A Dad Made A Brilliant Video Explaining Growing Up In The 80s For His 8-Year-Old Son

How can you truly explain what it was like to grow up in the 80s to your kids, who are living life with mobile phones, the internet, and Roblox?

One dad in Australia decided to tackle the question by making a video for his 8-year-old son that explains the whole thing in just a few choice pictures. It accurately draws some simple comparisons between this modern world and the one we used to occupy so that even a kid can understand.

And, yes, the soundtrack he picked for this video is Tears For Fears’ 1985 smash hit “Everybody Wants To Rule The World.”

“This was our Netflix,” one caption reads, showing a shelf of homemade VHS tapes.

“This was our contact list,” he then explains, showing a retro A-Z flip-top address book (did you know you can still buy these??)

“The struggle is real,” another caption reads, showing a cassette tape with its guts out.

“This is how we knew where our friends were,” he writes, showing a pile of bikes on someone’s front lawn.

The video quickly went viral, and has tallied over 14 million views, mostly, I’d imagine, from elder Millennials.

And the comments were dripping with the best 80s nostalgia.

“I miss them days, technology has taken away so much,” one person commented.

“We didn’t have much but those were the best times,” another wrote. “I remember recording the top 40 and trying to stop tape b4 dj spoke!”

“Omg. Someone make a time machine and take me back please,” another wrote.

Some people showed the video to their kids, with hilarious results.

“I showed this to my son, his response ‘Aw so you were really poor’,” one person shared.

The video was so popular, dad made a Part 2 and Part 3.

In Part 2, he covers even more basics: cars had ashtrays, no one wore bike helmets, and “The library was our internet.” He also shared pictures of a Walkman, the MTV logo, boomboxes, overhead projectors, film cameras, an original Atari, and an old-school skating rink.

In Part 3, he covers the classics, including notes folded into triangles, Saturday morning cartoons, liner notes, casserole dishes, pay phones, the original McDonald’s playground, and drinking from the hose.

“How we used to block people,” he writes, showing a rotary phone off the hook.

Ah, those were the good old days — and maybe our kids won’t ever quite understand. But we can still try to keep explaining it, using things they do understand, like TikTok and memes.