Ask Lemmy

One of the things I miss the most about the 1900s is that people didn't expect you to be reachable 24/7. Even though cellphones had been around since the 80s very few people had one. That meant that most people could only be reached through the family landline. If you didn't answer people would just assume you were out of the house, thus unreachable. That all started to change in the 2000s when cellphones became common place. Now days I feel like everyone expects me to pick up when they call, and if I don't they expect a better excuse than "I don't feel like talking right now." As a very introverted person who often needs a lot of alone time, it sucks, and sometimes I really wish I could go back to a world without cellphones.

Instead of doomscrolling, I read the newspaper. Having to go out and get it was a nice little nudge towards sociability.

I would hang out at a cafe in the city, reading and having coffee, and inevitably, someone I knew would come along and have a chat, maybe get a cuppa, tell me about something crazy, etc. Like a group chat in real life. We would never really organise to meet there, you would just turn up if you felt like it.

The paper itself being curated was good, too, because while it was definitely skewed by its corporate masters, or the inclinations of its editor, the stories had more time to be well-written and well-sourced within those constraints.

With experience, you could read between the lines to infer what wasn't being said, or know that something was missing and to check by other sources. Since everyone else was reading similar things, you could sometimes talk about the issues in more depth, without having to explain the basic facts.

Oh, and most people agreed on those basic facts.

Also, people were casually racist and sexist and bigoted, and lots of things we care about today were not even acknowledged by the majority as being problems.

A friend of mine got gaybashed (there's a term you might need to look up, hopefully) and it was like he'd just suffered an accident. People just shook their heads and muttered sympathies, like it was an inevitable result of being gay in public, instead of a brutal fucking hate crime. That sort of thing didn't even make the news unless the guy died.

Quick on the bathroom note... Meeting groups was wild. "Okay, everyone's gonna be at the food court at 2." And if you didn't make it we'd hang out and wait until the group decided you'd died or something and we'd hear about it in school in a couple of days.

Also, getting loser drunk in front of your friends was a learning experience, not a thing that would circle the school forever in video form.

I was wearing an onion for a belt, as was the fashion at the time.

We can’t bust heads like we used to, but we have our ways. One trick is to tell them stories that don’t go anywhere, like the time I caught the ferry over to Shelbyville. I needed a new heel for my shoe, so, I decided to go to Morganville, which is what they call Shelbyville in those days, so I tied an onion to my belt, which was the style at the time. So, to take the ferry cost a nickel, and in those days, nickels had pictures of bumblebees on ‘em. Give me five bees for a quarter you’d say. Now where were we? Oh yeah! The important thing was I had an onion on my belt, which was the style at the time. They didn’t have white onions, because of the war. The only thing you could was those big yellow ones.

It was just easier. I grew up after the Vietnam war and before the gulf one.

There was more help for people from the government. There was more freedom in daily life.living was easier. A 17year old could get a roommate and support themselves living independently working part time at fast food places. Simply having a job was enough to live.

There was a difference between being poor and being in poverty.

College was something you could get a job and work through with minimal debt.

Computers were just getting popular when I was young and it was easy to get a job based On what would now be basic technical skills.

The internet made noises and was crunchy.

People still struggled but I was easier for my generation than it is for the current kids.

Model 1964 human here.. Life in the past was a lot more free if you were a kid.

After school we'd be out the door with rocket boosters on and not come back inside until it got dark. Parents didn't know where we were, and usually didn't care as long as we did not get into trouble.

Rode bikes everywhere and played at the parks or would go to friends houses that had color TVs and watch afternoon cartoons. The closest we'd got to electronics would be a small AM/FM transistor radio. (If you got one of those, you were super lucky! I had this model.)

If you got 50 cents from the parents you were set for the day. Could get a can of Coke and a candy bar.

For the grownups, politics could be just as harrowing, Vietnam was a super hot topic and as kids, yeah you'd see lots of fucked up vets..

It's easy to look back and say "Ah, the good old days.." esp. if you were a kid - since mom and dad were doing the heavy lifting, but things were slower and the speed of stuff today seems to be down to the fact that people do not understand that they CAN slow down.

When we got internet in 1999, we bailed on the cable TV - having both was too costly. In the 27 years we're not had a TV (attached to cable service - I do game on a 50-inch 4k WalMart special (not-so) smart TV..) it's been a real show, watching friends and family get sucked up and into the maw of the mainstream media. Shit's poison.

