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GENX RULES, NON-FACT-CHECKING FACEBOOK FOOLS

Back In My Day, We Didn’t Have Stupid Facebook Problems

How did I ever make social connections?

Michelle Marie Warner
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Published in
7 min readJan 17, 2025

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Three young 20-something, light-skinned, women/femme presenting humans. On the left — short blonde hair, gray and white face paint on cheeks and faded rainbow painted on eyelids, not smiling, bangs hanging down on one side, black shirt; Middle — brown, medium-length, wavy hair, smiling, black and white striped shirt with black sweater; On the right — brown, straight, medium-length hair, smiling, sunglasses on head, black top with red sweater
Photo by Krzysiek on Pixabay

When I was your age, I didn’t have social media as you know it today. I’m a GenXer and predictably proud of it. The 1980s was a great time of innovation. We had MTV, Apple personal computers, and CNN.

We carried dimes for calls on 10-cent payphones, and some still used Morse code. Two taps for “Yes” and one tap for “No.” Three short taps and one long for “Meet me at home” Or something like that.

I lived in a small beach town called Carpinteria, where everyone knew your name. If we ran out of dimes, we could walk into Tyler’s Donuts in Casitas Plaza and ask to use their phone or wait about ten minutes.

My friends would buy powdered donuts, and I’d get the raspberry jelly-filled glazed. We were polite for the most part, only getting rowdy at the outside tables after our third serving.

A few of us had pagers, which, contrary to the rumors, weren’t only for drug deals. Fact-check me just in case, but rumors are usually false information.

When paged, it displayed your BFF’s phone number and vibrated to let you know they were thinking of you. Pagers made us look…

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Published in Contemplate

Reflections of the Mindful — A publication designed for the writer to reflect, the reader to be inspired, the creatives to find their muses.

Michelle Marie Warner
Michelle Marie Warner

Written by Michelle Marie Warner

Grateful, sassy, sober GenX mom with plenty to say and enough energy to listen. Learning to laugh a little more as I age gracefully. Bring it on.

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