“Things Gen X thought were normal” is the title across the top of an 80 second reel from @rickosbornart, filmed outdoors in front of a wooden fence. The man on screen wears a dark green sleeveless shirt and taps a finger to his temple as he talks, and every word he says appears in bold captions one word at a time.

The caption sets the tone: “Gen X, looking back at some of the things we thought were completely normal growing up is kind of crazy.” It adds, “I know I barely scratched the surface. What would you add to this list?” The hashtags are #GenX, #GrowingUpGenX, #GenXKids, #GenXLife and #Over50.

His first item is being left in the car while his parents went into a store. By his telling, sometimes they left the keys in it, with the engine running; the captions show “keys” and then “running” one after the other. Next comes being sent into the store to buy cigarettes for his parents. He names a brand in highlighted blue text, Vantage Lights, and says the store sold them. The captions pick out a few other words in blue, such as “X” and “one,” so the emphasis lands where he leans on a word.

The third item is discipline. He lists getting paddled or whipped at school by another adult, then getting whipped again at home, on the logic that obviously you had done something to deserve it. The fourth is looking after younger brothers and sisters while you were barely old enough to take care of yourself.

The one he flags as getting to him is the freedom. You could leave the house for hours, he says, and there was “literally” no way for parents to contact you, with the captions showing “phone” and “tracking” as the missing pieces. Near the end he says that growing up, you somehow thought it all seemed normal, and that now, looking back, it all seems absolutely crazy. These are his recollections, told on his own account, and the reel does not say where or in what year he grew up.

Several of these have a documented present day counterpart. On the car, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration says plainly on its hot car page: “Never leave a child alone in a parked car.” It says cracking windows or parking in shade does little to lower the temperature, that a car’s interior can pass 115 degrees when it is 70 outside, and that a child’s body temperature can rise three to five times faster than an adult’s. About 37 children a year die from heatstroke in or around cars, NHTSA says, and it advises keeping car keys out of children’s reach.

On cigarettes, the Food and Drug Administration’s Tobacco 21 page says that legislation signed on December 20, 2019 raised the federal minimum age of sale for tobacco products from 18 to 21, effective immediately and with no exemptions. It also says that under an August 2024 final rule, retailers have had to check photo ID for anyone under 30 trying to buy tobacco since September 30, 2024. Sending a young person in alone to buy a pack for a parent is not something the current rules allow a store to go along with.

On school discipline, the U.S. Department of Education’s March 24, 2023 letter from Secretary Miguel Cardona says corporal punishment is still either expressly allowed or not expressly prohibited in 23 states, 16 that expressly allow it and seven that do not expressly prohibit it. The letter says the number of students subjected to it fell between the 2013 to 2014 and 2017 to 2018 school years, and that boys were about 81 percent of those subjected while making up about half of enrollment. So the practice he recalls has not disappeared everywhere.