I finally accepted that I had well and truly left my youth behind the day I saw a young couple – both wearing heavy black eyeliner, studded belts, grunge band T-shirts and baggy jeans – listening to David Guetta and Bebe Rexha's remake of I'm Blue by Eiffel 65, one of the defining songs of my childhood.
A terrible remake too, in my humble opinion. Don't mess with my nostalgia.
I'll keep my fingers tightly crossed that today's teens don't fall in love with the teeny tiny hipster pants and thick, stripy highlights of the 2000s. Some trends should be buried and forgotten forever.
Just like cultural trends, there are also social trends that resurface and die down again every few years.
Hobbies are a great example of this: handicrafts such as knitting and embroidery are enjoying a surge in popularity in recent years, gardening and plant collecting is replacing the low-maintenance yuccas of the millennium, and plastic toys are being shunned in favour of classic wood and metal playthings.
Then, there are the technological revolutions that come in cycles and cause incredible upheaval.
The ones in recent centuries, including the Printing Revolution, the Industrial Revolution and the Information Revolution, have caused redistributions of populations through rural-urban migration and changed everything about the way we live our lives.
We finally reach a form of equilibrium with one new technology, and bam! There's the next revolution, ready to pull the rug out from under our feet.
We used to live what we would today call rural lives - growing our own food, building our own homes, making our own clothes.
Young people would be apprenticed to a tradesperson who would take on the responsibility of teaching, feeding, housing and clothing their apprentice in lieu of payment, or at least as a very large chunk of their pay cheque.
That worker could expect to remain in that hard-earned career their whole lives.
The apprenticeship system survived all those revolutions through to the modern time, albeit in a different form to those of our distant ancestors - thanks to the introduction of labour laws and formal qualifications, no doubt. But parts of the old system still lingered into the 20th Century.
It used to be fairly standard practice in some industries to provide housing to their employees at a cheap rate, or as part of a pay package.
Hospitals and schools frequently had accommodation options available for their nurses, teachers and caretaking staff, all owned and maintained by the employer.
Even when I was a kid, there were some schools that still had teacher houses on-site or nearby.
You still see this kind of arrangement today, particularly in farming and horticulture jobs.
It makes sense for a job that involves working long, strenuous hours from a static location to offer a form of accommodation for their workers.
They don't have to drive long distances at unreasonable hours to get to work, and I'm sure are more reliable employees for it.
But, as we see from the idea mooted by Scott McLeod of McLeod Transport and Hiabs, why not borrow from the past and expand this idea to other industries?
That company has up to 15 vacancies at the moment and is considering buying rental properties as a way to entice new workers to relocate to Tauranga.
It's a clever idea, really, for companies that can afford it. Find some fresh and keen young employees who don't mind house-sharing for a few years and you've created yourself a loyal workforce who you know are going to stick around for a while.
If an industry with a labour shortage can guarantee affordable and safe housing to prospective overseas employees, maybe one of the hurdles to attracting quality immigrant workers would be removed too.
Graham Rodgers, a recruitment boss recently returned from a job fair in the UK, said housing affordability was one of the primary hinderances to attracting migrant workers to New Zealand, as well as crime rates and the rising costs of living.
Well, how about we knock one of those issues off the list?
In August, New Zealand reported more than 3000 nursing vacancies in the public health sector, and about 2000 in aged care.
Imagine if those thousands of vacant – and urgently needed! – nursing jobs in New Zealand could be made more appealing by the promise of guaranteed affordable housing. Heck, with a promise like that, I bet you could even convince a few Kiwis to change careers.
Sometimes remedies to modern problems lie in the past. We don't have to reinvent the wheel, but we sure can give it a few tweaks.
Sonya Bateson is a writer, reader, and crafter raising her family in Tauranga. She is a millennial who enjoys eating avocado on toast, drinking lattes and defying stereotypes. As a sceptic, she reserves the right to change her mind when presented with new evidence.
