Culture

If You Long For The Days When There Was Not A Cell Phone In Sight, You’ll Love This Meme

"Absolutely beautiful, wish we could go back."

by Sam Langford  19 November 2018
Not a cell phone in sight. Just living in the moment. Absolutely beautiful, wish we could go back

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There is a peculiar phrase — perhaps a mating call, of sorts? — common to baby boomers. It can usually be pretty reliably triggered by presenting anyone over fifty with a grainy photograph. “Ah,” the boomer will say, “not a cell phone in sight. Just people living in the moment. Absolutely beautiful, wish we could go back.”

The phrase, unfortunately, is caused by a strange kind of amnesia that plagues the baby boomer generation. Boomers afflicted with this amnesia tend to remember any event prior to the invention of the mobile phone as a kind of utopia, free from any kind of violence, sadness or destruction. A simpler time. A happier time. A better time. Like this:

Don’t you just wish you could go back? We certainly do, which is why we’ve curated this collection of memes praising a simpler time, a time when there was not a cell phone in sight.

Beautiful, isn’t it? It’s also undeniable that humankind’s creativity — the feats of art and engineering we were able to dream up — truly peaked when the mobile phone was but a twinkle in Satan’s eye. I mean, look at that duct tape. How could someone possibly have constructed something so intricate with a phone in hand?

It’s a sad reminder of what we’ve lost.

Not everything is worth remembering, though. This meme has also turned into a bit of a wild nostalgia trip into other memes I was actually quite happy to have forgotten, like this:

Sorry, it’ll now be stuck in your head for the next fortnight. Thankfully, there are more ancient things you can dredge up while you wait for the memory to fade, like Club Penguin. They were the days, when children willingly forsook mobile phones to instead sit at ancient PCs and dress up as anthropomorphic penguins, which then gathered on icebergs to yell incoherently at one another.

Just people living in the moment. A simpler time. Wish we could go back.