You really want to slow down and touch grass, kick as much of the commercial-driven media as you can, to the curb.

I walked to school uphill, both ways, perpetual blizzard.

People went crazy with lead poisoning, lots of serial killers, but kids also roamed the streets like feral cats far past sun down and our parents never knew where we were.

Y2K ended the world and we all live in a simulation now as biological batteries for our AI overlords.

You could afford to support a family of 5 on 1 income of a grade 10 dropout though. And Big Macs were like $1.50.

I was mid-late teens when the internet started to become widespread. I didn't like the idea, had a bad feeling about it. Then I relaxed a bit and the more I used it, became comfortable with it.

Social media is what I was initially worried about, though I wouldn't have been able to know it back then. I"d want the pre-internet world back if I had one wish.

People were generally more respectful and forgiving to one another. There was a sense of we're in this together that has steadily eroded. We had our problems mind you, but I was sure my generation and I would make things better. By and large the only people saying everything's fucked were the "end is nigh" crazies in the streets.

Maybe my perspective was just more idealistic back then (excluding the internet), and the world was just as grim as it seems today.

But having college graduates reject AI--that gives me a little hope.

It was always fun calling your friends house on the land line and their dad picks up. You sheepishly ask if your friend is home and immediately hear their name shouted across their house through the phone.

Mid of the 80s in Europe.

When I was in primary school a corruption scandal wiped out our political class and this gave us 20 years of tycoonism.

Older-ish millennial here. We got just a taste of the 'fuck around' era, enough to mourn its loss and really appreciate how increasingly miserable the 'find out' era we live in today really is.

Before video games and cable TV, I read a lot of books. I can remember reading Call of the Wild and White Fang in elementary school, "childrens" classics like Tom Sawyer, Robinson Crusoe, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, 20000 Leagues. Encyclopaedia Brown was a favourite childrens series of mine.

late 80s here. We had a nice world before 9/11. there was hope.

You think of something you'd like to know. You check your encyclopedia set but it's not in there. Now you just can't know that thing. You make a mental note of it for the next time you're in a library, which you later forget. If you're feeling extra adventurous you ask Billy Bob down the street if he knows. Invariably he passes along some bullshit he heard someone say once.

People were a lot less emotionally literate or aware of mental health issues. Autism and ADHD went undiagnosed if you were able to compensate half decently (you were just treated like you were being difficult on purpose). And kids were more brutal to each other.

The music was on point, though. I still enjoy me some Goldfinger.

It was the free-est, most affordable, and happiest days that the world will be in my lifetime.

The Internet was slow and weird (in a good way).

The food wasn't great.

And the music was distressingly square.

I had a bike that I would ride on the side of the highway to get to town and spend the $8 I got for my allowance on some soda and whatever toy struck my fancy at the Eckerds. Sometimes my parents would let me rent a video game from the Blockbuster, which would always be Chrono Trigger. On Friday nights we would go to Pizza Hut and I would get a plastic cup that was a tie in to whatever kids movie was out at the time. Usually I'd have some Book-it stars to turn in to get my free personal pan pizza, which was always pepperoni.

There always seemed to be a fair at the fairgrounds. When I was old enough, I started working the parking lot in exchange for a free ride bracelet, and then I'd go in and ride The Zipper till I puked up my nachos. My friends would all meet me there, though we had no way to communicate where we'd be, we always found each other. Sometimes there would be a girl I liked, and I'd walk next to her and make small talk and that would be good enough.

I didn't watch a lot of TV. Sometimes a show like Sliders would come along and the family would all settle in to watch it, but for the most part, visual entertainment wasn't a big part of my life. There were free weekends where you'd get premium channels like HBO or Showtime and I would use blank VHSs to record movies. Some of them had 8 hours worth of recording time on them, so you'd have to label them with really small writing so you could read Captain Ron, Ghostbusters II, Backdraft, and Power Rangers Movie. I read more than I watched, and I played outside more than inside. Goosebumps and Animorphs over The Hardy Boys and The Babysitters Club. Encyclopedia Brown is still the goat, though.

The Florida summers were hot, and the winter's temperate. I wore shorts with cargo pockets because no one really cared, and I could carry extra stuff that I always seemed to have a reason to drag around.

Church was something you did because it's what you did, but no one really took it that seriously. That would change in my teens, but for most of my childhood it was really just something to do on a Sunday to have an excuse to socialize. I used to volunteer to clean up after the whole bread and wine thing we did once a quarter because the bread was fresh and the wine was welch's grape juice, and I could eat all of the bread and drink all of the juice. My pastor liked black people.

