Being born in '86 ruled. My childhood was neatly cleaved in half by the Old World and the New World; I grew up in my grandma's house and vividly remember all sorts of quaint details about pre-Internet life, but technology was advancing so rapidly that it felt like some amazing surprise was always around the corner.

I wish kids today could experience the same sense of wonder and optimism that I grew up with. Call me superficial, but video games are a really clear example: Imagine leaping from Nintendo to Playstation so quickly that everyone's parents kept complaining about how it felt like they had to buy one of those Game Machines every year. Nowadays, new consoles are spaced 7-9 years apart and have mild, incremental improvements.

Or the Internet. I can describe, in detail, the exact moment I learned about the Internet.

It was all in one frantic, excited phone call from my Dad, who was just so giddy about the fact that the Internet was now a thing that he described it to me in one breathless, confusing phone call that began with "Aaron! Aaron! There's this thing called The World Wide Web where you hook your computer up to your phone line and you can interact with any other computer in the world! You can look at anything and do anything! One day we'll be buying stuff off there!"

Or the general optimism of the 90's. Our problems were quaint and petty compared to the Hell just around the corner.

We didn't worry about the collapse of the global economy or apocalyptic doomsday plagues. Instead, we held Congressional hearings where politicians talked about how cool it was that Sub-Zero could rip off your head it Mortal Kombat, or how the game Night Trap was heralding the collapse of Western civilization because there's a scene where unpaid actors wearing trash bags could grab Dana Plato with a comically oversized plastic Pooper Scooper.

The central issue of the 2000 Presidential debates was "How do we best spend this enormous pile of money we have?"

I consider myself an old Millennial, and I imagine being born even a couple years before or after me would have a huge impact on your formative years, but it's hard to get mad at Gen X when the Boomers were constantly sucking all the oxygen out of the room.