Who knows where the time goes? Remembering the things we had in our teens

The hard choices, the forks in the road, the future unrolling in front of you, full of endless possibility.

Then there was the fact that everything was new, and felt that much more intensely because of the fact. The heartache, the happiness, the tedium, the excitement. Every setback felt world-ending, every embarrassment made you cringe.

Life can have a tendency to shrink as you get older. Your options narrow, you get stuck in a rut, you start to believe that you know everything.

It's nice, sometimes, to look back on simpler times.

So for our readers' choice page this week, we went on our socials and asked a simple question: "What did you have as a teenager that you don't have now?"

And among almost a thousand responses, there was certainly one thing that preoccupied our male respondents.

'Hair'.

In fact, the physical aspects of youth were a key theme.

A slim figure. Good legs. Teeth! Being in possession of such good looks without requiring any effort - and without understanding what you had.

It's been said almost infinite times: youth is wasted on the young.

Where does the time go? Picture: annca from Pixabay

But there were less tangible concepts, too.

Simpler times; trust; freedom; time; innocence.

Hope.

Maybe that last one speaks more about the times we live in than the times gone by.

One comment from David Coates perhaps summed up that modern cynicism. "A student grant, an NHS that worked, dentists that worked, energy services that didn’t rip everyone off, banks that actually tried to help customers," he wrote.

Parent, grandparents, friends, all these came up.

Paula Baker wrote of the innocence of the pre-internet days, and this was echoed by a number of readers, who feel that the world-wide web may have snuffed something important out of our lives.

"A good normal youth outside and doing things with no internet and things connected with it, the country was a lot better and safer, also didn’t have all the hatred etc," Paula wrote.

Rachel Sharp added: "Pen pals. I wrote letters to friends and relatives who lived away and that was so much more meaningful than social media. The freedom but also learnt responsibility that came with no mobile phones in the 90s. Therefore knowing how to look after myself when travelling alone with no constant contact."

And Claire Chamberlain wrote: "The freedom to ‘learn’ from my mistakes without all the evidence ending up on social media!"

Given we had expected responses about Walkmans and space hoppers with this question, it's fair to say things got deeper than we anticipated. But it was fascinating to see what you picked.

And however difficult and messy and painful our teens were, it's likely, reading through our responses, that for most us, if we had the chance to do it all again, we certainly would.

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