those just started feeling like basically any other day to me.

Also, very high on that list is that the biggest problem in life was my parents sending me to bed before sunset in summer.

I miss shops.

I mean, we still have shops, but not like we used to. When I was a kid, every town near where I lived would have a row of shops. There would be a baker, a butcher, a greengrocers, often a small women's clothes shop, a florist, a hardware store, maybe an Indian restaurant and a fish & chip shop. There would be a bank or two, building society. Maybe a sport shop or a musical instrument shop. A travel agent. A grocery store, often combined with a Post Office. They'd be the odd electrical store, where they'd repair radios. And furniture stores selling sofas and beds. Video rental shops.

Nowadays it's nearly all gone. No record shops because you stream music on your phone. No banks because you use the app, no sports shops because you get it from Amazon, no instrument shops: buy online. Clothes shops are just the big ones in malls and cities. Travel agents replaced by websites. Hardware stores are all gone, you order from Screwfix or online. Even the phone shops seem to have had their day as everyone orders online.

There are a few hi-fi and camera shops clinging on here and there but they're largely all gone too.

A high street now is just takeaways, vape shops, betting shops, estate agents and convience stores. We don't interact with people much any more and we're too busy to want to. We're all rushing through life to get to the end.

I miss Superman.

Now, what does this mean exactly? That feeling that you would get watching Superman (Christopher Reeves version) or reading All Star Superman. Everything is dark cynical and never genuine anymore. That feeling you got reading Superman and realizing he was that genuinely good person that's there to do the right thing and be nice. There was never a question that he had an ulterior motive. Most of media now just critiques the whole idea like The Boys. I just remember hearing "This looks like a job for Superman!" Or "Don't worry Lois, I'll think of something." You'd get that genuine feel that everything was going to be okay.

I always try to bring that kind of directness and assurance to my patients when I work with them.

The time I spent in video games as a child without even following the story, cause I didn't know how video games work, but I spent way more time in them than in today's games by playing through the story and finishing sidestories.

I'm also 36, and yes, the feelings of nostalgia have only gotten more pronounced over time. Which may sound obvious, but I can safely say that the "nostalgic" feelings I had when I was 25 or 18 were completely different things which don't really get at what nostalgia, as I currently experience it, is about at all. And I'm sure my feelings will change yet again in another ten years.

Honestly, at this point, it's not really about the stuff. Sure, this might be another obvious one...it's about how that "stuff" made you feel, and being unable to recapture that feeling. But the deepest nostalgia for me is looking back at my various relationships, how things can never go back to the way they were, dwelling on regrets, and feeling hopeless about the fact that time keeps marching on at breakneck speed and there's nothing much left to latch onto to feel good about the future.

I know this sounds very fatalist and depressive. I just feel that as you get older, you have to learn how to accept certain things which, for those of us who struggle to live in the moment, is really hard.

Neopets!

I'm a very nostalgic person, even more so since becoming a dad last year.

I find there's loads of things that can trigger my nostalgia, a strange one is this 90's Stretch Armstrong advert, I remember hunting it down a year or so ago and it hit my nostalgia bone like a ton of bricks.

Other things like thinking back to getting my N64 for Christmas 97 with Mario 64 or Majoras Mask for Christmas 00 make me feel happy. I love playing video games still (although I have less time to do so now) and those games fostered a strong love of video games, Nintendo and specifically the Mario and Zelda franchises.

TV shows that were of their era definitely make me feel nostalgic as well, like The Crystal Maze, Fun House, Gladiators UK and Big Break just have the stink of the 90's all over them and I love it.

I miss the innocence of youth and the ignorance of the world around me.

Back when you lived in the moment and only had to worry about being home before the street lights turned on.

I hit the big 4-0 next year, and one thing I am starting to miss is my body.

I miss being able to stay up until silly o'clock, drinking and eating what I want and still be able to get out of bed the next day fresh and alert with my waist measurement unaffected.

I miss not feeling aches in my lower back if I have sat at my desk for too long, my feet killing me after a long walk, or bending down without making some sort of strained groaning sound.

I'm cool with getting older (I'll make a fantastic grumpy old fart) but I'm not looking forward to the physical side of it.

The thing I miss most is having friends with nothing to do but get stoned, lay around someone's basement, and over analyze music for HOURS, and talk about nothing.

I turn 40 this year and all my friends are gone, and I have no idea how to make new ones with similar interests.

