THE FERAL SAVAGES
There will never be another generation quite like us.
Not because we were tougher.
Because the world that made us no longer exists.
We left the house in the morning and disappeared.
No phone.
No GPS.
No text saying where are you?
Nobody knew where the fuck we were.
Sometimes we didn’t either.
You’d walk half an hour across questionable territory to your buddy’s house only to discover he wasn’t home.
His parents didn’t know where he was either.
Perfectly normal.
So you took a piss, stole a Kool-Aid packet and continued the expedition.
Maybe somebody saw him near the arena.
That counted as intelligence.
Rumours and last sightings were Find My Friends.
You’d hit the Mac’s Milk, dump a couple quarters into Pac-Man, run into some kids from school and suddenly you had a completely different plan.
Because there was no plan.
The day happened to you.
Too hot outside?
Go sit in the arena and watch the figure skaters.
Bored?
Never ever announce that within earshot of an adult. They had a cure for boredom.
It was called chores.
So we disappeared again. We found balls people lost. Built forts. Jumped fences. Ripped our hand me down clothes.
Collected broken bikes on garbage day and Frankenstein’d three pieces of shit into one slightly less dangerous piece of shit.
No tutorial.
No instructions.
We built freedom from scraps.
Just tools, curiosity and an unreasonable belief that we’d figure it out.
Sometimes we did.
Sometimes we learned what scary and dangerous meant on the way to the emergency room.
We waited for everything.
Christmas catalogs were months of foreplay with toys we’d probably never get.
Songs had to come on the radio.
Pictures had to be developed.
Friends had to be found.
Entertainment had to be invented.
Wanting something and getting it were separated by time.
And somewhere inside all that freedom, boredom, neglect, independence, stupidity and improvisation, adaptations were being built.
Resourcefulness.
Patience.
Problem solving.
Comfort with uncertainty.
The ability to entertain ourselves.
The ability to make something from almost nothing.
The belief that if nobody was coming, we’d probably figure it out ourselves.
Some of that became resilience.
Some became hyper-independence.
Some became the inability to ask for help.
Some of us learned I can handle this.
Some of us accidentally learned I have to handle everything myself.
We’re old enough now to know the difference.
But don’t mistake reflection for regret.
Because there was something fucking glorious about those feral little savages.
We knew how to make a world out of whatever we found lying around.
And there won’t be another generation raised quite that way.
The window closed.
Technology changed it.
Parenting changed.
The neighbourhood changed.
The world changed.
And now the feral kids are pushing 60.
We’ve got mortgages, bad knees, reading glasses and an increasingly suspicious relationship with QR codes.
We’ve watched technology promise to make everything easier while somehow making everybody reachable every second of the fucking day.
We’ve watched institutions wobble.
We’ve watched the internet turn into the world’s largest argument.
We’ve watched people rediscover concepts like boredom, independence, delayed gratification and resilience as though somebody just invented them.
Meanwhile Gen X is sitting quietly in the corner.
Eating a Pop-Tart.
Watching the whole thing shake.
And somewhere underneath the adult clothes is still that sunburned kid with torn shorts, three dollars in quarters and absolutely no fucking idea where his friends are.
And part of him is thinking: We fucking told you.
