That’s cool. I went to my 40th a while ago.
I was a total wallflower in high school, but at my reunion I realized that there where girls there that had a crush on me in high school. Very cute and intelligent girls. Like top in the class.
I was very, very, shy and yes an idiot.
29 years married now, so no regrets. But damn, Jenny, I didn’t know.
I was at Home Depot wearing a Green Day T-shirt that I got from the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame - this should have been my first clue - when the cashier pointed to my shirt and said, “Green Day, who’s that? Oh wait, is that one of the new European bands?”
To add insult to injury, my son’s nanny, who is in her earliest of 20s, showed up wearing a Green Day T-shirt and I said, “Ha! You know Green Day!”
She nodded sheepishly. “Yeah, my Dad made me listen to them all the time growing up.”
I went to my 60th earlier this year.
Oh hello. I turned 50 yesterday. Now what?
Count yourself a lucky whippersnapper who doesn’t have a business in this thread? 
Reminds me of the time I went to the liquor store, maybe about a year ago, and the lady at the cash register was wearing a Kiss T-shirt. It had the cover art from the Destroyer album printed on it. She might have been, I’m guessing, about thirty years old. I said something to the effect of “It’s good to see the classics are still appreciated.” And she said, “I don’t know anything about those guys. I just thought it looked like a bad-ass shirt.” I chuckled and said, “Fair enough.”
Aside: I went to a rock concert once in the early 2000s which featured Aerosmith and KISS. I was an Aerosmith fan and knew nothing about KISS.
Aerosmith was meh.
KISS rocked my face off. And they were so nice about it.
I think they’d get a laugh out of your anecdote.
My son asking me what YouTube channels I watched as a child certainly makes me feel old.
I was sitting at a Starbucks a couple of months ago and there was a young couple across from me. I’d guess about 17 or 18. The girl was the absolute spitting image of Cher. Long straight black hair parted in the middle. Heavy eye makeup with false eyelashes. Flawless skin. Pale lipstick, expertly applied. I walked over to her and said, Has anyone ever told you that you look just like Cher?"
Go ahead, guess what’s coming next.
That’s right. She never heard of Cher. So I asked her boyfriend to look up some pictures of Cher on his phone, which he did. He said, “Nah, that doesn’t look like her.”
Whatever.
A few years ago, my office team was out of town in Los Angeles on a project. We had a late evening at a karaoke bar where the video screen was playing the music video for the Madonna song Material Girl. One of the younger co-workers said, “This must have blown up the internet when it premiered.” Someone else replied that there was no internet when the song and video were released in 1985; I was too busy being reminded how old I was.
I’ve been making cultural references to my college students as long as I’ve been teaching. Most of them have no idea what I’m talking about. Then there was a period where they actually did understand them, because they were retro. Now they’re (the cultural references, not the students) too old for that as well.
Most disturbing is that I’m a voice teacher, and a large percentage of my students are specifically interested in musical theater, and no one has any idea who Ethel Merman is
I’m not surprised. Actually, I’d be surprised if someone that young had heard of her.
Yeah, there are plenty of people of Cher’s era whom I would expect modern youth to have heard of, but Cher was mostly famous for being Cher. And fame for the sake of fame doesn’t endure.
I mean, yeah, she’s not as bad as the Kardashians or something. She did have an actual reason for her fame originally. But nobody who knows her any more knows her for her singing.
Yeah, I know similar aged kids who don’t know the Beetles or gasp Clapton.
To be fair, the only reason I know Hatsune Miku is because my student likes her.
For writing assignments sometimes I ask my students to imagine how we coped with life back when there weren’t X.
The kids’ guesses about how stores handled checkouts before bar codes was interesting.
I worked in a place where delivery people could get in with a card, but the elevator to go back downstairs wouldn’t work for them. Take too long to explain. I joked to a young delivery guy and said “You can check in any time you like, but you can never leave.” He didn’t get it. 
The girl at the liquor store I go to has a ‘Queen’ tattoo. I had just seen a Queen cover band (Killer Queen) at Red Rocks amphitheater.
We chatted about it. This girl said she was born a year after Freddie died.
ooofhh. 
I’m old. Still having fun, but I’m old.
But she still knew who they were, and, presumably, liked their music. Kids These Days can like good music from any era: All of it is easily available. I wouldn’t be surprised if some classic artists have more fans now than in their prime.
My mother told me about an office party she went to where her colleagues were all talking about what TV shows they watched in their youth. They asked my mom, and were shocked when she told them she didn’t have a TV in her youth, because no one did.
A few months ago I had to explain to a client (who was around 20 years old) what a phone book was.
My mom was always a fearful person, afraid of many things, like elevators, driving on the freeway, people of color, flying, hippies, mice, you name it. I always vowed I’d never be like her and to never be afraid of everyday things. I made myself get over a moderate fear of flying in my 40s and took many plane trips over the next twenty years.
I’m 70. In the last year or two I’ve developed a phobia of driving on mountain roads with a steep drop-off on one side, or across bridges where you can see the ocean on either side of a steep ascent (like the westbound Richmond Bridge on San Francisco Bay). This has put a crimp in our road trips. I suppose it’s a side effect of getting old, but I sure hate it. I hate turning into my mom at this late stage.