As we millennials grapple with adult responsibilities, the memories of our carefree youth get buried under a growing mountain of corporate emails, bills, and laundry. So it's about time we refresh them!
Enter the Instagram account 'Childhood & Memes.' With 3.9 million followers, it regularly shares content for '90s and early 2000s kids that can instantly teleport us back to the good old days.
Whether it's a still from a classic video game, a picture of a beloved board game, or a joke about sibling relationships, continue scrolling for a healthy dose of nostalgia.
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I have a habit of counting all those little animations we get now before the movie. The record is eleven (in a Russian-made film). I suspect, one day we'll have a whole movie just of them.
No wonder 'Childhood & Memes' has such a huge following. Krystine Batcho, Ph.D., is a licensed psychologist and professor at LeMoyne College and she believes that nostalgia is an emotional experience that unifies.
"One example of this is it helps to unite our sense of who we are, our self, our identity over time," Batcho explained.
"Because over time we change constantly, we change in incredible ways. We're not anywhere near the same as we were when we were three years old, for example. Nostalgia, by motivating us to remember the past in our own life, helps to unite us to that authentic self and remind us of who we have been and then compare that to who we feel we are today."
That gives us a sense of who we want to be down the road in the future as well.
"The other way that nostalgia serves an essential psychological function is that it is a highly social emotion," Batcho added. "It connects us to other people"
Nostalgia does that in many beautiful ways, not just memes. "In the beginning, when we're very young, it's part of what bonds us to the most important people in our life, our parents, our siblings, our friends. As we go through life, it can broaden out and extend to a wider sphere of the people we interact with"
"It's a social connectedness phenomenon and nostalgia is in that sense a very healthy pro-social emotion," the psychologist added.
My parents realized I could read when I opened the childproof lock for one of these
I was always too excited to see what goodies were brought home to throw on shoes to help with groceries. I grew up in the California desert so this involved stepping on hot dirt, jagged rocks and getting pierced with "goat heads", also known as "stickers".
Nostalgia also helps us to unify what otherwise would be felt or experienced by us as conflicts.
"In itself, it is somewhat of a conflict because as I define it is a bitter-sweet emotion," Batcho noted. "It's sweet because we're remembering the best times, the good times of our life. The bitterness comes from the sense that we know for sure that we can never really regain them, they're gone forever."
The irreversibility of time means that there is no way to go back in time so it helps us to deal with the conflict of the bitter longing for what can never be again, together with the sweetness of having experienced it and being able to revisit it and relive it again.
My daughter has started playing UNO recently and she doesn't like playing with her daddy. She insists she plays sitting next to me and we team up against him! :D :D
Change, whether it's good or bad, is stressful. That's mostly because we're not 100 percent sure how much of it is within our control.
So when things begin to change, either very substantially, such as major events in a person's life, getting married or getting divorced, getting a new career, going back to school or graduating from school, it's comforting to have a nostalgic feeling for the past that reminds us that although we don't know what the future is going to bring, what we do know is that we know who we have been and who we are.
These pictures bring us back to the times when we were accepted and loved unconditionally.
"That is such a powerfully comforting phenomenon, knowing that there was a time in life when we didn't have to earn our love, or we didn't deserve it because we earned a certain amount of money or we were successful in a certain venue," Batcho said.
"Our parents, for example, or our siblings, or our friends simply loved us unconditionally. That is a wonderfully comforting feeling when we're undergoing any kind of turmoil in our personal lives."
So if you want to indulge in it a little more, check out these 50 Nostalgia-Instilling Posts For Kids Of The ’80s, ’90s And ’00s.
What is this fancy s**t? It doesn't look like Win 3.11...
There's an incredibly detailed Reddit thread about this, just Google "Home Alone pizza prices" and it should be the first result. Basically the family orders 10 pizzas at a rounded average of 12.50 each, which is about right for 1990. So, not really "comical", more realistic.
Way to fancy for me. We mixed our kool-aid packets in a pitcher and drank from (reusable) plastic cups.
When I was a kid, in the 60’s, we had these little rounds that resembled the candy “Bottle Caps “. But, you would drop them in water and they’d fizz and torn the water into soda. Does anyone else remember these? I remember them mostly from when my dad was stationed in the Philippines, but I seem to remember them after, when we were in Texas. I have an odd, but repeatedly verified by my mother, ability to remember my very early childhood. I’d tell her about something I remembered, and her reaction was, invariably, “I can’t believe you remember that!” But I’d love to hear from anyone who remembers those soda drops.
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Yeah, nah. Our juice was called mini sips. It came in a clear plastic bag that you stabbed with a straw. Once you finished your drink, you would blow into the straw, fill the bag with air and stick the straw out the other side to make yourself a balloon. The dumber kids would bust this balloon and spray juice crumbs all over themselves.
Who remembers the colored sugar water barrels with the aluminum lid that was REALLY HARD to peel off?
Too expensive! From what this little farm girl thought, those were only for rich kids.
Anyone ever use the tear-off caps as starships and have a battle afterwards if you had more than one?
If he's only waking up mom because he missed the bus that means, in theory, he had already been up on his own, showered and dressed, fed himself, brushed his teeth, was ready to go and mom would still be asleep after. I want that.
Note: this post originally had 37 images. It’s been shortened to the top 30 images based on user votes.
20+ of 41 that had nothing to do with millenials. I'm so tired of BP lists not bothering to match the title of the article. I want the nostalgia they promised, dammit.
They did just say "good ol days", not millenials in particular
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20+ of 41 that had nothing to do with millenials. I'm so tired of BP lists not bothering to match the title of the article. I want the nostalgia they promised, dammit.
They did just say "good ol days", not millenials in particular
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