Someone In This Online Group Asked “Without Mentioning Age Or Date Of Birth, How Old Are You?” And Here Are 30 Of The Best Answers
People in the same age group tend to have similar interests and even if two people are complete strangers, they still might share some of the same memories. For example, remembering what TV shows they both liked as kids or what major world events they have witnessed.
These kinds of things can actually give away your age even if you don’t say the number or your birth date. Reddit user teddyjr32378 asked “Without mentioning age or date of birth, how old are you?” and the thread got pretty popular, being upvoted 46.6k times with 45.7k people getting deep into the nostalgia, naming movies, songs or other recognizable things that would let other people guess what age they are.
What is the thing you can say about yourself that would let others pinpoint the year you were born? Let us know in the comments and don’t forget to upvote the submissions that you can relate to the most!
More info: Reddit
This post may include affiliate links.
I'm "had to make a mad dash sprint to the cassette player to mash the record button when your favorite song came on the radio" years old.
MTV actually played music videos.
They sure did. And they always had "cooler" videos than VH1. Video killed the radio star... then reality shows killed the video!
Would you like to accept a collect call from MomWe’reDoneComeGetUs?
A call from “Mom we’re done come get us.” Somebody was working the system nicely.
For those needing this explained, back before cell phones took off, you'd call home using a payphone but rather than spend good money just to tell your mom that you're done at the mall and need a lift, you could call collect and then when the automated operator asks for you to say your name at the beep, you'd just quickly say that message instead "Momwe'redonecomepickusup!" And then the operator would call home and say "This is Bell Canada" (in my case) "You have a collect call from: momwe'redone..." "Do you accept the charges?" Then your mom would say "no" then hang up and come get you. Easy peasy, and free!
If you had to dial long distance, always dial 10-10-321 first so you get a lower rate.
I'm just gonna say it... I'm 38 and I used to use this all the time to call my gf in TX (esp during the more expensive day time hours)
Load More Replies...
ahh yes the auto decline charges. Family used this many times when traveling. My grandmother would call us collect when she and granddad traveled from Vancouver to Mexico each spring (driving) and she would get upset if we accepted the charges as if she needed to call us she used her calling card for a cheaper rate.
In 1964 there was a pay phone at a store by the school that you could dial and say two or three words before putting in your money. When we would need a ride home, would call and say "help!" and in about five minutes the car would be there to pick us up. Worked perfectly!
We used to have to book a date and time with an overseas operator to get a line to call overseas. When I was really young I remember getting a telex from Europe on Christmas Eve.
Nah, you just ask for your own name & mom & dad know it's you calling collect.
Rotary phones were a thing.
A tiny mistake in the number and you had to hang up and do it all over again lol
There was only one newscast at 10pm, and before it started, a booming voice asked, “it’s 10pm. DO YOU KNOW WHERE YOUR CHILDREN ARE????” and after it was over, there was an hour of maybe an infomercial , then a test pattern, and TV was OVER for the night. And there was only 7 channels
I saw Disney's "The Lion King" in theaters when it came out.
I saw Disney's original Jungle Book in the theater. Cried because I thought Baloo died.
Went to computer labs in elementary school to Paint and play pinball.
Drop dead Fred, Little Monsters, Ghost Busters, The Last Unicorn, & Labyrinth were my favorite movies as a child.
I got in trouble in kindergarten because my tamagotchi kept telling me it was hungry
I’ve lived in two millennia’s, two centuries, and four different decades yet people still tell me I can’t call myself old.
The calendar picture shows the date I was born. Edit: To be considered young by some made me feel better about the grey hair I have at 32.
Old enough to have my first phone be a nokia brick phone/flip phone to now having a smartphone. Ahh simpler times lol
I played the all green Oregon Trail.
When I was little, my favorite cartoons was My Little Pony, Rainbow Brite, Strawberry Shortcake, and She-Ra.
I watched blockbuster close and remember when netflix mailed movies and videogames
Grew up watching classic cartoon network shows such as dexter laboratory, courage the cowardly dog, Johnny bravo, the powerpuff girls and my personal favourite Ed, edd and eddy.
