Thinking about how as a kid I...

some of the shit yall born before 2000 talk about doing is wild. like you're telling me you were allowed outside without adult supervision before you were 16?
- My parents used to kick me out of the house and lock the door. They wouldn't let me back inside until after sundown. I'd usually go hang out with my cousins or whoever the most recent neighbor was. I grew up in a kinda rural area with nothing but forests and swamps, so most of our days involved inventing elaborate games with one another. Like tag or hide and seek, or some very complex variation of baseball. Or maybe someone smuggled something out of the house like a Gameboy Camera, or some comics, or a cassette recorder or something and we'd spend time with that.
  Also we were like 10 years old during this. Yeah. I have no idea what kids are like now or what they do. We didn't even have phones, not even 90s brick phones. Also this area had bears, occasional bobcats, cougars, and scary methheads out in the woods. The Klan was around too. And yet our parents were just like "get the fuck out of the house, go play"
  i fucking hate sounding like a boomer by the way, I don't wanna sound all wistful and nostalgic. That's just the stuff I experienced
- you were allowed outside without adult supervision before you were 16?
  When I was in middle school and beyond - all the time.
- I was a lazy kid and would ask my parents for a ride to my friend's house across town and their response was always along the lines of "you have legs don't you? Walk or ride your bike!". I always walked to school across town in the other direction unless it was raining hard or really cold (colder than -20°C). I was allowed to roam wherever I wanted so long as I told them I was going out. I can't imagine growing up with the kind of helicopter parents some people have. I had one acquaintance who had parents like that, the kid that insisted on driving them around for Halloween, and I always thought that was bizarre behavior.
  My parents had the attitude that if a hundred years ago kids could work full days in factories then we could easily handle the responsibility of a little freedom and I'm thankful everyday for that
- By 2nd grade me and my neighborhood friends were out riding bikes, building forts in the woods, or catching crawdads in the creek without any adults in sight.
- Yeah, by myself or with friends. We would play street hockey, ride bikes, climb trees, go to the school playground. In high school we would go on long walks in our suburban hellscape, sometimes several miles to get to 7-11. Where I lived is not at all pedestrian friendly and I bet parents today would be terrified of their kids crossing the major roads we did. Also, when the first Rock Band came out my friend got it at midnight and because we'd wake his grandparents up if we played it at his house we walked to the school football field and set it up in the announcer box. I had noticed it wasn't locked a while ago and there was an outlet so
  
  We stayed up there for at least 3 or 4 hours jammin out despite it being pretty cold, as I remember.
- My friends and I went out into the forest all the time on our own when we were younger. We were only allowed to go out after 10PM once we were 12.
- At about 8-10 years old, the rule was be home before the sun goes down.
  There were no mobiles, so if we were missing they would call around the neighbors houses saying “have you seen 420?”
  At least 3 times there were search parties because we were out too late, which was followed by socially accepted physical child abuse for breaking the rules.
  The 90s.
  
  Simpler times. Ah, the memories.
- I was babysitting my little siblings when I was 9. Took a class and everything. Spent my free time riding bikes around the neighborhood or climbing through the woods. Had my first cigarette at 9, when I was 10 I found a pizza place a couple miles away from my home that sold cigarettes out of their regular candy vending machine. Buy your cigarettes and then a pack of m&m's and take both out at the same time with the m&m's hiding your smokes.👍
- Obviously.
  Kids went to school by bike alone since 10 yo or sooner. Then you were outside running around the whole town unsupervised cuz you had a bike you could go anywhere.
  Oh and we were free to spend unholy quantities of time in cybercafés. The worst place for a kid to be, I would rather have my kid playing at the bog alone
- And like, my brothers and I were working riding tractors. And not mock "OK kid 'help' me with this". It was things like, "comb this field, I'll return in an hour or two"
  With a thibg like this
- Not really, no, but I had a tiger mom and a back yard.

