What would you give up to go back in time?

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Today I feel a little bit nostalgic. I've been thinking a lot lately about how things changed since I've grown up.  In 1976 the first television show aired in South Africa.  I was five, so we grew up playing outside and we had no worries.  

When we are little the only thing that we want to be is grown up, but now that we are, we wish that we could go back. 

I grew up in a small safe town. I loved school and I had plenty of friends. We lived close to each other and we used to ride our bicycles in the afternoons, (without helmets) without anyone worrying about where we were going, because we had rules, and we listened to our parents. We had a specific time to be at home, so we went home without any complaints. Our parents always knew where to find us.

I grew up in a time where we didn't have television in South Africa so we had to keep ourselves busy and we never said that we were bored. We didn't have cellphones, computers or any of the technology that we have today, and we survived perfectly well.  I think I was in grade eight when we got our first computer.  

The closest thing to technology we had were Walkman's and radio's. I remember sitting on a Sunday afternoon recording the top twenty music hits, and it made me angry because the broadcaster used to talk for the first few seconds when a new song started, and then you had to rewind the tape and forward to get to exactly the right spot to cut out the voice of the broadcaster. Gosh, I must sound ancient but I'm actually only in my forties.  

We played seasonal games at school. At certain times everyone would play with marbles, until the next new craze came along. One of the biggest things that fascinated me most were the Rubik's cube, and we spent hours playing with that little cube trying to get all the colors together. I even had a neat trick where I used a spoon to take the block apart and then put it back together perfectly. 

                                

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We were very smart if we had a hands-free game console. I remember I had Donkeykong 2 and I played for hours and hours just to get that little monkey to jump over the barrels. 

                                   

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Our biggest friends were our family members and we used to play outside in the mud, building little farms with plastic toys in the flowerbeds and we were happy. 

We were not worried about anything, and now we worry about everything! 

I would give up a lot of what I have today, to just turn back the time, to live in a simpler time when life had less stress, and more fun.  

Would you be willing to give up technology to go back in time?