I’ve had experience with these ways of listening to music: 8 track, vinyl, cassette, CD, and mini disc.
Rabbit ears on my television..
I remember Baby Jessica and I was afraid something like that might happen to me too.
Until I was in pre-school there were 48 stars on the US flag.
Toby McGuire is my favorite Spider-Man
I was around when man landed on the Moon.
My mother wouldn't let me stay up. But my father was on a course in US at the time, and he came home with a load of fabulous souvenir stuff
When I was a kid the big playground argument was Sega vs Nintendo.
In elementary school, I got to watch the space shuttle Challenger explode on live television.
Edit: the more I think about this and read others' comments, while I was indeed in 2nd grade / 7yrs old, I'm almost positive school was out and I watched this at someone's house with my mother. I know we watched it on CNN and I can see that thin red stripe at the bottom of the screen and that font they used in the 80s in my head and no elementary school would've had access to that channel back then.
I had a furrby as a kid
Most dist(f)urbing thing is that the eyes are on front of the head. It implies that Furrby is a predator.
I wore Dittos and high waisted bell bottom jeans to high school. We had a rotary phone in our house. We didn't wear seat belts in the car until I was older and most cars only had lap belts. There weren't car seats when I was a baby. Wooly Bully was the number one song the year I was born and Flashdance... What A Feeling was the number one song the month and year I graduated high school.
I was the first person in my high school to have a cell phone
Note: this post originally had 44 images. It’s been shortened to the top 30 images based on user votes.
To the older millennials, if you want to feel old, the people born on 9/11 are in college now. You're welcome.
Croatia (Yugoslavia) won Eurovision the year I was born. With the band Riva.
Load More Replies...
I still remember a few of my friends' old phone numbers from the 60s.
Load More Replies... I layed on the floor in front of our console tv and watched JFK give his "Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country" speech. I also heard him predict putting a man on the moon. My mom was put on a train with her siblings without their parents at 6 years old to go stay in the country side for the duration of the war. The siblings were mostly all separated except Monty and two toddlers.
If you give me a cassette and a pencil, I know what to do with them.
Until I was nine months old, the only thing in orbit around the Earth was the Moon.
My milkman comes twice a week. Will also bring fruit, veg, groceries etc. (That's in the UK. Milk is heavy to carry home from the shops.)
Load More Replies... We had an 8-track player in our car. Dad had some of Elvis and Stompin Tom Connors.
I was forbidden to play with rain water because of Chernobyl. That times me pretty accurately. (I life in Finland which is right beside Russia, so we NEVER forgot Chernobyl. It's a good thing that new generations discovered the disaster through the television series.)
Did anyone else go through this, and give up b/c they felt way too old?
I refuse to use these silly classifications like "millennial". It feels like an insult.
Yeah, I really hate it. I think it started because "baby boomers" were an actual thing - a much higher rate of births after the war. But for the most part now I think it's harmful in many ways, and useless in all other ways. (FYI, I would be a Gen-X.)
Load More Replies...
I remember watching Sky King, Sergeant Preston of the Yukon and the original Mickey Mouse Club on Saturday mornings.
I only had jumpman junior, but it was still a great game! And Montezuma's revenge :)
Load More Replies...
I'm as old as the Intel 4004, the first commercially produced microprocessor.
Altair 8800 came out while I was in the Navy in the Philippines. Wanted on SO bad...
Load More Replies...
I remember when, at midnight, TV would play the National Anthem, then there would be nothing but static until about 5am in the morning.
That is a "good" way to get you to reveal your age. Otherwise, if somebody - a stranger asks me how old I am, I say, "I'm as old as you think I am."
When 7 year old me came back from a holiday, our roof had been torn off by the hurricane Michael Fish said wouldn't happen.
Another one: I was home sick one day in elementary school and saw a talk show where these two goofy guys from some computer company were talking about how people were going to have computers in their houses just like people had TVs. I thought that was ridiculous and hilarious. The audience laughed at their silliness. (I think now it was Steve Jobs.) FYI, I'm now a software developer :-) I taught myself on the computer my Dad brought home from work before most (or any?) colleges had computer science majors. (He worked at Unisys.)
