13 Things We Miss About Our Childhood That We Really Wouldn't Mind Going Back To

Writing this piece may or may not have made me cry.

1. There was no need for constant connectivity.

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Phone calls were infrequent, therefore cherished. Instant replies were not a default expectation, and thank the lord because patiently waiting for letters made letters all the more fun. In the age of constant connectivity (and ghosting), since our options to stay connected are aplenty, casually forgetting the preciousness of human companionship is easy.

2. You could dedicate yourself to your passion for hours, without worrying about its commercial value.

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There was no dread for each day’s ration of time. We could draw stick figures all day, even when they made little sense to anyone but our silly goose brains. We were also allowed to sing our hearts out for hours, even if that meant giving the friendly neighbourhood frogs a run for their money. Every fibre in my capitalist body will strongly disagree, but no joy beats that of creating just for the sake of it.  

3. There was zero pressure to make your vacations Instagram-worthy.

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Beautiful sunsets were just beautiful sunsets and not tickets to getting more "likes". Beaches might have inspired you to eat sand (or was it just me?) but had never been the inspiration behind clicking a million photos in the same pose (yes, I am calling myself out here). Overall, performative fun was yet to rear its ugly head and we could just be in the moment, listening to the old brags of our hearts, “I am, I am, I am.”

4. Remember Bollywood and its Shah Rukh Khan era?

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I personally believe that every day is SRK day and I can write a 5000 word essay about why you should too. No wonder, I miss the times when a truck horn blasting the tune of SRK's latest hit song would wake me up. And I also dearly miss the Sunday afternoons of our childhood when the entire family gathered around the television set to enjoy SRK classics. Am I obsessed with SRK or am I nostalgic for a time when I believed heroes always won? Ah, well…maybe that’s another story for another day.  

5. When our routines included both (home)work and rest.

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Wicked or not, as children, rest was pivotal to our routines and no force in the universe was capable of disrupting that. Didn’t we revolt hard against the system for the introduction of workers’ rights and a five-day work week? What happened to good old weekending (and by that, I mean bidding adieu to your work laptop) over weekends? I sincerely believe that as adults, we’re meant for more sensible things, like wandering "lonely as a cloud" over "vales and hills" and among "a host of golden daffodils".

6. Getting haircuts that would cost 20 rupees!

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Out of all the things I miss about being a child, I miss being dragged to a barbershop and getting a 20 rupee haircut the most. Yes, I believe in cheap haircut supremacy, what about it? **Nobody asked, but I just wanted to mention here that I typed this while contemplating whether I will be able to afford groceries this month if I choose to not look dishevelled by finally getting a haircut**.

7. When your attention span was longer than that of a goldfish.

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Wake up, everyone! A new literary genre just dropped — sigh-fi! Here, we collectively mourn the death of our attention spans that once allowed us to finish reading three new books a week. Whoever is in charge of big brain stuff, could you please invent a time machine via which we can relive our days of yore?  

8. When our lives were free from Zoom-and-doom.

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You want me to attend a Zoom meeting? The thing that makes even doing your own taxes sound like eating cake in comparison? In my personal inferno, the seventh circle of hell is having to attend two Zoom meetings a day, with no time to recover from the first. “Country roads, take me home, to the place I belong” and the home in question being our childhoods when Zoom had something to do with cameras and not panic and dread at 8:00 AM.

9. When doomscrolling, the anarchic Pied Piper, was yet to make an appearance.

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Oh, to exist in the pre-Tiktokification-of-everything era! Oh, to live during a time when staring blankly at a screen, passively consuming everything it was feeding us, was as improbable as meeting a unicorn. Oh, the liberty to be anything but a beloved scapegoat of the attention economy! Oh, to live…

10. When emails used to be…umm...fun.

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There was indeed a time when emails didn’t make you want to turn into a fine mist and dissipate in the forest. Emails came, from dear friends and loved ones, bearing warmth…and sometimes something as absurdly hilarious as current-day WhatsApp forwards. But that part can be easily overlooked because, for all its faults, emails used to be a tool of sporadic communication, and nobody was breathing down our necks to write back.  

11. Old Cartoon Network and Pogo!

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Imagine a world where you embark on exciting adventures and later get to sleep in your own bed, like Dragon Tales’ Max and Emmy. And who wouldn’t want to live in Bob the Builder’s world, where, in 30 minutes, just about anything could be fixed? Every rational adult only wants one thing — to teleport back to the old Cartoon Network and Pogo universe.  

12. When you could just cry whenever you wanted to.

LadyLover @MultiGayShipper

"I want to cry. All the time" #Fleabag understands 90% of us. #PhoebeWallerBridge

07:14 PM - 08 Sep 2019

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Once upon a forgotten time, when you felt like crying, you could just cry without having to worry about your next meeting. And when things went south, you were allowed to fall apart instead of having to feign a cheery voice befitting a cereal advertisement. In the adult world of the miserable and the lonely, not having to schedule a breakdown for a more convenient time is indeed a privilege.

13. When you were a ten-year-old and still hopeful about adulthood.

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POV: You were just a regular fifth grader. Every day was new and full of potential. The perils of impending adulthood were yet to be unmasked by the march of time. Emily Dickinson said, “hope is the thing with feathers” and you were confident that since it had feathers, it would fly its way back to you, every time.

PS: Apologies for sounding extremely cynical about adulthood...but trust me, it can be fun too (albeit, only sometimes!) Like, remember the time you got to pick the colour of your bed sheet?? I mean, it's okay if you cried later for having to pay for it all by yourself...but can we just focus on the colour-picking part for now?