I'd kill a baby just to meet someone with similar music tastes that ALSO like to lay around, drop acid, and talk about nothing.

My whole state is just people who hike with their dogs and drink craft beer. Whatever happened to the "indoor kids"?

I'm in my early 50s, and I miss sugary cereals and '80s music -- however, I listen to a lot of '80s music these days, so I guess I'm not actually missing it much.

I miss when articles about Harrison Ford (and his movies) weren't all about old age and mortality.

I constantly miss being passionate about my work or interests, diving headfirst into everything and being productive without seemingly any mental effort whatsoever. It took a long time but life finally beat that out of me. I miss my family being closer, too (and more of them alive, generally speaking), and having more friends who were more available and open-minded about activities. Some online activities are all that's keeping me sane these days, or at least keeping me from doing something stupid.

I don't know about nostalgia for platforms. Things are getting crappy lately, but old online platfroms were crappy as hell in their own way. They were insecure, slow and clunky with terrible UI and missing vital features (such as no built in user registration on IRC).

And I definitely feel no nostalgia for content. With apologies to some of the respondents, old cartoons mostly kind of sucked. They were poorly animated, the stories were simplistic and condescending, the voice acting was mediocre. They make them way better now! High effort Ghibli and Disney movies notwithstanding. Videogames are the same: There were some gems, you can't play A Link To The Past for the first time ever again, but for the most part they were severely limited not only by the technology of the time but by terrible design philosophies, such as making use of abundant frustration to make the game last longer. We have a ton of great music now, a ton of great TV shows, including almost everything that was available in the 90s. They even press records again if you're one of those people. Life is fun!

Do I miss living in a less connected world? Not exactly. Work from home would be impossible. I'd get lost a lot more often when driving to a new place - I have a terrible sense of direction. Super hard to get in touch with people when things don't go as planned. If you're in danger, if someone gets hurt, the odds of escaping or surviving would be much worse. These are all bad things! Tourism abroad was harder, more expensive, more dangerous. I do miss the relative peace and optimism of the 90s, I suppose, and the inability of people with horrible beliefs to reinforce them by finding kinship online.

I miss there being less people and a time before the internet gave away everyone secrets. You used to be able to find that secret beach only a handful of people knew about. No everyone knows and it's just as crowded as every other beach. You used to be able to have a favorite quiet little restaurant. Now it's all over TikTok and there's a wait on a Saturday night. We used to go camping and get our favorite spot every year. Now you have to be up at 6am on a random Tuesday in January with 15 browser tabs open and a timer so you're ready to hit refresh and hopefully you get any spot in the 3 mins spots are available during the once per year release.
It's insane! I'm glad people are going out more and exploring the world around them. But it's frustrating as the lines for everything get longer and longer.

I was thinking about pre-internet lately.
I remember private bulletin board systems, and getting on them with Procomm+ in MsDOS. I still remember the sound the modem made when connecting.

Also there was Compuserve which was basically message boards. It cost about $12 an hour so you would get on, read some messages, and get off quickly. Actually it was much more expensive than that during business hours, so you would only use it in the evening.

Later there was Genie, a Compuserve competetor that was only $5 an hour. Like Compuserve, it was completely text based.

It was kind of a big deal when Prodigy came out. It was much less expensive and it had graphics! The graphics were vector-based and would load very slowly.

I didn't use Prodigy much because it was too slow and the content was very oriented toward consumerism. There's a pretty good post that references that development here: https://catvalente.substack.com/p/stop-talking-to-each-other-and-start

Once the internet was more widely available, and you could use Mozilla to browse it, it felt kind of weird and magical. Like you would go to a website that was hosted in Germany, and you felt like you had visited the country or something.

I miss my friends. Not all of them, but a lot of them have passed in the last few years. I think I'm past the grief part of it - I'm at the point where I just miss those evenings when the phone would ring and we'd pop down to the neighbourhood pub for a pint.

As someone in his mid-30s, the generally more sunny and forward-looking cultural disposition that the US had back in the late 90s.

Maybe a couple times a year I'll pull up compilation videos of mid-to-late 90s TV ad blocs and be at awe at how much more positive the overarching attitude was. It aligns with what I remember from having lived through that time period but watching old media really makes the contrast with how things are currently crystal clear. I'd give just about anything to be able to bring that back.

I also miss being a teenager and having so few responsibilities and things demanding my time and attention that I could become totally enraptured by whatever had my interest at that point in time, whether that be working on some kind of art in Photoshop, writing code, or playing a game. Being a well-rounded responsible adult and member of society means that I can't go more than an hour without my internal voice nagging at me in the back of my head to go make sure X is taken care of or that my time would be better spent doing Y productive thing.

