Hi. My name is Turney and I’m a Diet Coke addict. I have been for years. Countless times I’ve hopped in my car upon waking up, clad in my pajamas and not showered, and driven to the closest gas station to get my early morning fix. The craving for that diet soda high is just too much to bear. I need it. But once I hand over my $2 and have those 20 oz. in my sweet little hands—I know everything will be all right.

I can’t be alone. There must be others out there just like me. People who hear that Diet Coke talking to them. The faint whispers in the ear and the visions of dancing plastic bottles in the mind. But truth be told the diet soda addiction is just like crack—minus the dangers of imminent death, of course.

Remember when you actually had to go to the video store to rent a movie? It was an event. It was part of the night. These days in the midst of a blizzard or even a little bit of rain, you’re grateful that all you have to do is walk five feet to your coffee table and grab the television remote, and in four or five clicks you’ve got the opening credits rolling. Of course there’s something really nice about that, but it’s just not the same.

Sometime in the 1980s mom-and-pop video stores started popping up in every small town in America. You knew the guy behind the counter and he knew you. There were rows and rows of VHS cassettes displayed along the wall by genre. The movies sat there like caged puppies at the shelter just begging you to rent them. And if you were lucky, you got to stop by the store on the way home and pick up some popcorn and candy.

Recently I’ve been reminiscing about my rowdy, younger days and it got me thinking: How different am I now? Things around me have certainly changed. Back in the day, it was dial-up Internet and fax machines that were cutting edge; now it’s everything mobile and 3-D printers. If you plot any two points in history and give them 20 years of distance, there’s always going to be transformation. But do people change like technology?

Sure, I now have a few extra gray hairs, maybe I’ve put on a few pounds, and my recovery time has lengthened a bit. But have I really changed? I’m 45 years old, and I see the world with the same eyes, but with a different lens.

“Perspective is worth 80 IQ points,” computer scientist Alan Kay once said. And I couldn’t agree more. That’s probably the biggest difference between my 20s and 40s: perspective. I wish I knew half as much today as I thought I knew 20 years ago.

Below is a list of some of the innovations I’ve experienced over the past 20 years (and I don’t think I’m alone):