I am lucky enough to be a child of the happy 90s. This was the time before influencers and reality celebrities made their inroads. Before the time thieves Instagram, Snapchat and TikTok came along. My generation is the very last to experience childhood and adolescence without mobile phones and social media. What a liberating time! Instead of “selfies”, we took pictures of each other to preserve the memories. We wrote down our innermost thoughts in diaries in the girls’ room and locked them with small keys, because the mere thought that others could read them was the most embarrassing thing. Blogging, followers, hashtag, sponsored posts…huh? We hung out after school, chatted face to face and visited neighbors and friends completely unannounced. The summer holidays were endlessly long and we were bored. A lot. But boredom made us creative. We played superheroes in the forest and built cabins in the trees. The adults interfered little as long as we were out. We ate Marie biscuits with palm oil and blue snop with e-drugs, and survived. We easily cycled half a mile to rent VHS films at the local video store, no Netflix with a thousand choices in the yard, no. We went on summer holidays to Denmark or Sweden in a fully packed Toyota Hiace and stopped at rest areas with packed lunches and thermos coffee. If the summer day was extra hot, it was pure magic and we lived happily ignorant of climate crises and the environment. Since the internet barely existed, we were pretty spared having to deal with destructive clickbait news minute by minute. War was something that happened a long time ago and the world’s problems were the adults’ problems, not the children’s! We got to be children for a long time. I got my first mobile phone in my hands when I was seventeen. It wasn’t exactly a smartphone! Make-up, hair color and fashion I had almost nothing to do with before the first year of high school. We didn’t stress ourselves out to be perfect in all areas. I got sixes in music and twos in maths. It was a victory, not a defeat because the diploma had been passed. Because life was more than school and homework. You lived well with being “good enough” and didn’t need to be the best at everything. Rules were within reasonable limits, to be stretched. We weren’t insufferable, but that’s how we learned right from wrong and found our own voice. Maybe everything wasn’t better before. Some probably experienced the 90s differently. But the state of things seemed less stressful and the world more tangible. If someone had told us in the 90s that chocolate milk at school is dangerous to life or that one day we would hoard toilet paper and tins in a panic because a virus is on the way, we would have had a good laugh. The media know how to stoke the fire. We live in the age of speed and information floods like never before. When, as an adult, I feel a certain pressure on social media and mobile phone addiction, I don’t even dare to imagine what it must be like for young people. The average age when children get their first mobile phone is 8.8 years. It’s terrifying. The little heads pick up a lot more than we realize. The month of June was supposed to be the month of inclusion and diversity, but paradoxically, it felt like we have never been more polarized. There are arguments and debates in the cabin and guns. What signals does this send to the children? Time cannot be reversed, but now the pendulum has swung too far and it has completely ended. Then I want to pull the emergency brake.
ttn-69
Time to pull the emergency brake – Statement
