When Everything Becomes Vintage

I owned three Walkmans. White one, gray one, and some kind of clip-on model that never worked right. This was just what you carried—your music, limited to whatever cassette you could fit. No wireless, no batteries that lasted more than four hours if you were lucky, no way to carry more than one album at a time. Completely normal. Now there’s a YouTube series where they hand kids Walkmans and film the moment their brains short-circuit trying to understand what the thing even is.

The confusion is real. They hold it like it might detonate. Two spinning wheels inside a plastic case—what is this? Why would you need this when you have a phone? The kids poke at the headphone jack, try to find a screen, ask if it charges. One of them actually asks if it’s a vintage Spotify device. It’s the kind of thing that makes you feel genuinely old, not in a sad way, just in a factual way. You built your childhood around this object, and now it’s been dead for so long it’s become a novelty.

What kills me is thinking about how this feeling will loop forever. Twenty years from now, someone will show a kid an iPhone from 2026 and they won’t understand why you have to touch a screen to do anything, why it can’t read your mind, why you carry around a separate object for your music and your messages and your life. The technology you thought was permanent, that felt like the future, becomes yesterday without you even noticing. Walkmans were the future once. Then they were just normal. Then they were a joke in a viral video.

There’s something weirdly comforting about this. Everything gets old. The stuff that seems cutting-edge and indispensable right now will be a thing kids laugh at, a museum piece you have to explain. It removes the pressure somehow—when you hold a Walkman in your hands now, you’re not thinking about the future, you’re just thinking about how normal it felt then.