I miss the time when people didn't willingly put their names, faces, voices and homes on the internet.

We all had (pseudo) anonymity and things worked just fine.

LAN parties and overall much more physical meeting with people (and more free time back then when I was teen).

That pokémon bot for AIM is fascinating! I was a kid in the era of MSN messenger but never came across actual text-based games played over IM before. I am going to research the shit out of this. Thanks for the dopamine!

Miss spending most of my time out and about with only spontaneous plans with whoever showed up. Not having a way to contact anyone other than going to where you think they are. Landline if internet wasn't used, and the few that had pagers.

A few people have mentioned friends already, but what I specifically miss is the intense bond of preteen and teenage friendships. At that age my friends were more important than anything else; I loved them more than my own family. I would have done anything for them and them for me.

We’re still friends now, but it’s different. We have husbands and children and careers and we all live in different countries. We still talk often, but they don’t know me better than anyone now. I miss that as I get older.

A great representation of this is Turning Red. I cried a few times watching that, because it was such a beautiful telling of the power of teen friendships

I deeply miss Yahoo! Pool. It's how my wife and I essentially forged our strong friendship while still teenagers. We're both competitive by nature and we'd stay up till the wee hours of the mornings lining up our shots with a straightedge on our monitors while chatting away in the limited text box. Despite being on opposite sides of our city, our interactions within that Java applet made it feel like we were in the same room having the time of our lives.

An honorable mention goes to Microsoft Ants on MSN Gaming Zone which was another game I was obscenely fond of. It was basically a kid-friendly RTS that had you competing with other players for food by using power-ups to gain an edge. It was a masterpiece.

It's not even that long ago, but the "old" broadcast radio environment is the thing I miss the most lately. Coupled with the lack of tactile buttons for next or skip, non-self curated music listening is more work than it use to be.

The thing I miss the most is open-access messaging.

Platforms like AOL Instant Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, ICQ, etc. were technically proprietary services, but they didn't require you to use their software to access them, and as a result they were ubiquitous and you could talk to just about anyone through at least one of them. Nowadays the number of services like this are all so small that they basically don't exist. The closest is good old fashioned SMS, but that's a very limited service that also requires a phone number, which provides a whole host of reasons why people don't want to use it the same way they would IM services.

I also have vague childhood memories about this website called The Backbone Zone that was supposed to be some sort of educational website for kids. I remember there were games had lessons about how to count money. But the real reason why I miss it was because it had a lot of communication stuff built in, so I was able to talk to other kids through it. AFAIK it closed down around the same time as Google Search became available, so the internet seems to have completely forgotten about it.

Educational games in general seem to have gone the way of the Dodo. It looks like ABC Mouse has replaced them all.

I miss the maze game in prodigy. I miss pizza hut book it. I miss the free compuserve internet connection I got being in the boy scout explorer post. I miss making doom wad files.

I remember during that same period playing in dragonball role playing games in chat rooms. I still remember the URL was perfectcell2.tripod.com

Just remembering creating our own hangouts using beseen chat rooms on tripod websites was such a blast. I remember making friends that I thought I'd know for a long time. Never met them in person, and I haven't heard from them since that time. I hope they're doing good though.

I wish each poster would include their current age. I'd like to see how the things we missed have changed with age. The 65 y/o people probably have an entirely different genre of memories than the 35 year olds.

There are places I'll remember
All my life, though some have changed
...
I know I'll often stop and think about them

             Beatles, In My Life

In general: I miss not being reminded of my own mortality on a consistent basis. I miss thinking that things would get better in the future and having things to look forward to. When you're young, birthdays are exciting, but when you're older they feel more like a count down. A rapid march to a state of life of which it may be said: "It is bad today, and it will be worse tomorrow; and so on till the worst of all." (Schopenhauer)

Specifically: This might sound weird, but I miss having specialized technology. Back in the day, a game console played video games, a phone was a phone, etc, but now a lot of devices can do... well... everything... which kinda makes everything feel a little less special.

