One of the things that makes me feel old (even though I'm still in my twenties) is thinking back on the things about my childhood that people younger than me have no experience with. There's plenty of ways for teens and children to make the rest of us feel old, whether it's by participating in
to us, becoming obsessed with
, or simply by not recognizing something that we grew up with.
One thing I found particularly bizarre was reading about teenagers that didn't know what the symbol was to decline calls on their smartphones - since they have never had to physically hang up a call in their lives. That kind of news will do plenty to mess with your head. Another example of this, I've found, is the fact that while we had to deal with VHS players and videotapes, a whole generation of people have had no need to ever touch one.
I remember taping movies so we could watch them later, with episodes of The Simpsons being taped over important news programmes to the annoyance of my parents. When a film got taped that someone was particularly fond of, they would stick a label on so that no one accidentally taped over it and feigned ignorance - because once that happened, it was gone forever (or so we thought).
In the years since, we moved onto the much more compact and higher quality DVDs, then Blu-Ray DVDs (with a brief foray into HD DVDs that completely flopped), finally getting to the point where we don't need to physically own anything at all - with everything a simple download or stream away. So where does that leave all those video cassettes?
[[twitterwidget||https://twitter.com/loneblockbuster/status/876131110304002051]]
Well, I'm sure there's a dump somewhere full of now-defunct Blockbuster rentals, and plenty going unsold at second-hand sales, but most of them are probably still in a box somewhere in your parents' or grandparents' house. After all, it feels weird to just throw them out and there aren't many
, so you'll come across them now and then, just like this Twitter user did, to hilarious results.
[[twitterwidget||https://twitter.com/hamishsteele/status/961208731743784960]]
There are plenty of times that important things have had to make way for other things, but rarely does it come together in such a perfect joke format as this. But while the tweet, which garnered over 40,000 retweets and 186,000 likes, is funny enough on its own, people stepped up their Photoshop game to create their own version.
[[twitterwidget||https://twitter.com/NetX_G/status/961300188496146432]]
A topical one with the Space X rocket launch:
[[twitterwidget||https://twitter.com/NetX_G/status/961300451873484801]]
A callback to one of 2017's weirdest memes:
[[twitterwidget||https://twitter.com/NetX_G/status/961300649643331584]]
And a reference to one of the original shock videos:
[[twitterwidget||https://twitter.com/NetX_G/status/961305911838085120]]
Videos would only hold the most nostalgic of memes:
[[twitterwidget||https://twitter.com/NetX_G/status/961383417245065216]]
But this last (and real) response wins the day:
[[twitterwidget||https://twitter.com/FlemishDog/status/961220871703728128]]
While we can laugh about this now, in 10 years or so kids will be making fun of us for using those ungainly disc-shaped mp3s, making us all feel ancient.
