Don’t Bury Me Just Yet

There are moments in life that cut a person to their core. Moments that shake their very sense of identity. Moments that leave them staring into the existential abyss, questioning everything they once believed.

For some, it’s the first gray hair. For others, it’s realizing they now make involuntary noises when getting out of a chair. For me, it happened when my oldest child—my pride and joy—looked at a movie from my childhood, wrinkled his little Gen Alpha nose, and declared:

“Wow. This is old. The year starts with a 19.”

It took every ounce of self-control not to collapse into a heap on the floor. Old? The movie in question came out when I was in high school. It wasn’t some black-and-white relic from the silent film era—it had color! It had dialogue! It had soul!

But no. According to my son, it was a relic. A dusty, prehistoric artifact from a bygone age.

It was bad enough when “bruh” and “skibbidi” entered my home like uninvited houseguests, taking up residence in my child’s vocabulary. I tolerated the absurdity of Dog Man, I endured the brain-melting antics of my children’s favorite video-gaming Youtubers. But this? This was too far.

Let’s talk about actual cultural drivel, shall we? The 80s and 90s weren’t just decades; they were an era of substance. Our movies had heart. Our TV shows had actual plots. Our culture wasn’t built around an army of “influencers” with imbecilic vocabularies and questionable conspiratorial views about the shape of the earth.

And yet, despite this, I know the battle is lost. The sheer volume of absurdity flooding modern culture cannot be undone with mere nostalgia-fueled rants. My protests are drowned out by the relentless onslaught of social media trends, manufactured celebrities, and the repetitive brain rot of feeble minds.

We are living in a world where depth and artistry have been replaced by five-second videos of people eating cereal aggressively into a microphone. Where films that defined generations are now shrugged off as “mid” while influencer cash-grabs are deemed “iconic.” A world where a TikTok dance is somehow a cultural achievement but a meticulously crafted screenplay is just “that old thing.”

But I refuse to go down without a fight. If I must endure the vapid wasteland of modern entertainment, then I will do so with the righteous indignation of someone who actually remembers when stories mattered.

I will sing the praises of The Princess Bride until the internet collapses under the weight of its own stupidity. I will champion Back to the Future until time travel itself is a reality. And if anyone dares utter the word “cringe” in response, they will find themselves subjected to a mandatory screening of Citizen Kane and a lecture on why dialogue and framing matter.

Yes, I was born in the last century. Does that make me a relic? No. It makes me a classic—a finely aged bottle of wisdom in a sea of artificially flavored energy drinks, a vinyl record in a world of auto-tuned noise, a well-worn novel in a wasteland of clickbait headlines. I am not outdated; I am timeless. 

And in case you were wondering how I responded to my child’s insult upon my age, I simply hit him with “Bruh. You know both your mom and I were born in years that start with 19.” To which he replied with a simple “Oh” and went off to do something he deemed more important.