We had swimming classes, which were put on by professionals that, when I look back on it, were probably 16 year old kids with their lifeguard permits. I remember someone jumped into the pool and landed on a girl that was swimming under the water, and her collarbone broke. That was the only time those 16 year olds were put to the test. We just kept swimming while Christine was taken to the hospital.

All in all, it was different, but the same. I have good memories, and bad, and some that make me feel a certain kinda way. I don't wish I could go back, but I'm happy I got to enjoy them the first time around.

I'm seeing a lot of nostalgia glasses here so just going to say some things were markedly worse (90s perspective): it was much harder to verify information whether that be for scientific research (the hole in the ozone layer was a big one at the time), directions, movie/game reviews or even geopolitical situations

The smell of vehicle exhaust was more common as many vehicles on the road predated the requirements of catalytic converters and you can bet there were a lot more people who would claim seat belts are more dangerous because they can trap you in a drowning vehicle (no matter how far inland they lived)

Buying batteries on a regular basis from the grocery store was a normal occurrence as rechargeable ones were either prohibitively expensive, unavailable or had iffy chargers and you needed them for a lot of stuff smartphones do today: clocks, answering machines, CD/cassette players, etc

Answering machines (though largely digitized by the late 90s) generally required tiny tapes to record voicemails while vacuums almost always required bags. Neither were large expenses but both were recurring as was using payphones but that's a topic unto itself

There was a monoculture that we took for granted which I feel was both the best and worse part. Basically all your classmates and coworkers likely watched the same shows/movies as you which legitimately helped the community bond as a whole but those shows seldom challenged (or even could challenge) the status quo with "dangerous ideas" like same sex parents or non-white superheroes but I'm not gonna pretend I don't miss the phenomenon of people excitedly going "hey, did you see Friends last night?" or the energy of Pokemania

I'm not trying to say it was strictly better or worse but the rise of the internet, smart phones, rechargeable batteries and widespread adoption of international standards (USB, various EU policies, Bluetooth) undoubtedly democratized many things previously held behind gatekeepers

Sometimes those gatekeepers were legitimately excellent at their craft, sometimes they were out of touch, sometimes they were manipulating the lack of info gathering tools at the time, or even (often) some combination of the three but that friction between us and the next piece of media made it easier to appreciate the 15th rewatch of The Mask on VHS while simultaneously helping to enforce the college textbook scam so well-known today

Most people you'd meet in real life were still jerks, but there was less existential dread. It was more "you win some, you lose some" and less "humanity is doomed and the human condition is irredeemable."

Products were designed to last.

Most of the people you'd chat with on the internet were curious, benevolent nerds, not narcissistic political hacks.

We walked to school in the snow. Uphill. Both ways!
Now get off my lawn!

Jokes aside, I think one thing we had pretty good was not having to live in constant fear of every stupid thing we did likely being put online immediately. And there not being an "online" where your mistakes would haunt you forever. I did a lot of stupid stuff in my late teens and early 20's. And there is thankfully very little evidence of any of it. Kids these days don't often have that luxury. We're all young and stupid at some point. As you get older, that stupid stuff should be something you and your friends laugh about over beers, not something you fear a current employer is going to find at the top of the results when they google your name.

That said, the easy access to media and information is insanely cool. If I want to learn about the mating habits of marmosets, there is likely an in-depth Wikipedia article with way, way too much information. And it's likely up to date and well edited. Compare that to whatever blurb might be in the encyclopedias at your local or school library, plus anything you could dig out of the periodicals and microfiche, and it's not even in the same universe of information availability. Sure, there's a lot more to sift through online. And it's getting easier and easier to get lost in a sea of misinformation. But, you still stand a much better chance today of finding more, faster, than what we had back then. It's funny to think back about instructors making a big deal about not using Wikipedia when it first came out. Now, it's likely recommended as the first stop in researching something.

Also, I have a fucking computer in my pocket with more processing power than the entire world had available when we sent men to the moon. And I can use that computer to communicate with nearly anyone in the world instantaneously. And that computer can access that insane wealth of knowledge I just mentioned above. Again, almost instantly, from most places I am likely to be. I can be taking a shit in the woods and reading up on marmosets fucking while chatting with someone shitting on Twitter. It's the goddamn future over here.

