also, yall are on bikes

Best old school perk is doing all your stupid kid shit at a time where cameras weren't ubiquitous.

I do feel bad about the younger generations of today. It seems like every part of their life is recorded or streamed now. I'm not sure how comfortable I would have been with that, when I was their age.

This is one thing I will always appreciate of growing up Gen-X. Our moms would kick us out of the house after breakfast and expected us to be gone until the street lights started to buzz. A pack of us on BMX bikes, adventuring, exploring abandoned buildings, jumping off cliffs and into rivers or the ocean, etc. It genuinely ruled ams and I fully appreciate that it did.

I’m on the cusp (xennial) and it’s kinda crazy in hindsight. I had the exact same experience you described, but when it got dark, I’d go home and play with the Commodore 64 or Atari.
- Same for me, but I guess I'm a little younger since my console was NES and, later, a Gateway 2000 computer.
  I'm so glad that I had those experiences and so sad that my son won't. I hope that I can give him enough of a similar experience that he can at least identify with Calvin and Hobbes.
- Atari! Yars' Revenge, Asteroids, Frogger and Space Invaders were my jam.
I was born in the mid-90's and I was also more or less raised that way (until a certain age). I remember being able to get home in time for dinner after a whole day of playing outside just because it "felt" like it was almost dinner time. We would go to the nearby "forest" where we built huts, climbed into trees, made wooden swords out of sticks, and sometimes had "battles" with rivaling groups about certain areas in the forest. We'd be there for hours even in the pouring rain. There was a whole economy around these wooden swords and other services like building a hut. It was better than any video game ever could be

The bikes are non negotiable. Also there's some sort of bully involved.

And a golden retriever
Bully becomes a friend at the end though
- That's absolute bullshit. I've never met anyone who turned their bully into a friend while they were still in school together.
- Not Henry Bowers

Or finding a dead body

Or kissing Wendy Peffercorn

I’m a millennial. I remember a time without cameras everywhere. I also grew up in the poorest part of WV and I’ve seen my own childhood home in like 10 documentaries on poverty so…
I agree for the most part, but as an early millennial, we had that freedom too. Society didn't truly go crazy until some time after 2000 in my opinion. I turned 16 that year.
- Early to mid mollenial here with the same experience. It all went downhill when Facebook and flip phones with cameras came out ie. around 2006.
I have repeatedly felt like taking some emery cloth to my neighbors ring door bell camera, which records me when ever I am in my front yard. There is an expense to replacing cameras and they seem like easy targets, if you go about it right.

When you're sold a version of nostalgia for something you never experienced.

anemoia

You'll never be a middle-aged accountant in the 80s either, just fyi.

My grandfather was, but it does seem rather unlikely he'll be able to do it again now that you mention it.
- Time flies like an arrow, fruit flies like banana.

Or on skateboards, running from rent-a-cops.

Hell yeah. Running from real cops too. This leads directly to the beginning of me becoming radicalized.
A cop came up while we were skating on an unused building's loading dock. He had his hands kinda up like hey I just want to talk to you guys.
He did. He threatened us. He said he was the boss and if we crossed him he'd take our boards, beat us up, and take us to jail. He brought out a paper pad and a pen, and I quote to the best of my memory- "This is my magic pen. Why is it magic? Because whatever I write with it is what happened."
- One of my most memorable experiences skating on "no skateboarding allowed" property in Jr. High, where a RAC came up and one of my friends said "Um, excuse me, suck my dick sir." I thought "omg we are fucked" and just ran.
  Another time in HS I wasn't even skating, I just had my skateboard with me, and had climbed up onto a wall outside a mall loading dock. I saw the RAC's coming and got worried they'd be dicks like always and ran into a Walgreens in the mall. I thought they weren't following me and I'd kill time, so I stopped to do my blood pressure check at the machine, then went to piss. On my way out an undercover RAC slammed me up against the wall and said into his radio "we got him!" Another RAC came and started patting me down, and when he got to the back of my Alternative Tentacles record company shirt, right where the words "Stop Skate Harassment" were printed, I looked back at him, and he said "yeah I see your shirt." They then said I was a cocaine dealer who had just gone and flushed my stash down the toilet. I was like 16, had never done drugs, and was like "whaaaat? Are you crazy?" They let me go but told me not to come back for 3 months. I worked in that mall though so I ignored them.
- Maybe I'm just well adjusted but at 30 years old I can't imagine deciding to lord my power over teenagers