12 Everyday Struggles Kids Today Will Never Experience

Growing up before smartphones and high-speed internet meant dealing with some everyday struggles that modern kids will never understand. From waiting for your favorite song to play on the radio to surviving the pain of a bad AIM away message, life required more patience (and sometimes more suffering). Here are 12 struggles that were all too real back in the day—but completely foreign to today’s kids.

1. Rewinding VHS Tapes

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Before streaming and DVDs, watching a movie meant dealing with VHS tapes—which required manual rewinding before returning them. If you forgot, the rental store charged a fee, and rewinding could take minutes. Worse, if the tape got chewed up, your movie night would be officially ruined. Kids today will never know the struggle of waiting just to rewatch their favorite scene.

2. Dial-Up Internet and the Pain of Phone Calls

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Using the internet in the ’90s and early 2000s meant listening to the screeching dial-up sound and praying no one picked up the landline mid-download. If someone made a phone call, your connection was gone, forcing you to restart everything. Websites took forever to load, and downloading a single song could take hours. Modern Wi-Fi speeds would have blown our minds.

3. Printing Out Directions from MapQuest

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Before Google Maps, road trips required printing directions from MapQuest and hoping you didn’t miss a turn. There was no GPS voice to reroute you, so one wrong turn meant pulling over and figuring it out yourself. If you lost your printout, you would be in serious trouble. Kids today will never experience the panic of realizing they’re lost with no way to fix it.

4. Memorizing Phone Numbers

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Before smartphones, you had to actually remember phone numbers or at least write them down somewhere. If you lost your address book, good luck calling your friends. Calling home from a payphone meant knowing your parents’ number by heart or asking a stranger for help. Now, kids just tap a name and never think twice about what the actual number is.

5. Burning CDs and Making Mixtapes

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Making the perfect mixtape or burned CD required time, patience, and a stack of blank discs. You had to either record songs from the radio (with DJs talking over the intro) or painstakingly burn tracks from your computer. If the CD got scratched, it was game over. Kids today can make a playlist in seconds—no skipping, no scratched discs, no stress.

6. The Horror of Accidentally Hitting the Internet Button on Your Flip Phone

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In the early 2000s, accidentally pressing the internet button on your flip phone meant instant panic because it cost a fortune. There was no Wi-Fi—just ridiculously expensive data charges that could wreck your phone bill. Closing it in time was like diffusing a bomb. Now, kids stream videos on their phones all day with zero fear.  

7. Running Out of Film for Your Camera

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Taking pictures wasn’t instant or unlimited—you had 24 or 36 shots per roll of film, so every photo had to count. You wouldn’t know if the picture was good or bad until it was developed, which cost money and took days. Blurry shots? Too bad the film was expensive. Kids today can take 100 selfies in a row without thinking twice.

8. Blowing Into Video Game Cartridges

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If a Nintendo or Sega game didn’t work, the solution was taking it out and blowing into it, even though we weren’t sure why it worked. Sometimes, it took several tries before the game finally loaded. If you lost a memory card, all your saved progress was gone forever. Today’s kids have auto-saves and digital downloads—they don’t know true pain.

9. Waiting for Your Favorite Song on the Radio

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Before Spotify, if you wanted to hear your favorite song, you had to sit by the radio and wait—sometimes for hours. If the DJ talked over the intro while you were recording it onto a cassette, too bad. If you missed it, you had to start all over. Now, kids can just search and play whatever they want instantly.

10. The Struggle of Floppy Disks and Limited Storage

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Saving files in the ’90s meant using floppy disks that held a tiny amount of data (1.44MB at best). A single high-quality photo today wouldn’t even fit on one. Losing a disk meant losing your school project, and you always had to carry extras just in case. Today’s kids have cloud storage and USB drives—lucky them.

11. The Fear of Overwriting a VHS Tape

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Recording your favorite show on a VHS tape was a delicate process, and taping over something important was a tragedy. Families had stacks of unlabeled tapes, and accidentally erasing Dad’s football game was a serious offense. Kids today don’t even have to think about DVR or streaming—everything’s just on demand.

12. Using Payphones and Collect Calls

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Before cell phones, if you needed to call home, you had to find a payphone and hope you had quarters. If you were out of change, you had to make a collect call and rush through the “say your name” part to avoid charges. “Mom, pick me up!” became a five-second coded message. Today, kids just text “where r u” without a second thought.

• Tags:
• nostalgia
• 90s
• Technology
• throwback
• Childhood