The first movie I remember seeing in theaters was Grease. We not only had a rotary phone, it was on a party line. When I was in Kindergarten, all of the students were taken into the gym and give three shots and a sugar cube with pink liquid on it, once we did that, we got a cookie and got to play dodgeball with the 1st graders (parents weren't forewarned, no one was given a choice). All parents were encouraged (and many did) to take their children to have their tonsils removed when the child turned six.
The Korean war was still going on when I was born. A guy named Truman was president. ;-)
Load More Replies...
I remember being in my high school history class when it was announced over the PA that President Kennedy was shot.
I was in 7th grade, moving from one classroom to another. When we got to the room, the teacher told us what had happened, & to get our stuff from our lockers & go to our buses out front & go home. I remember some of the kids crying.
Load More Replies... 
Oh yes and we could draw on a slide and then project it. Amazing.
Load More Replies...
Pop up video. Atari. Trolls. Computer mouse being invented.
As tweens, my brother and I rode from Michigan to Tennessee in the back of a pick up with just a cap on it - no seats or seatbelts - just a couple of bean bag chairs.
I used to do that in my mamaws Ford! She had a mattress in the back and I'd just hang out and read books back there whenever we drove up to Gatlinburg or pigeon forge! Lol good times!
Load More Replies...
Kids born in the year 2000 (Y2K) are LEGALLY allowed to drink! I am not okay with this information happening as we live. Where has the time gone?
In the late 60s, I used to read a magazine called 'Look and Learn' . It once had a picture of the living room of the future, and the TV controls were fixed into the arm of an armchair. Imagine the fight to sit in that chair for the evening!
We had to walk to the telly to switch channels. There were only three channels and they had a break during the middle of the day. If we wanted a friend to come out to play, we would call them. I.e. we would go to their house (i grew up in residential block) and bawl their name until they came out or their neighbours yelled back at us.
I was born in hte year that Orel was taken back by the Soviets after German occupation.
I remember dieling 0 for the operator to get emergency response 911 came out in my town when I was in high school 82,
My favorite TV shows were Beanie and Cecil and Kookla, Fran and Ollie
Dad used to give me a quarter to walk down to the gas station for a gallon of gas for the mower. Would come back with change.
Dad used to give me a quarter to run down to the gas station to get gas for the mower. Would come back with a gallon and change.
1958 here. I was 15 (I think) when we pulled out of Vietnam.
Here's a few more you guys might know: Spuds McKenzie dog, Manimal on NBC, Morris the cat 9 lives commercials, car door ashtrays, Those plastic Halloween costumes that were hard to walk in and had a mask that was hard to see out of. Suisse mocha coffee, snoopy snow cone machine, waterbeds, mongoose bikes with white mag rims and back tire pegs, buying cigarettes and alcohol for your parents, coleco vision, trapper keeper, Max headrom, baby Jessica falling down the well, who shot J.R., 1st & 10 on HBO, garbage pail kids!
How excited I was when with new school year, I got to choose a new Trapper Keeper! lol
Load More Replies...
I went to a different school every year of elementary school & there was at least one kid in every one of my classes that was wheelchair-bound with polio. (Then something happened & polio seemed to go away. Hmmm.).
A year after I was born, my parents bought these light shades. We still have them hanging up in the hall. They were really in fashion then. hall-lamps...6f02eb.jpg 
I remember my dad repairing televisions & radios by replacing the "tubes" in the back. I also remember the milkman, the bread truck, & the Fuller brush man (he sold brooms, mops, dust pans, hair brushes & combs, scrub brushes, shoe brushes, etc - any kind of brush you needed!)
We had the milkman, the coalman, and also the rag-and-bone man, with a horse and cart, to buy anything you didn't want. That was as seen in UK TV series 'Steptoe and Son'.
Load More Replies...
Hah, wish I'd seen this one. Saw Star Wars (Episode IV) at the drive in theater as a kid.
