Things you use to enjoy that you can't do anymore because they are deemed dangerous or improper

What is going on where you people live?

Things my kids still do that apparently other parts of the world, don't:

1. Slip and Slide

2. Ride in innertubes behind vehicles

3. Ride in the back of vehicles

4. Play outdoors without supervision

5. Go to the grocery store without a mask (or adult supervision) and they travel there by themselves

6. Play spontaneous sports with random people

7. Drink from the hose

8. Light firecrackers

9. Shoot real guns

10. Learned to drive on ATVs

11. Go places without their phones (sometimes I wonder why they own them)

12. Run

13. Walk, ride, whatever to school

14. Climb on top of the house

15. Burn trash

16. Eat hedge/tree fruit

17. Drag race

Okay, we wear seatbelts and helmets because they're just a good idea.

Hitchhiking.

Yes, hitchiking.

Hitchiked from Dallas to Norwalk, CT in spring of 1979. Just stuck out a cardboard sign reading NY. Took me 5 rides and about 32 hours. Last ride all the way from outside Knoxville TN to Norwalk CT.

Runjumpthrow,etc wrote:

Yes, hitchiking.

Hitchiked from Dallas to Norwalk, CT in spring of 1979. Just stuck out a cardboard sign reading NY. Took me 5 rides and about 32 hours. Last ride all the way from outside Knoxville TN to Norwalk CT.

Good one,

Once, in my twenties, i hitchhiked from Kenai Peninsula, AK up to Anchorage and got a ride sitting on the open bed of a pick-up truck. I wouldn't think anything about it except that i looked over and a woman in a car next to us on the freeway was staring at me and grinning ear to ear.

I had been sitting there with my backpack by my side, singing for all I was worth,

OF course, i reeled it in to a mere humm. But I guess the point is, when you're caught up in it, it's nothing, and it takes being removed or seeing yourself from another's perspective to realize how special those things are.

seattle prattle wrote:

How about all the dangerous, risky things I did and somehow survived, and now cringe at the very thought of?

they're not as risky as you thought, and you have become a cringer.

Your governor is in a wheelchair for running in a storm.

Your state has mad Covid cases.

We don't need Texas.

Nobody needs Texas.

Greg Cripplabbott. Wheel your way out of this....

Then it's you vs me ..Texan Redneck.

Bring it Abbott.

Living without a cell phone and constant social media.

Doing stupid things, people only remember, not record on their cell phone or you find on your camera after you get your pictures back from the photomat.

retired guy here wrote:

Some of these things may have been dangerous or improper but they didn't seem wrong or bad at the time.

1 Slip and Slide - my kids loved doing this on a hot summer day.

2 Jarts - it was a fun family game.

3 Riding in the back of a station wagon - loved doing this when I was a kid.

4 Harmless mild sexually suggestive banter with coworkers. You knew the people you could do it with and often it was initiated by the female.

Maybe next! Ok wait here

Yup---Going to store when I was 5 and my older brother was 8...Cowboys and Indians, playing ball at the local park for sure,;

Riding in back of the pickup -never had an issue falling out, but growing up in Ottawa, Canada got frozen ears going to the bar hitching a ride in November -temperature was -15!

Shooting bottle rockets while on vacation in Florida-you could buy a ton of fireworks for 15 bucks then...

"bunking" was big in the late 70's/early '80's. You would wait for the city bus to stop and pick up a fare on a snow day and you "would latch on" the rear bumper and let it ride! In 1984 since I caught a good ride going about 25 MPH, but my boots caught a sewer grate and in a blink of an eye went ass-over-teakettle, at least only a banged up chin and no lost teeth! After that no more bunking. Otherwise for all of the crazy things, relatively few injures!

About 20 years ago, my first stint in a medical practice, at the end of a long Friday, one of the docs would pull out of a cupboard a bottle of vodka, and we would pass it around 6 or 7 of us including the nurse and secretary and tell dirty jokes and gripe about the day! I never got really buzzed, but that probably wouldn't fly these days-good times!

Photocopying a map at the college library and going for a 3 day-hike with buddies with no GPS/phones, only a 25 year-old compass!

It was probably in the late 70's when I last road in the back of my father's pickup truck but what was most dangerous is that he was hauling a refrigerator in the back and it was not securely tied so I was told to make sure it did not move. Of course it started moving--it started to tip over on me. Somehow I reacted fast enough to keep it from falling over.

Born in the mid-60's wrote:

It was probably in the late 70's when I last road in the back of my father's pickup truck but what was most dangerous is that he was hauling a refrigerator in the back and it was not securely tied so I was told to make sure it did not move. Of course it started moving--it started to tip over on me. Somehow I reacted fast enough to keep it from falling over.

