Asklemmy

How do you deal with the uncertainty if the money you saved for retirement will be enough for the rest of your life? What if you're 95 and you run out of money? It's not like you can go back to work or take out a loan etc.

I guess my question for those older than me is: before computers, how did you learn to do something?

Um, we used textbooks, or RTFM

Old person here.

before computers, how did you learn to do something?

Books! and People! And while they wouldn't give you endless answers to every trivial thing you wanted to know, you could call the library to ask a question for them to look up for you.

was a constraint lifted

Maybe, but not really. I think people talked and shared more. If you were in the midwest, you'd never eaten Thai, Japanese, Ethiopian, or even Lebanese food, and it wasn't available. The ingredients weren't available, either, so you weren't going to learn to cook it from scratch. Even if you had a cook book. By the 1990s, I had an Americanized Thai cook book with substitutions for some things. Now I can get everything from fish sauce to harrissa paste at local stores. That was more important than access to recipes. Also, there were strange recipes in the 70s -- like Watergate Cake and Chex Mix (which you had to make at home and always had nuts), and all kinds of jello 'salads'.

Was life more simple

Yes. I gather this was true prior to the 70s/80s I remember, but simplicity came from vetted curators. If you bought name brand things, they would work and last a long time. "No one was ever fired for buying IBM." -- because their stuff worked. Same for GE, Kodak, Pyrex, Whirlpool, and so on. Not anymore. I'm pretty sure everyone is working to make the cheapest possible version of everything now, so figuring out what version of a thing to get is much harder, and you can't trust that online reviews aren't paid advertising.

We believed experts, and called out liars. We knew people who'd had polio harm their families, so we got vaccines because they obviously worked better than 'healthy living'. For things like music, you knew which critics had your tastes, and could trust their suggestions for what to hear were spot-on. They got a decent salary for their dedication and you supported that by buying their publications. Enjoy rock? Maybe Robert Christgau was your guy, or maybe Lester Bangs, but both would give you an entertaining read with solid recommendations. It was WAY better than algorithms.

Further: while there is much wrong with the studio system, the cost of getting a record pressed meant we were not flooded with the volume of bad, under produced junk that litters the music world today. There would be no "Sgt. Pepper's" without a LOT of studio work. Also, there was a glorious heyday of FM radio before it got the same commercialization as AM where you DJs (especially the late night ones) would make interesting set lists that we all heard together over the airwaves.

All that said, moving to internet searches was easy, but the results feel fractured. We all read the same newspapers, and generally believed them, knowing each had some biases and we never had every detail. We might have different opinions, but we had the same facts. I remember reading a book on raising ducks and accidentally learned that their chromosomes are not X/Y, but Z/w (boys are ZZ and girls Zw). I did not expect to learn that. A search for 'raising ducks' generally doesn't mention that, and a search for duck sex traits doesn't bring up raising them. Knowledge ran deeper, if more slow.

To sum up: Yeah, the internet is nice, but I miss feeling like we all share the same world.

I just went to libraries and asked my friends for information.

By the way, the internet didn't suddenly become filled with all the knowledge in the world. The first internet pages were like personal blogs filled with not-so-useful information. In those days, the internet was similar to today's darknet. Google was just starting out, and there was no search engine as such. As a result, people just shared websites with each other. The current internet is the result of millions of people's efforts to fill it with information. So, having access to the internet didn't change my life overnight.

But we used to buy collections of websites and data on CDs when CD-ROMs first became available, and that was pretty fun.

UPD: and at some point, people started exchanging data through modem calls, and that's how fidonet was born. It was a whole cultural layer where you could get an address and slowly receive newsletters and exchange data through late-night calls to sisops. It was like a prehistoric torrent, but instead of pirating, you were exchanging data.

I'm just short of 50 and can probably give some answers to those questions. I'm sure there are folks even older who can go deeper.

before computers, how did you learn to do something?

Books and other people. My father taught me a lot of basics around home improvement. I spent several years in auto-shop in high-school. I used to read a lot of things, just to satisfy my curiosity. Honestly though, the internet has made this sort of thing much easier. You're far more likely to find information on what you want to learn. However, you're also able to find a lot of bad information. And most of social media was a bad idea.

Did access to knowledge change your life, was a constraint lifted when you no longer depended on having found the right books or people to learn tips on how to cook a new dish, or how to fix a plumbing problem, or how to plant a garden?

Can't say it "changed my life", but it's certainly a much better situation. Though I will say that the internet and easy access to information is still no substitute to having someone on hand to teach you for many subjects. Just the ability to ask questions and get immediate feedback is invaluable. Especially when analyzing your screw-ups. Having someone there to talk though what you did right and what you did wrong and how to avoid those mistakes in the future just can't (currently) be replicated by Youtube videos. Still, I'd much rather have the internet than not.

Was life more simple, did you have fewer problems to solve without technology in your life, or did technology make life easier?

It's a mixed bag. Part of the "life was simpler" is just the rose colored glasses of nostalgia. There wasn't the constant barrage of information and distractions. However, if your local library didn't have the books you were looking for, you were up a creek. At the same time, I think there was more opportunity to fix things and tinker. When toys, bicycles and cars aren't 90% semiconductors, you can actually pull out a set of hand tools and fix a lot of stuff yourself. On the down side, being a nerd or just being different led to a lot of bullying, with most authority figures basically telling you to "suck it up". Not that I'd condone it, but I sort of understand why some kids turned to violence. So, as I said, a mixed bag.

Oh and adjacent to the access to information, the access to stuff is still kinda amazing. Sure, it's easy to hate Bezos and Amazon. But, the fact that I can click on an item on the internet and it shows up at my door a couple days later is fucking amazing! I would ride my bicycle to the hobby store and hope they had any interesting D&D books. One time, I even got the owner to special order a book for me, which was a bit of a disaster. It's really hard to explain how fantastic it is to just pick a random item out of millions and it just fucking shows up in days. Like, what even is this magic?

TV watching is also so, so much better. While I do sorta miss the Saturday Morning Cartoons ritual, I like not having to time my life around network schedules or setup a VCR timer and hope it works correctly this time.

So ya, overall I think things are better now. I'm just waiting for all that really cool tech like cybernetics and flying cars which is supposed to show up in the distant future of 2020.

What's your favourite LP?

What did Reagan smell like?

I'd ask if things get better, but I don't know if I want to know the answer.

This question kinda of erks me, cuz this a geographical specific question. Most of the world technological progress was slower than the US and adjacent countries, especially in developing countries, so by the time everyone their internet, we still had those old CRT TV and flat screen were for the ultra rich.

About the looking about stuff, even tho I was born in 2000s, we didn't have internet/a home PC until 2013, before then you would either ask a teacher or a family member who specialise in that field, if its not your parent first. Contrary to popular, library are not that common outside the US and mainly in Universities. Really, this how most ppl are the world looked up stuff, just us around.