7 years old was an important age for me. We stood in line a lot...first for the debut of the original Star Wars movie and second for the King Tut exhibit. When I was 10, a mountain exploded in our state. When I was a teen, our first game system was an Atari 1000 and when I was in high school, we learned about computers using a Tandy 1000 with only dos loaded on it. Did I mention we only had 13 channels growing up? I also remember that the first video on MTV was "Video Killed the Radio Star" by the Buggles.
My first recollection of television is a black & white news clip of dead soldiers being loaded onto helicopters in Vietnam.
I could watch tv late at night as a kid. But the colors were nice to look at.
I saw the last good Indiana Jones film at the cinema before I was in double figures
I remember when my little ponies actually looked like horses 😂🐴
Shouldn't have clicked on this post...didn't know what was being talked about the whole time...
I knew about the poems of Cats, by T.S. Eliot, long before the musical was written. I learnt the poem Skimbleshanks, the Railway Cat, off by heart when I was at school. My Mum complained I should have been doing schoolwork.
Load More Replies...
I watched Return of the Jedi in theaters, but not the previous two films.
Bruh, Why would you get in trouble for something like that? I mean, the teachers could have put it away. And wouldn't there be an off button?
I remember having to use a VHS to watch movies, and I was alive when the PS and PS2 was first out, though I don't remember PS1.
AOL used to come on free CDs that gave you a certain number of free minutes, and you had to use dial up internet.
I'm the same age as CDs. When that stood for Compact Disc rather than Cross Dresser!
I didn't know CD ever meant Cross Dresser. But maybe the abbreviation didn't come to the UK.
Load More Replies...
I got In Utero the day it got out, but was too young to do so for In Utero
My first experience of the internet was at age 11, when my dad let us set up our free trial of AOL from the 3.5in floppy disk they sent in the mail. My first email address was a geeky adjective and my common first name with no additional numbers, letters or symbols at AOL dot com.
‘ In Iraq, at least thirteen people were killed and another forty-five wounded in a bombing of a Baghdad market’ -Google That was on the day I was born.
There were toy sections in department stores. Moms would leave their small children there to play unsupervised while they shopped for clothes. That all ended abruptly when a little boy was kidnapped from a Sears, and his severed head was later found in a ditch.
There are still toy sections in department stores, and Mums still leave their kids there. FYI, a lot of less macabre things happened in 1981, too.
Load More Replies...
My favourite kids TV programs were Willow The Whisp, Jamie and The Magic Torch, The Magic Roundabout and Rhubarb and Custard. To anyone who grew up outside the UK, look these up and you’ll understand why we’re all a bit peculiar. Oh and I forgot Chorlton and The Wheelies!
I loved all of those. Especially Chorlton. Don’t forget Knightmare. That was epic as was Ulysses 31
Load More Replies... 
I stood in line for the original release; was PG13 where I lived.
Load More Replies...
To the older millennials, if you want to feel old, the people born on 9/11 are in college now. You're welcome.
Croatia (Yugoslavia) won Eurovision the year I was born. With the band Riva.
Load More Replies... I still remember a few of my friends' old phone numbers from the 60s.
Load More Replies... I layed on the floor in front of our console tv and watched JFK give his "Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country" speech. I also heard him predict putting a man on the moon. My mom was put on a train with her siblings without their parents at 6 years old to go stay in the country side for the duration of the war. The siblings were mostly all separated except Monty and two toddlers.
If you give me a cassette and a pencil, I know what to do with them.
Until I was nine months old, the only thing in orbit around the Earth was the Moon.
My milkman comes twice a week. Will also bring fruit, veg, groceries etc. (That's in the UK. Milk is heavy to carry home from the shops.)
Load More Replies... We had an 8-track player in our car. Dad had some of Elvis and Stompin Tom Connors.
I was forbidden to play with rain water because of Chernobyl. That times me pretty accurately. (I life in Finland which is right beside Russia, so we NEVER forgot Chernobyl. It's a good thing that new generations discovered the disaster through the television series.)
Did anyone else go through this, and give up b/c they felt way too old?
I refuse to use these silly classifications like "millennial". It feels like an insult.
