Various ‘Life Truths’ Gen X’ers Were Told As Kids Turned Out To Be Utter Nonsense, Like These 30
The modern world is incredibly fast, not only because today we can literally get to anywhere in the world in a day, or even less. Not only because of the speed at which we consume content, moving from two-hour movies through ten-minute YouTube videos to minute-long TikTok shorts. The speed of the modern world also lies in how quickly knowledge becomes obsolete.
Indeed, experience is becoming outdated, and what a couple of decades ago was considered unshakable worldly wisdom is now perceived as a funny absurdity. And, for example, Gen X'ers in various viral online threads like this recall examples of such outdated and baseless things from their childhood with humor and nostalgia.
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You won’t always walk around with a calculator in your pocket.
We're also walking around with a phone, a phone book, an address book, a clock, an alarm, a stopwatch, a timer, a library, a stereo, a gaming console, a newspaper, a word processor, a photo album, interactive maps...
I had to unlearn everything i was taught about the age of exploration, and american history in general.
We had a serious problem with making heroes out of powerful, and very flawed, individuals while minimizing the experiences and suffering of others
Just go to college and you’ll get a good job, your major doesn’t matter.
Why exactly Gen X'ers? In fact, this is absolutely reasonable - these are representatives of the last generation in the history of human civilization (unless, of course, for some reason we give up technical progress) whose childhood and partly youth passed before the start of this insane online breakthrough that we all made in the late nineties and continue doing to this day. The last generation for which gadgets and the internet were not an integral attribute of their daily life growing up.
Technology would give us so much free time in the future, that we'd only have to work 5 - 10 hours a week. And, we'd be able to do it from home, and employers would be on board with it.
That one still hurts.
We never figured employers would just pivot to expecting one person to do the work of three.
Trickle down economics is a good thing and not at all a way to consolidate wealth to the top.
Plastic bags will save the earth because we won't have to kill as many trees to make brown paper bags to carry groceries.
This implies another logical assumption - those who raised the future Gen X'ers were even less ready for fast progress, and perceived it with quite understandable skepticism towards this "newfangled stuff". And these older folks transferred their attitude, for example, to computers from TVs or radio. Hence the dozens, hundreds of absolutely ridiculous demands on the use of gadgets that we encountered in childhood.
For example, my grandma also repeatedly told me not to sit close to the TV or I'd go blind. And it doesn't matter what kind of TV it was - a fossil kinescope dinosaur or an incredibly advanced (for the second half of the nineties, of course) LCD monitor. After all, the older generation had this, well... whatchamacallit, life experience!
Eggs are bad for you. No, wait, they are good for you…hang on, are they bad again?
I could do without a lot of the ones who get fertilized and emerge as human beings
Don't sit too close to the TV or you'll go blind! Then computers came and we would have to spend 8+ hours at work with a screen 5 inches from our eyes.
Not on fire as much as I thought I would be. So much “stop, drop, roll” growing up.
Also, DONT GET IN A STRANGERS CAR!”
Currently sitting in an Uber.
“Now humanity is at such a unique point in its development, when life experience, if it is more than a few years old, sometimes turns out to be not only irrelevant - even harmful,” says Vladimir Nemertsalov, a school principal and teacher from Ukraine, with whom Bored Panda got in touch for a comment. "The same applies to many work skills. If back in the middle of the last century, for example, an engineer graduated from a university and could work for several decades on the old baggage of skills and knowledge, only periodically taking refresher courses, then today it is almost impossible."
"Hence the problem of ageism at work - after all, older, experienced workers have always been considered more valuable, and this paradigm is now breaking painfully. Because the ability to constantly learn in the modern world often turns out to be way more important than experience. So even if some advice that we were given a quarter of a century ago and before was really useful, now we are left with only a nostalgic smile for it," Vladimir summarizes.
The food pyramid is a healthy way to eat.
Eating fat makes you fat.
The American Dream is achievable to anyone who wants it hard enough.
No, all these words we have said do not at all mean that everything that we were taught in childhood should be treated with disdain, as outdated nonsense. Do not discard it - but take it critically, trying to extract the grains of remaining benefit. And, of course, feel free to crack up at the really ridiculous pieces of 'practical wisdom' coming from your childhood. So if you're a Gen X'er like me, please feel free to scroll this list to the very end and embrace some nostalgia. Or just sincerely laugh at these funny 'boomers' in case you're way younger.
The human species evolved in a linear way. Neanderthals came before modern humans, and before that was one proto-human species after another, one at a time, as far back as turtles. Before that in deep time it's turtles all the way down.
Now we know of at least six human species coexisting all around Africa and Asia and Europe for a really long time, and sharing genes among them.
A large percentage of earth's population have Neanderthal DNA due to humans and Neanderthals interbreeding.
I took my son to a dinosaur exhibit, literally everything I learned about Dinosaurs is now wrong, including names of dinosaurs.
Slightly foolish, but true lol
That quicksand would be a real life problem
I’m a HS teacher and use Lies my Teacher told me by James Loewen as a reference for American history.
Columbus discovered America
Memorizing geography. How many of those countries do not exist anymore? All of Yugoslavia, many countries in Africa, Burma, anyone?
Our time would have been better spent understanding the history of these areas, and not arbitrary lines set up by colonizers who didn't have an ounce of sense.
Ulcers are caused by stress
The amount of sugar in the daily recommended diet
A world where everyone is able to communicate with everyone else will be a paradise of kindness and peace
Concussions are no big deal
"A world where everyone is able to communicate with everyone else will be a paradise of kindness and peace" -how wrong "they" were.
The tongue has a map of different taste buds that taste different things
You have to wait a 1/2 hour after eating before you go back swimming or you'd get cramps
The metric system will be phased in by Junior High. I remember thinking how much sense it makes.
That the only global history you need to know is western history. All other countries’ history isn’t important
I was never taught this. I was well aware of and taught the important contributions of China/East Asia and the Arab world.
Dinosaurs walked with their tails dragging on the ground
The Civil War was fought over "States Rights"
We'd be living on the moon with permanent bases by now
My top five:
1. Shaming fast food workers was classist nonsense.
2. No need for memorization of maps. We have the GPS and Google now.
3. Weed is not as evil as they made it out to be. Turns out the devil’s lettuce will be legal even in Florida gas stations (for medical purposes only, but hey, it’s progress)
4. Boyz 2 Men were more talented than we realized. Just listen to “it’s so hard to say goodbye to yesterday” and tell me you don’t need a hug.
5. Snackwells, Crystal Light, and Snapple were never actually “healthy.”
Non stick pans are safe.
If you've ever been hit in the head with a pan, you would know that they are not safe.
Almost all Americans are committed to democracy.
Note: this post originally had 38 images. It’s been shortened to the top 30 images based on user votes.
Why has gen x suddenly become so vocal? I'm seeing loads of stuff mentioning it lately
If you can dream it, you can do it..... There are snakes in the McDonald's ball pits.... you are going to need to know how to do math off the top of your head.... don't let babies look in the mirror or their teeth won't grow... if you get bad grades and don't go to college you'llbe flipping burgers the rest of your life (a few off the top of my head)
Why has gen x suddenly become so vocal? I'm seeing loads of stuff mentioning it lately
If you can dream it, you can do it..... There are snakes in the McDonald's ball pits.... you are going to need to know how to do math off the top of your head.... don't let babies look in the mirror or their teeth won't grow... if you get bad grades and don't go to college you'llbe flipping burgers the rest of your life (a few off the top of my head)