Books and CDs/casettes were much more important and impressive. Kind of like magical in a way. You can say they still are, but imo it's not the same. Back then you had to buy them or risk forever losing that piece of media. You liked two songs but you got the whole CD anyway, you got that book just in case and if you were into collecting images you would buy loads, on stuff you didn't even care about, just because the photos were interesting.

Video rental places had an energy similar to a candy shop. You wanted to taste all of them.

In a way all those media now feel maybe valuable, collectible, but not really essential. They aren't as special anymore. I think it's easy to imagine what it was like but if you didn't live through it you wouldn't fully get it, it's like explaining doing drugs or giving birth, one of those things that you can easily understand logically but only when you experience it you grasp the concept entirely. Crazy to think that probably most things from our cultural past are exactly like that and no matter how much we study them we will never truly understand them.

Analog. I didn't have the internet until my last year of college (and i didn't have a celphone until 2013). I grew up completely outside. My parents had no idea where i was until the sun went down...every day. I spent my childhood skateboarding, and wasn't allowed to play videogames, or eat at McDonalds.

We all wore onions on our belts, which was the style at the time.

More srsly by the 1990s we were about as internet addicted as we are now. There just weren't smartphones, so you were offline when you went out of the house away from your computer. You usually did have a voice cell phone, initially analog (AMPS) but later digital with SMS messages. Also, when you were online, the web didn't suck as badly as it does now. There was less bandwidth for megabytes of javascript bloat, etc.

For the US, my experience:

• Way more smoking (which people also mentioned last time this was asked). Cigarette butts everywhere.

• Government was more dignified.

• Houses were smaller.

• Cars were smaller. And more colorful -- the last decade or so has really favored colors between white and black. Oh, and a wider variety of interior upholstery.

• Telecommunications were much more expensive.

• People smashed trees into pulp, bleached it, rolled it into sheets, and then put their messages on them.

• Libraries were more important.

• Store selection was way, way more limited, and if you lived somewhere rural, even more so. Amazon and similar let you have anything delivered anywhere today.

• I kinda miss some of the styles, like 1980s denim jackets, but there were also things that I disliked compared to today. Oh, yoga pants were not typically worn in public. Or flannel pajamas pants

that seems to be a thing where I am now. If you were female, you were a lot more likely to be waring a skirt or dress than today. Clothing was more formal, in general.

• On that note, the necktie was still a thing. It's pretty dead today.

• Carpeting in houses was more popular.

• People spent a lot more time staring at the TV, which I think is a lot more mindless than Internet use today. Oh, and you had far fewer channels than you do on a TV today.

• Lighting was yellower, because of the use of incandescents. Nighttime in houses was darker and yellower.

• The logistics of communication and navigation were more complicated without GPS-equipped smartphones. One typically kept maps in the car. Asking for directions was a thing. You might even have a car compass. Finding payphones was a thing.

• Much less omnipresent surveillance, like the security cameras and automated license plate readers of today.

• If you had a computer, it was much more likely not to be connected to a network, so software couldn't rely on network access. It couldn't phone home or transmit information about you.

• Video games were much less mainstream, especially before the 1990s. Not many adults playing them.

• Way more handwriting done. The fancy pen was more of a thing.

• Flashlights and penlights were more prominent, since everyone wasn't carrying a smartphone that could act as a flashlight.

• I'd say that probably the majority of people wore a wristwatch.

• Computers were much more expensive than they are today, and became obsolete far faster. The rate of computation speed increased such that about every 18 months, computers ran software twice as fast as before. This has a huge impact on other industries, since that constantly made new things viable.

• Lots of devices with disposable batteries.

• Dedicated portable music players with far less battery life were much more common. You carried around much less music.

• Cars, IMHO, looked more interesting. Certainly more varied. Mileage was worse.

• You certainly didn't omit spare tires in cars. Much harder to get roadside assistance.

• I'd say that woodworking skills were more common. A lot of guys could and would do basic projects.

• People spent more time outdoors.

• People were thinner.

• Motor noise was more obnoxious along roads. Cars are quieter today.

• Airline security was way less obnoxious. Didn't have all the security screening stuff that 9/11 spawned. Air travel was more expensive.

• More casual conversations with strangers that one sat near, I'd say. Smartphones severely degraded the custom of chatting with strangers.

• Magazines and newspapers were much more common.

I was five.

Get offa my lawn

Better in a lot of ways

Imagine life with no internet, no cell phones, and personal computers were both very rare and very few people knew how to use them.

It sucked ass!