Sensory Memories For 80s Babies
What does a hackey sack smell like?
Welcome to Cheaper Than Therapy, a healing newsletter for 80s babies by Shani Silver. This newsletter does not publish free content, but if you’d like to read it you can subscribe here. Thank you for enjoying the work of independent writers.
One of the great luxuries of this line of work is getting to care about whatever I want, as passionately as I want, and there’s no editor or boss who can roll their eyes or give me a bad annual review. About a million years ago my stepfather told me to go to work for myself. I didn’t listen, and I learned the hard way, but he was right. My aunt told me not to go to law school, wise advice I also ignored, leading me to believe that while I might be passionate about days gone by, I was also an absolute moron back then.
I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about nostalgia, and why we like it. Why does it make me smile when I scroll past a photo of one of those round mosaic candles that used to get dusty on my bookshelf? Why do I watch videos of people thrifting on TikTok in the hopes that they find a relic of my youth? Why can’t I throw away my DVDs? These are questions.
From what I can gather, nostalgia is kind of like comfort food for the brain. We can’t really live on it, but morsels every now and again are really nice. I also think there’s a sense of validation in community with people who remember things you love. People younger than our cohort give us stink eye for enjoying songs made by people they’ve never heard of meanwhile they do the same shit just with newer musicians. Whatever.
If you were born in the early 80s, you are currently in your early 40s. You’re not really Millennial, not really GenX. You are Generation Y, the one everyone loves to ignore because it’s too much mental effort to have a named generation for such a small number of birth years. You are among the only people on the planet that remembers being a teenager with the internet, and without. No other childhood can boast such a claim and I think it’s a big goddamned deal. We are the end of analog and the last set of teenagers that had to learn to drive without GPS. I know how much a Mapsco weighs y’all can kiss my ass.