For the very first time in my life, I am actively dreading an upcoming birthday. The big 5-0 is looming on the horizon, and honestly, it’s a heavy number to digest. Usually, I embrace getting older—more wisdom, less caring about what people think, right?—but this one feels different. It has a bit of weight to it. So, I figured that if the immediate future feels a bit daunting, maybe looking backwards is the best kind of therapy. I’ve decided that over the coming months, I am going to regularly look back at where we came from to remind myself of how we got here. Consider this the first installment of my retro-therapy.
Let’s start with a little perspective. If you tell a teenager today that you have lived in 6 decades, 2 centuries, 2 millenniums, and yet, by some absolute miracle of mathematics, are still in your 40s 😊, they will look at you like you are a time-traveling wizard. To a fifteen-year-old scrolling through TikTok, being "alive in the 1900s" sounds like you should be wearing a top hat and riding a horse to work. Yet here we are, holding onto our youth by a thread in 2026. We are the ultimate glitch in the matrix.
We belong to a highly exclusive, elite club. Being born in ’76 and raised in the 80s means we experienced a childhood completely, hopelessly, and blissfully disconnected from the grid. We are the bridge generation. For context, we are older than Google. If modern teenagers get into an argument about who played the villain in a movie, the debate lasts exactly four seconds before someone whips out a glass rectangle and asks the internet. We had to settle arguments like cavemen. You either had to confidently lie, call a knowledgeable uncle, or trek down to the local library to consult an encyclopedia. We were allowed to be wrong for extended periods, and we were highly confident about it.
By the time we hit our teenage years, we were genuinely feral. When we were finally released into the wild in the 90s, tracking down a friend wasn't as simple as checking their live location on Snapchat. It was a high-stakes gamble and a full-blown physical investigation. You would jump on your bike and ride to their house. If they weren't there, you moved to phase two. You’d cycle around to the usual spots—the park, the local square, the corner shop—just hoping to spot their bike thrown carelessly on the grass.
And making plans? That was a binding verbal contract. You agreed on a time and a place in advance. There were no "running 5 mins behind, traffic is crazy!" texts to save you. If someone was late, the group waited a few agonizing minutes, and then we left. The train moved on. If you missed the rendezvous, you spent the rest of the afternoon wandering the neighborhood hoping to bump into us. It taught us punctuality the hard way. Today’s youth gets a panic attack if a text is left on "read" for three minutes; we survived entire weekends not knowing where anyone was.
Part of that glorious analog freedom came from the fact that we were walking, breathing databases. We casually memorized phone numbers like it was nothing. If a modern teenager loses their smartphone, they essentially lose their identity. They couldn't call their own mother if their life depended on it. We, on the other hand, had a mental Rolodex of epic proportions. We knew our best friend's number, our grandparents' landline, and the exact sequence of digits required to order a pizza.
Getting from point A to point B was another adventure entirely. We didn't need Apple Maps, mostly because our version of a GPS was pure instinct, blind faith, and a ballpoint pen. If a teenager's 5G drops today, they will get hopelessly lost in their own zip code, entirely dependent on a polite British voice telling them to "turn left in 100 meters."
Our navigation system was built on trial by fire. Picture this: a summer holiday job delivering supplies to pharmacies. The training program? Two days of sitting in the passenger seat, furiously scribbling down notes for entirely different daily routes. Third street on the left, take a right at that specific house, go straight at the weird tree. On day three, you rode shotgun to test your notes. And after that? You were completely abandoned to your fate.
Imagine doing a delivery route right through the chaotic, beating heart of Brussels center when you’ve only had your driver’s license for exactly one month. You learn to pay attention to the road real fast. There was no glowing screen calculating the fastest route around a traffic jam. And if you messed up? There was no "recalculating" voice to save you. You just got totally, hopelessly lost. I will never forget the absolute shame of having to drive all the way back to the company headquarters with glowing red cheeks to admit defeat. But you know what? We survived it, and it made us bulletproof drivers.
But the absolute peak of our analog existence was the music and the camaraderie. We didn't have algorithmic Spotify playlists curated for our specific moods in a fraction of a second. We just needed mixtapes and good friends. A mixtape was an act of pure, sweaty devotion. You had to sit by the radio for hours, your fingers hovering over the "REC" and "PLAY" buttons simultaneously, waiting for the DJ to finally play your song. And when that DJ inevitably talked over the first fifteen seconds of the intro? Absolute, heartbreaking betrayal. But we carefully wrote out the tracklist on a tiny piece of cardboard with a gel pen and handed that cassette to someone we cared about. It was a handcrafted piece of our soul.
Looking back at that completely disconnected, unrecorded era, I didn’t know it back then, but that was a gift. We learned how to navigate the world with our own two eyes. We learned how to be bored, a skill modern society has completely eradicated. When we had nothing to do, we didn't have infinite scrolling to numb our brains. We had to build forts, invent ridiculous games, and actually look our friends in the eye when we spoke to them.
Yet, because of when we were born, we were also young enough to ride the wave of the digital revolution. We are the ultimate hybrids. We speak both the ancient tongue of the rotary phone and the modern dialect of the smartphone. We survived the screeching terror of dial-up internet, thrived in the golden age of MSN Messenger, and now we are flawlessly navigating the AI era.
So here is to the bridge generation. The human GPS devices. The mixtape masters. The Brussels traffic survivors. We may occasionally make a cracking noise when we stand up from the sofa, and we might be staring down a milestone birthday, but we had the absolute greatest childhood in history. And no algorithm can ever replace that.
Cheers,
Peter
