I'm a millennial but grew up with boomer parents - here are 9 things from their era I wish still existed

I'm scrolling through my phone for the third hour straight when it hits me: my parents never did this. Not because they were more disciplined, but because the option simply didn't exist.

At 44, I'm technically an older millennial who grew up in that weird transitional zone. My childhood was analog, my adolescence was the early internet, and my adulthood has been increasingly digital. I watched the world shift from my parents' boomer era into whatever this is.

And look, I'm not one of those "back in my day" people. I like GPS and streaming music and not having to physically go to a bank. But there are aspects of my parents' world that we've lost in the upgrade, and I miss them more than I expected to.

1) Jobs that actually trained you instead of requiring five years of experience for entry-level positions

My dad walked into a company at 22 with a high school diploma and they taught him everything he needed to know. He stayed there for thirty years, moving up through actual on-the-job training.

Now I see job postings requiring a bachelor's degree, three years of experience, proficiency in twelve different software programs, and they're calling it "entry-level." For $35,000 a year.

The expectation that workers should arrive fully formed, already trained on their own dime, is exhausting. Companies used to invest in people. They'd hire someone with potential and develop them. That's almost extinct now.

I started as a music blogger with zero credentials and figured it out as I went. That pathway feels increasingly rare for people coming up now.

2) The possibility of genuine disconnection

When my parents went on vacation, they were unreachable. When they left work, they left work. Nobody expected immediate responses because immediate responses weren't possible.

I've tried leaving my phone behind for a day and it creates this low-grade anxiety that something urgent is happening without me. Because it might be. Because everyone operates on the assumption of constant availability now.

Even traveling, I'm checking emails and social media and staying plugged into the same streams of information I'd be monitoring at home. The concept of truly being somewhere else, unreachable and present, feels almost impossible.

My parents had that by default. We have to fight for it, and even then, we're fighting against infrastructure designed to prevent it.

3) Social plans that didn't require a group chat and three schedule confirmations

People used to just make plans and show up. "See you Saturday at 7" and that was it. No following text thread, no "still good for tonight?" messages, no last-minute bailouts.

Now every plan exists in this quantum state of maybe-happening-maybe-not until about thirty minutes beforehand. Group chats devolve into scheduling chaos where nothing gets decided and half the people stop responding.

There was something solid about making a commitment when breaking it required actual phone calls or just not showing up like a jerk. The friction kept people accountable.

4) Media you actually owned

My parents have shelves of books, CDs, and photo albums that will exist regardless of subscription services, platform changes, or companies going under.

I'm paying monthly for access to music I don't own, streaming shows that disappear when licensing expires, storing photos in clouds that could vanish if I miss a payment. Nothing is permanent. Everything is rented.

When I left Los Angeles briefly last year, I realized how much of my media consumption was tied to specific services and accounts. If those companies folded tomorrow, years of curated playlists and saved content would just evaporate.

There was security in physical ownership that we've traded for convenience. Most days the trade feels worth it, but not always.

5) Careers that followed predictable paths

Not saying the old system was perfect or fair. But there was a certain logic to it. You started at the bottom, put in time, moved up. Loyalty was rewarded with pensions and stability.

Now you're supposed to job-hop every two years for raises, build a "personal brand," have side hustles, constantly upskill, and treat yourself like a startup that might pivot at any moment. It's exhausting.

My grandmother raised four kids on a teacher's salary. Not wealthy, but stable and sufficient. That same job now requires a master's degree and barely covers rent in most cities.

The goalposts keep moving and the path keeps fragmenting. Some of that creates opportunity, sure. But it also creates constant low-level stress about whether you're doing enough.

6) Boredom that led to creativity

I grew up with hours of unstructured time where there was genuinely nothing to do. So I taught myself guitar, started writing, took photos of random stuff around the neighborhood.

Now every moment of potential boredom gets filled immediately. Waiting for food? Check your phone. Long drive? Podcast. Alone with thoughts? Absolutely not, here's infinite content.

I notice this even in my work. My best ideas used to come from staring out windows or taking walks with no destination. Now my brain is constantly processing inputs, and the creative silence gets crowded out.

Kids now will never experience that particular flavor of boredom that forced you to entertain yourself. And I think something valuable gets lost there.

7) Reasonable expectations about availability and productivity

Work happened at work. Home was home. You couldn't be reached outside office hours, so nobody tried.

The eight-hour workday actually meant eight hours. You weren't expected to check emails at night, respond to Slack messages on weekends, or be "always on" just because the technology enables it.

Productivity was measured by output, not by appearing busy or having green status lights on communication platforms. You did your work and then stopped working.

I'm technically a freelancer with flexible hours, which sounds great until you realize it means you're never not working. There's always something else you could be doing, some way to optimize, some opportunity you might miss.

My parents clocked out and were done. I'm jealous of that boundary.

8) A pace of life that allowed for processing

News happened at 6pm and you caught up once a day. Important cultural moments got discussed over days or weeks, not dissected in real-time hot takes.

Now everything is immediate and urgent and requires your instant opinion. You haven't even processed an event before you're supposed to have a position on it, broadcast it, and defend it against strangers.

I've mentioned this before, but the speed at which we're expected to consume and respond to information isn't sustainable. My parents had time to actually think about things before forming opinions.

That slower pace wasn't because they were more thoughtful. It was because the infrastructure forced processing time. I think we'd all benefit from some of that friction back.

9) The assumption that one income could support a household

My parents bought a house in suburban Sacramento on my dad's single income while my mom stayed home with kids. Not rich, solidly middle class.

That same scenario is essentially impossible now for most people. Dual incomes are required just to maintain what used to be normal middle-class life. And even then, housing costs relative to wages have made home ownership feel increasingly unrealistic.

The cost of everything has outpaced wage growth to the point where the basic markers of adulthood my parents hit in their twenties now happen in people's thirties, if at all. That's not individual failure, it's structural change.

I'm not romanticizing a time when women's career options were limited. But the economic reality that one regular job could support a family seems objectively better than requiring multiple incomes just to survive.

Conclusion

None of this is advocating for going backwards. My parents' generation had its own problems, many of which we've rightfully moved past. I wouldn't trade modern medicine, social progress, or access to information for anything.

But we've also lost things in the transition that mattered. The baby got thrown out with the bathwater on some fronts, and we're only now starting to realize what's missing.

The constant connectivity, the precarious employment, the expectation of relentless productivity, the absence of boredom and boundaries - these aren't inevitable features of modern life. They're choices we've made, often without realizing we were choosing.

Maybe the real skill is figuring out how to keep what works about now while recovering what worked about then. Build in friction where it creates space. Protect boundaries where they enable rest. Choose ownership over convenience sometimes. Let yourself be bored occasionally.

Because looking at my phone for three hours straight and feeling vaguely empty about it suggests we might have optimized for the wrong things.