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13 Struggles From 2005 That Today's Teens Will Never Know

So many devices, so few pockets. And other ways life is better now than a decade ago.

Great. You lost your selfie stick, Spotify ate through your mobile data and your favorite BitMoji has been taken away and replaced with some totally lame one. Believe it or not, this isn't even the hardest life has been.

It may seem but a faint memory now, but you have already survived a time of major hardship and struggle -- a decade ago. It was a time when Tom Cruise was jumping on couches, YOLO sounded like a brand of frozen yogurt, and life had some major inconveniences:

Our phones were not that smart

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DoCoMo Introduces New Cellular Phone

Sure, we were glued to our Sidekicks and "Crackberries" -- because LOL, as if we were going to miss an AOL IM from our BFF -- but the internet was slow, the images never loaded right and "apps" were things we ordered before dinner.

If we wanted a cab, we had to hail one ourselves

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Without ridesharing apps like Lyft or Uber, we either had to find cabs on the street or call some 800 number and hope there was no busy signal (which there always was). Then hope that the cab actually showed up. Then hope that we had cash. Then hope someone would just find a way to let our phones do all of this for us.

Listening to music in the car required a cassette adapter thingy

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Some fancy people had cars that came standard with an aux input, but most of us had to connect our iPods by way of a tape adaptor that often had a working life of about two and a half weeks. When it broke, we had to listen to (gasp!) CDs until we had time to go buy a new one.

We were constantly trying to figure out WTF was going on on "Lost"

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Were they dead? Was this a dream? Seriously, what was the deal with that polar bear?

This mind-bending sci-fi drama would continue to haunt and perplex us for five additional seasons, but for now, we were just trying to make sense of every bizarre clue and flashback while simultaneously dealing with our newfound fear of flying.

We had to agonize over who was in our "Top 8"

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Facebook had just started, and was only being used by a small number of college students. Instagram and Twitter were but gleams in their programmers' eyes. For most of us, our social networking fix had to be found on MySpace, where we constantly worried about offending one of our friends by not ranking them highly enough in our "Top 8." (Or we were the offended friend who had been relegated to "Bottom Everyone Else" status.)

We couldn't eat a sandwich in peace without getting an earful on how evil carbs are

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The Atkins craze was in full effect, and everyone was pounding steaks and hamburger patties in the name of good health. Every sandwich place started offering low-carb wraps, and we all secretly wondered when we were going to just be able to enjoy potato chips again.

Flying meant going through Wi-Fi withdrawals

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Watching live games or gchatting with friends was not always par for the course at 30,000 feet. In fact, there was a time when air travel meant multiple torturous hours of lousy snacks and severe FOMO as we wondered what our earthbound buddies were doing. (At least the snacks were free then.)

We had to keep track of which rubber bracelet stood for which cause

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Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby UK Premiere - Arrivals

It all started with Lance Armstrong's yellow Livestrong bracelets and quickly escalated into a rubber bracelet bonanza. We covered our wrists in a rainbow of colors that stood for everything from cancer awareness to the environment to the fact that our friend gave us a really cool tie-dyed one.

Banks could charge INSANE overdraft fees for tiny purchases

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Before the Overdraft Protection Act of 2013, we were frequently charged money for ... uh ... not having money. It didn't make sense then, either.

We were all terrified of the bird flu

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It sounded like some kind of nightmarish episode of "The Twilight Zone," but H1N5 was a global epidemic that some newspapers politely warned "could kill 150 million people." We all tried to forget our worries by blasting "Hollaback Girl," for the umpteenth time, but at the end of the day, we still kind of wondered if we should invest in one of those surgical masks.

We had to pretend like we weren't all online dating

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In the days before "Tindering" was a verb, online dating had a stigma to it and was looked down on as something that only desperate people did. Of course, we were all constantly checking our inboxes and updating our profile pics, but if we did successfully find a mate online, we had to make up some lame story about how we met, or risked facing shame from our family and friends.

We were shocked to say goodbye to Dumbledore

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A Tour Of The Set Of Harry Potter

"Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince," had just been released, and we tore through it in record time -- only to find that the book ended with one of our favorite characters being killed off. To make matters worse, we knew there was only one more Harry Potter book coming, which meant soon we'd be leaving Hogwarts for good. Why, oh why, couldn't Time-Turners be a real thing?

Miley Cyrus wasn't famous yet

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Ron Galella Archive - File Photos

Forget Miley's amazing Instagram stunts or forever dangling tongue. We were still a year away from the premiere of "Hannah Montana," which meant that we didn't have Miley in any way, shape or form. Luckily, she was about to come into the world of pop culture like a wrecking ball.

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