On Twitter today the hashtag #SignsYouAreAMillennial was trending this afternoon. The usual statements of remembering being a kid and playing Organ Trail and using floppy disks that were actually floppy were there and it made me think about the world that my new son will grow up in. While I joke with my conservative parents that I am glad my son will not remember the Trump administration, even if he does get a second term, what will the world look like? How will technology change?
In 1985 Ronald Reagan was president. In 2018 Donald Trump is president. Both of these men had different types of celebrity before becoming president. To be fair to President Reagan he was the governor of California before he became president. What that says to me is that with politics, especially presidential politics, name recognition matters, maybe more than ideas.
I think we all look back on our own childhoods with nostalgia and believe that our childhoods were the best. Fashion and movies have this 20-year nostalgia cycle that is very clear. I remember in the 1990s wearing flared jeans, hemp necklaces, and drawing peace signs and flowers in my classmate’s yearbooks. Most of the people I knew wished they had grown up in the 1960s and 1970s and lived the cool parts of those two decades. Now people in their teens and twenties are wearing neon, chokers, slap bracelets, and baby doll dresses. What makes me feel old is that the 90s were 20 years ago, and I hope like heck that frosted tips aren’t going to make a comeback when this generation’s teens start idolizing the early to mid-2000s.
My son is going to grow up in a world that is cyclical and all its own. It will have its own problems and issues that I will not be able to understand, and yet the world will go round. He will worry about school, and friends, and things that everyone has dealt with.
The world will be different for my son, but the one thing that will never change is my undying love for him, and his safe place will always be home.