Yeah, I really hate it. I think it started because "baby boomers" were an actual thing - a much higher rate of births after the war. But for the most part now I think it's harmful in many ways, and useless in all other ways. (FYI, I would be a Gen-X.)
Load More Replies... I remember watching Sky King, Sergeant Preston of the Yukon and the original Mickey Mouse Club on Saturday mornings.
I only had jumpman junior, but it was still a great game! And Montezuma's revenge :)
Load More Replies... I'm as old as the Intel 4004, the first commercially produced microprocessor.
Altair 8800 came out while I was in the Navy in the Philippines. Wanted on SO bad...
Load More Replies... I remember when, at midnight, TV would play the National Anthem, then there would be nothing but static until about 5am in the morning.
That is a "good" way to get you to reveal your age. Otherwise, if somebody - a stranger asks me how old I am, I say, "I'm as old as you think I am."
When 7 year old me came back from a holiday, our roof had been torn off by the hurricane Michael Fish said wouldn't happen.
Another one: I was home sick one day in elementary school and saw a talk show where these two goofy guys from some computer company were talking about how people were going to have computers in their houses just like people had TVs. I thought that was ridiculous and hilarious. The audience laughed at their silliness. (I think now it was Steve Jobs.) FYI, I'm now a software developer :-) I taught myself on the computer my Dad brought home from work before most (or any?) colleges had computer science majors. (He worked at Unisys.)
The first movie I remember seeing in theaters was Grease. We not only had a rotary phone, it was on a party line. When I was in Kindergarten, all of the students were taken into the gym and give three shots and a sugar cube with pink liquid on it, once we did that, we got a cookie and got to play dodgeball with the 1st graders (parents weren't forewarned, no one was given a choice). All parents were encouraged (and many did) to take their children to have their tonsils removed when the child turned six.
The Korean war was still going on when I was born. A guy named Truman was president. ;-)
Load More Replies... I remember being in my high school history class when it was announced over the PA that President Kennedy was shot.
I was in 7th grade, moving from one classroom to another. When we got to the room, the teacher told us what had happened, & to get our stuff from our lockers & go to our buses out front & go home. I remember some of the kids crying.
Load More Replies... Oh yes and we could draw on a slide and then project it. Amazing.
Load More Replies... Pop up video. Atari. Trolls. Computer mouse being invented.
As tweens, my brother and I rode from Michigan to Tennessee in the back of a pick up with just a cap on it - no seats or seatbelts - just a couple of bean bag chairs.
I used to do that in my mamaws Ford! She had a mattress in the back and I'd just hang out and read books back there whenever we drove up to Gatlinburg or pigeon forge! Lol good times!
Load More Replies... Kids born in the year 2000 (Y2K) are LEGALLY allowed to drink! I am not okay with this information happening as we live. Where has the time gone?
In the late 60s, I used to read a magazine called 'Look and Learn' . It once had a picture of the living room of the future, and the TV controls were fixed into the arm of an armchair. Imagine the fight to sit in that chair for the evening!
We had to walk to the telly to switch channels. There were only three channels and they had a break during the middle of the day. If we wanted a friend to come out to play, we would call them. I.e. we would go to their house (i grew up in residential block) and bawl their name until they came out or their neighbours yelled back at us.
I was born in hte year that Orel was taken back by the Soviets after German occupation.
I remember dieling 0 for the operator to get emergency response 911 came out in my town when I was in high school 82,
My favorite TV shows were Beanie and Cecil and Kookla, Fran and Ollie
Dad used to give me a quarter to walk down to the gas station for a gallon of gas for the mower. Would come back with change.
Dad used to give me a quarter to run down to the gas station to get gas for the mower. Would come back with a gallon and change.
1958 here. I was 15 (I think) when we pulled out of Vietnam.
Here's a few more you guys might know: Spuds McKenzie dog, Manimal on NBC, Morris the cat 9 lives commercials, car door ashtrays, Those plastic Halloween costumes that were hard to walk in and had a mask that was hard to see out of. Suisse mocha coffee, snoopy snow cone machine, waterbeds, mongoose bikes with white mag rims and back tire pegs, buying cigarettes and alcohol for your parents, coleco vision, trapper keeper, Max headrom, baby Jessica falling down the well, who shot J.R., 1st & 10 on HBO, garbage pail kids!