Friend of mine did that with a stretched art canvas in the back of a pick-up and the wind caught it, he held on and went over, landing in the road on his head, Goes to the hospital and they treat him for a consussion, but he gets bored and escapes, goes to our local townie tavern where he walks in with a bandage wrapped around his head, and i come to find out the story.

He was apparently okay and no discernable long term effects.

This wasn't completely out of the ordinary amongst us.

retired guy here wrote:

Some of these things may have been dangerous or improper but they didn't seem wrong or bad at the time.

1 Slip and Slide - my kids loved doing this on a hot summer day.

2 Jarts - it was a fun family game.

3 Riding in the back of a station wagon - loved doing this when I was a kid.

4 Harmless mild sexually suggestive banter with coworkers. You knew the people you could do it with and often it was initiated by the female.

Jesus that list escalated quickly. Think might have some underlying issue there my friend.

Heroin.

Runjumpthrow,etc wrote:

Yes, hitchiking.

Hitchiked from Dallas to Norwalk, CT in spring of 1979. Just stuck out a cardboard sign reading NY. Took me 5 rides and about 32 hours. Last ride all the way from outside Knoxville TN to Norwalk CT.

I hitchhiked to Alaska from Southern California in 1979 and 1981. Was 17 the first time, turning 18 on the road. It took 9 days both times. Had to sneak across the Canadian border. I left in the spring flew back to California in the fall .

I started hitchhiking in the six grade though. I live in a semi-rural area and would ride my bike to a place with traffic going to a lake I wanted to fish at, Hid the bike in the bushes and would get rides from old fishermen. It was funny, they would often tell me that they would give me a ride , but I had better not fish by them.

I bummed a ride from Anchorage, AK to Chicago in 1979 off a listing i did in the want-ads,. Hitchhiking the Al-Can highway must be really rough!

A friend and I hitchiked from the east coast to Colorado a few years before that, when i was about 18., It was okay, kind of boring, really.

Once I spent a day hopping freight trains in N. Carolina. Now that was a blast!

Hitchhiking and living in Alaska for a couple of summers- met some really crazy people. Just loaded with stories but unfortunately I can't begin to tell them to my son because, well, I wouldn't want to be encouraging him to do anything so "Dangerous and improper".

I can't tell you how many things I did that would be outrageous now. My parents were hippies, and had a moral prerogative for free-range parenting, and broke up very early in my life any case. I lived with one, in a country area until she kicked me out at age 12, then with another in a second country area, before he kicked me out at age 16. In both instances, and before when both parents were together, I was absolutely free range.

Then when dad kicked me out, I was living in a homeless youth hostel with even less supervision. That place was like Lord of the Flies. You wouldn't believe me if I told you, and I genuinely thank goodness this was all before social media.

Okay, I'll tell you one thing. The supervisor tired of me, and made to have me removed. I spoke fast to the social workers, and pulled out some Jedi mind trick where she was kicked out instead, and I was made supervisor in her place. I'm not making any of this up.

I hitch-hiked, a lot before the age of 12. We were very poor, and the bus from the rural area to the very slightly less rural area was usually too much. Never a problem. Our back door at one place didn't lock, whatsoever. When I was under parental supervision, such as it was, I'd disappear for days, and days and camp, or run riot, or go on crazy adventures with disreputable people. By 'camp', I mean sleep under my jacket down by the river and explore abandoned water pumping infrastructure with my friends.

Once, I missed an interstate bus by minutes, and one random guy said he was going to the place the bus was. Mum literally handed me over. It was okay, the dude took me to where I was meant to go.

We'd wag school, of course, all the time. Hang around department stores, collecting trolleys for the 20c deposit, to save enough for a video game or two.

Lots of other stuff it would be unwise to share.

One other thing: in year 9, I think, our class had a school trip from a rural area to the nearest capital city. I had lived in this capital city previously (I lived in many places, rural and otherwise--my parents were both quite crazy) and I'm not sure how, but I convinced the teacher supervising to let me loose, into the city, to 'visit my sister'. I did no such thing, I just cruised around and caught random public transport for a day.

I was 15 or 16.

Incredibly illegal, and inappropriate, but looking back I realise most people knew my home life, and accepted I was an unusual, and willful kid

Do kids not do these things anymore? I'm 19 and we did almost all of these growing up (not traveling to another country or drag racing obviously), in a more-affluent-than-not neighborhood in the Midwest.