Life hacks from the 90s to help millennials make it through adulthood

Born in 1987, I was your typical 90s kid. I kept my Tamagotchi™ on the belt loop of my JNCOs while jamming Blink 182 on my non-skip CD player. I was part of the subset of Millennials who experienced the agony of death time and again playing Oregon Trail on a brightly colored Mac computer in the school computer lab. The last group of kids to grow up without the internet, we came of age at a time when the World Wide Web was like the wild, wild, west (a song that every 90’s kid will know).

There’s no getting around it—we millennials are now approaching middle age. As I enter my mid-30s, it’s heartbreaking to know that my Mighty Ducks and Hocus Pocus references are now as lame and outdated to the youths as my parents’ flower power reminiscences were back in the day. I’ve also come to realize that my peers and I have grown up to find ourselves in a world that we didn’t expect and weren’t well prepared for.

In the 1990s, it wasn’t weird that Homer Simpson, Carl Winslow, and Al Bundy were able to afford homes and support families of four on a single income. Between the 2008 financial crisis and crippling student loan debt setting us back in early adulthood, many millennials have had to significantly delay their plans for buying a home and starting a family. We actively wonder if we’ll get to use our retirement funds before climate change destroys the planet. Don’t even get me started on how much we weren’t expecting to have to be functional adults during a global freaking pandemic.

With our collective acceptance of adulthood being grudging, at best, it’s no wonder millennials get nostalgic for the days of Nerf gun fights and Nirvana. In this blog post, we’ll share five life hacks from the 90s that will help millennials make it through middle age.

 

continue reading »