I was just considering making a thread about how I miss AIM. I know I can text any of my friends at any time now, but being on AIM was a signal that one was open to chatting, so I ended up having a ton more conversations back then, despite the fact that texting is technically more functional. I think gchat was kind of replacing AIM in my social circles as AIM waned, but people always had access to gmail at work. However, google has changed their messaging strategy so often that this interaction kind of died out as we transitioned to smartphones. For a while people were hopping on Discord, but that was just the gamers, excluding the rest of my friends. People are rarely on discord nowadays as we've all gotten older though. There were some group texts, but they seemed to die out over time as well. So now the only thing that is still ongoing is a fantasy football league group chat that's active during the NFL season, but mostly quiet otherwise. It's been hard to keep people interested in fantasy football too, since a lot of them are busy with kids and whatnot. Well, kind of a rant, but yeah I really miss the AIM days too.

Not sure why this is popping up on my list now two months later, but I'm turning 43 soon and have been thinking about this a lot so here's my late reply.

I've been pretty lucky health-wise, so I don't feel getting older so much in myself as I do in friends and family. I'm nostalgic for the time in my life when I just assumed my parents would live forever--both are in their 70s now and it's never been more clear how naive I was. I'm nostalgic for childhood summers when I could hop on my bike when the sun went up and play with my friends around the neighborhood until it went down again--I've kept in touch with almost nobody from back then and my social interactions are mostly limited to video conferences with coworkers. I'm nostalgic for the silly amounts of fun I had morphing into the "tickle monster" and chasing my kids around the house--both are teenagers now and will never be those un-jaded giggly little toddlers again.

Of course I'm sure in 30 years (assuming I make it that long and my health continues to hold out) when my kids are the age that I am now I'll be feeling nostalgic for this time in my life as well. It's just one of those aspects of making memories and getting older that you don't really think about until you do.

I miss nothing since I have many things to look forward to in life.

I miss the carelessness of youth. Going on rollercoasters without a single thought to structural integrity. Going out to drink and having no idea how I got home. Quitting a job just because, and being absolutely certain I’ll find a new and better one. Being impulsive and irresponsible with money.

I just had this moment with my kids the other day. They were chasing fireflies. But they only found a couple. I remember there were so many we would fill jars and jars of them. Now, we are lucky to see enough to notice them.

And being out all day. Doing whatever, wherever. No worries about being hurt or lost. Came home for dinner or ate at a friend's. As long as we were inside before dark it was all good. The 90s and early 2000s were a great time.

Sunday drives in the car singing songs.
My parents used to take us on a Sunday drive every so often an we would sing old songs from the early part of the century and World War 2.
This must have been something they did as children. They were born in the 1920s when cars were still relatively new.

I was recently visiting a lot of websites I used to frequent in the past (ostensibly to reset my password and/or delete my unused accounts; apparently some of the passwords teenage me used to repeat on many websites had, in fact, been pwned) and visiting some of the old sites brought back a lot of memories.

I miss mutiplayer browser games. I used to frequent browser-based Pokemon fangames - largely Pokemon Crater in my childhood days until its owner shut it down. I have many fond memories of logging on after the end of a school day to battle my friends and hunt for rare mons to show off to them. And after that, I played DelugeRPG for a fair bit too. I also liked Neopets and probably dabbled in a few more whose names I've forgotten as well. Even though them were rough around the edges and janky when compared to modern games/websites, I miss their simplicity and honestly, the roughness added a certain charm to them too.

I miss butterflies. We've lived in this house for 25 years or so. Butterflies were everywhere in the summer. Now, despite having land filled with native and pollinator-supporting plants, days go by without a single butterfly. One day this summer I saw 3 in one day, and it seemed like a miracle. Most days there are none. A couple years back, there was a burst of a particular kind of butterfly that liked to lay its eggs on sunflowers. The neighborhood app was filled with people complaining about the pests that were eating their pretty flowers, and using pesticides to get rid of them.
I miss butterflies and it breaks my heart to know why they are gone.

I'm 48 and I miss "the mall". Not necessarily the mall itself but the mall experience that kids had in the 80s. I grew up in a small suburban area where weekend fun was limited to either swimming and riding bikes at home, going to the movies or Blockbuster, or going to the mall. The mall was the ultimate because you'd more than likely see schoolmates and friends, you could hang in the food court and socialize while you ate giant slices of Sbarro pizza or sipped on an Orange Julius. You could go pet the puppies in the pet store or spend all your time in the arcade. I miss those days.

Trash talking without thinking or resulting in a fight, or worst, being shot. Back in the days, your momma jokes etc., were common. Yeah they stung, but it also helped me develop. Trash talking turned into battles, which I don't know what came first but I also recall Rap battles which for those who had the ability did it really well.