Everything they do is forever recorded.
Forgive and forget is impossible, if you even make it out of the moment.
- Monumental amounts of data that nobody really knows what to do with.
  The panopticon is great for justifying something after the fact, but awful for any kind of actual detective work or deterrence.
  
  just you wait until they get ai to sift through that data. ever seen minority report? flagging us as tankies and hunting us down is probably gonna start getting more and more practical for them to actually do. maybe theyll get behavioral analysis to tell on us before we even turn red.

I feel like your kid is more likely to get got by a pedo grooming them on discord than just snatching them off the street in a van.
It's rough how little there leeway there is for kids to do stuff IRL. I was a latchkey kid because of parents working nights.
I saw a survey where kids still actually do want to go outside more than play fortnite for hours, they just can't.
- Suburbs are violence to children. Imprisoned at home every day with nowhere to hang out with peers on your own until becoming 16 and getting a license and your own car. The Dutch Bikes YouTube Man made me realize how lonely my childhood was.

As a kid I didn't even know where my friends lived. They materialized in the morning at school and then vanished afterwards. I wasn't allowed alone outside until I was a teenager but by then, anywhere worth going was miles away and I didn't have a car so...
- that sucks. I'm old enough that we just wandered all over the place and as long as we made it back before dinner (that sounds so stereotypical) no one really noticed or cared. And I grew up in a place where there were bears.
  
  It's funny because my parents grew up on a ranch and both have stories of like, getting chased by coyotes or maiming themselves on farm equipment or almost-drowning in a ditch. They overcorrected imo but there's also nothing to do in suburbia so I can't blame them

Some of my buddies kids are having a real hard time right now and we were talking about this. Doubly so as they're in a real rural area where the traditional passtimes are drinking, driving, getting knocked up, often all at the same time.

honestly the kids aren't alright, but i can't even blame them for being raised in such an awful society

I was just thinking about how free being a kid was and how much more surveilled and limited kids are now. I don't know how anyone growing up in the US today gets to adulthood without severe mental health issues. At least my friend's kid is growing up a 5-10 minute walk from his elementary, middle, and high schools with no dangerous roads to cross. Hopefully, he does alright.
- I don't know how anyone growing up in the US today gets to adulthood without severe mental health issues.
  dont worry, the planet is going to enter the cool zone before we're old enough to really experience them

When I was a kid all you had to worry about was bears out in the woods. Gen alpha kids need to worry about their neighbor who has a purse in his garage with the door open and an ar-15 on his lap watching his ring camera.

I remeber whenI was younger me and my friends at the time would wander the neighborhood and would sneak into the property of this creepy old mansion with a pond in the backyard
- Me and the other kids in my complex would wander the woods behind our apartments and one time we found a magical wall of cars and old schoolbuses. We climbed it and loitered a bit in the junkyard on the other side. I think we went there twice or maybe three times. We eventually got caught and our parents had to pay for property damage to some moldering cars we had definitely damaged. I think I got grounded for like a month for that one.
  EDIT: I'm pretty sure I still have a half destroyed copy of the 1973 Guinness World Record that I found in a glove box on the first trip in my garage or something. Got you motherfuckers.

Yeah, there were some streets we were supposed to stay away from and like two houses but I miss it.
My partner looked at me like a fucking space alien when I talked about running around outside all day and coming home to play video games.

i dunno if the getting shot thing is an exaggeration, but i feel for today's kids who aint allowed to live their lives out on the world and have to instead be in an increasingly hostile internet. no wonder kids are getting more and more depressed and anxious.

Suburbia Delenda Est

siouxsie and the them/she's would be an excellent modern all transwomen/enby punk group. someone please go make that, thank you.

When I was a kid, my friends and I would sometimes have huge, hours-long Nerf wars that involved crouching in the bushes throughout our neighborhood with gun-looking objects. Sometimes even parents would join in. Can't imagine anyone running around looking sketchy with a Nerf gun today without immediately getting domed by either a crazy homeowner or a cop.