How excited I was when with new school year, I got to choose a new Trapper Keeper! lol
Load More Replies... I went to a different school every year of elementary school & there was at least one kid in every one of my classes that was wheelchair-bound with polio. (Then something happened & polio seemed to go away. Hmmm.).
A year after I was born, my parents bought these light shades. We still have them hanging up in the hall. They were really in fashion then. hall-lamps...6f02eb.jpg
I remember my dad repairing televisions & radios by replacing the "tubes" in the back. I also remember the milkman, the bread truck, & the Fuller brush man (he sold brooms, mops, dust pans, hair brushes & combs, scrub brushes, shoe brushes, etc - any kind of brush you needed!)
We had the milkman, the coalman, and also the rag-and-bone man, with a horse and cart, to buy anything you didn't want. That was as seen in UK TV series 'Steptoe and Son'.
Load More Replies... Hah, wish I'd seen this one. Saw Star Wars (Episode IV) at the drive in theater as a kid.
7 years old was an important age for me. We stood in line a lot...first for the debut of the original Star Wars movie and second for the King Tut exhibit. When I was 10, a mountain exploded in our state. When I was a teen, our first game system was an Atari 1000 and when I was in high school, we learned about computers using a Tandy 1000 with only dos loaded on it. Did I mention we only had 13 channels growing up? I also remember that the first video on MTV was "Video Killed the Radio Star" by the Buggles.
My first recollection of television is a black & white news clip of dead soldiers being loaded onto helicopters in Vietnam.
I could watch tv late at night as a kid. But the colors were nice to look at.
I saw the last good Indiana Jones film at the cinema before I was in double figures
I remember when my little ponies actually looked like horses 😂🐴
Shouldn't have clicked on this post...didn't know what was being talked about the whole time...
I knew about the poems of Cats, by T.S. Eliot, long before the musical was written. I learnt the poem Skimbleshanks, the Railway Cat, off by heart when I was at school. My Mum complained I should have been doing schoolwork.
Load More Replies... I watched Return of the Jedi in theaters, but not the previous two films.
Bruh, Why would you get in trouble for something like that? I mean, the teachers could have put it away. And wouldn't there be an off button?
I remember having to use a VHS to watch movies, and I was alive when the PS and PS2 was first out, though I don't remember PS1.
AOL used to come on free CDs that gave you a certain number of free minutes, and you had to use dial up internet.
I'm the same age as CDs. When that stood for Compact Disc rather than Cross Dresser!
I didn't know CD ever meant Cross Dresser. But maybe the abbreviation didn't come to the UK.
Load More Replies... I got In Utero the day it got out, but was too young to do so for In Utero
My first experience of the internet was at age 11, when my dad let us set up our free trial of AOL from the 3.5in floppy disk they sent in the mail. My first email address was a geeky adjective and my common first name with no additional numbers, letters or symbols at AOL dot com.
‘ In Iraq, at least thirteen people were killed and another forty-five wounded in a bombing of a Baghdad market’ -Google That was on the day I was born.
There were toy sections in department stores. Moms would leave their small children there to play unsupervised while they shopped for clothes. That all ended abruptly when a little boy was kidnapped from a Sears, and his severed head was later found in a ditch.
There are still toy sections in department stores, and Mums still leave their kids there. FYI, a lot of less macabre things happened in 1981, too.
Load More Replies... My favourite kids TV programs were Willow The Whisp, Jamie and The Magic Torch, The Magic Roundabout and Rhubarb and Custard. To anyone who grew up outside the UK, look these up and you’ll understand why we’re all a bit peculiar. Oh and I forgot Chorlton and The Wheelies!
I loved all of those. Especially Chorlton. Don’t forget Knightmare. That was epic as was Ulysses 31
Load More Replies... I stood in line for the original release; was PG13 where I lived.
Load More Replies... 