Not knowing everything all the time led to more interesting conversations.
On a related note, not having to know literally everything a public person has done before feeling safe to express even the most basic support for their work.
I appreciate the accountability, I don't want to support bad people, but back in the day it was like "I enjoyed that album" and then you went back to living your life. Lack of information made separating the art from the artist the default and it made enjoying new stuff take so much less effort.
And at least half of this is just the fact that these people had less reach and weren’t able to be on TV all the time. Back then the CEO of Sears may have thought trans people were monsters, but he wouldn’t have been pushing it on the news or Twitter every day/week.
I still say I prefer wild conjecture.
Yes, also. More strongly I feel not being able to contact or be contacted, on chronic but varying intervals, gave me a freedom i didn't grasp by then, free from worries or work dependancies. I feel I was more independent and more relying on myself.
The mobile communication tool has became something else.
We could go outside unsupervised.
Which is odd, since not only can you call for help, but crime is way down now
But fear mongering is way way up.
Ironically, it’s much safer now because of all the horrifying things that happened to kids when we were young
I assume if you remember that you're old enough to go outside now unsupervised too.
Not having a camera or tracker up my ass everywhere I went.
Hair metal.
Big concerts with crazy amounts of people and you got a $20 ticket made out of paper that you could save to display in your photo album.
Two sliders in car for heat and air. One for low or fast blowing, one to slide from hot to cold. Why tf do I need a PhD for my AC when I'm trying to drive?
Going outside.
Not having parents and teachers and government bother people constantly about everything. Latch key parents didn't go to jail for neglect, kids grew up with freedom, gov wasn't watching you, and police were not at schools.
Playing video games without the need to sign in, use server, update for a goddamn hour when I only have 45 min to play, and games made for fun rather than cookie cutter eye candy.
Kids got in trouble for tobacco but didn't get criminal charges for it. We also did not get charges for fighting. We got through it. Now parents are in court rooms over stupid normal shit kids do.
People didn't kill each other at schools. Students often had gun racks in the back windows of their vehicles and nobody cared.
Playing video games without the need to sign in, use server, update for a goddamn hour when I only have 45 min to play, and games made for fun rather than cookie cutter eye candy.
Oh I definitely have to wait before I can play games.
I had to go and buy a bunch of CDs to install World of Warcraft because otherwise it would have taken about 6 years on my dial-up internet connection. Then my father would probably have called, broken the download, and I'd have had to have started all over again.
It was such a blessing to not have every aspect of your life monetized by shadowy tech billionaires. I see that now. You could simply exist as a person without worry that something or someone would gather the most intimate details of your existence to sell to the highest bidder so they could better psychologically manipulate your purchasing decisions. If you wanted, you could disappear for a while to recharge in solitude - no cellphone cataloging where you are, no cameras generating records of your movements. Friendships were more solid. These were people like you that sought connection whether it was an activity or common experience. There were whole seasons when you were free to roam about and socialize or not, there was no expectation of you being productive every waking moment. It was a time when science and technology felt exciting - the next new discovery or invention would be something that would improve our lives. Computers were simple by todays standards and were centered around what YOU wanted to do with them, not just a conduit to shovel content to consume. It was an exploratory experience and you felt so accomplished when you got the hang of the interface. I can barely recall the feeling of knowing there was a brighter future ahead of you and that there were others in this world who cared and reached for it too.
Fuck, I'm crying as I write this. I'm mourning a world that no longer exists and can't ever again.
The shared experience of Television and Movies.
Nearly everyone watched The Simpsons, for instance. It was more reliable than Game of Thrones ever was.
More truth and fewer media bubbles. The "WMDs in Iraq" lie was a huge understanding, and not everyone believed it, just enough. Now you can do that more easily with some social media accounts and algorithms. People just choose their own news.
Enjoying music concerts without a sea of cell phone screens blocking my view.
The concept of monoculture.
My car, refrigerator, microwave, TV, etc. not having to have updates or a subscriptions.
Not having to be asked my phone number at every single store checkout.
A lack of cameras everywhere. Plenty of dumb things that happened in my childhood now only live in my memory (and maybe those who were there). There's no video proof of a dumb thing I said or did. I was free to make mistakes.
The freedom to make mistakes honestly. For real that hurts my heart to think about.
Not needing an account to do everything.
You paid at the door, you enjoyed your bowling/concert/etc, you didn't get adverts for the rest of your life.
Nowadays, if the phone rings or if someone knocks on the door, it causes fear and anxiety.
When I was a kid, if the house phone rang or there was a knock at the door, we'd rush to answer in excitement. "the cousins are coming over."
simpler times
The ability to disappear, just go out and come home a few hours later with no one, not even my parents have any way to verify my whereabouts during this time.
I started doing this again. I leave my phone at home and just go out with a bit of cash in my pocket. I bought an mp3 player so I can bring along some music.
Garage sales! Holy shit garage sales used to be so fucking awesome. As a 12-15 year old I scored so much computer stuff dirt cheap at garage sales, along with books and music. Just about every Saturday in the summer you could see me with a box precariously balanced or a shopping bag hanging from my bike's handlebars.
Nowadays everything worth more than a couple bucks goes up on FB marketplace and Kijiji, and the only stuff anyone puts in a garage sale is actual garbage that the thrift stores wouldn't even put on the shelf.
The ability to not be available 24/7 or expected to be. Employers with the advent of cellphones and their ubiquity expect that from you and they can fuck right off.
Play. Actual children's play. I have kids in the house, two sets, one lives with mom most of the time, others live with me. One set has screen limits, the other doesn't. One 10 year old plays with their Legos and one doesn't. Now this could be chalked up to personal differences, but it seems very correlated to me. And I see it clearly when other kids are visiting, less screen time = more creativity and play.
A lot of parents today just hand their kid a tablet when they expect the kid to be bored and leave it at that. Instead of learning to entertain themselves, they learn to sit passively and consume content. It starts young, too - toddlers with tablets with unfettered access to Youtube Kids, sitting back watching Cocomelon or AI kids' slop (it's out there, boy is it out there.)
To those of us who grew up without access to screens at any given time sometimes take issues with it, but not everyone does. There are some kids I work with whose parents explicitly say they don't want their kid watching videos at school. I get it, you want your kid to interact with other people and explore their creativity instead of sitting around watching something - I love that.
Recently a new coworker, much younger than me, asked why some parents don't want their kids watching videos. I was surprised, but I guess I shouldn't be. That coworker probably grew up with screens from an early age. Perhaps she can't fathom the world without it. Either way, the idea that some parents want to limit their kids' screen time was a foreign concept to her, which concerns me somewhat.
Not linked directly to the tech, but generally the thing I miss the most was the optimism. In the 90s people were excited for the future. Crime was trending down, the economy was doing well, the government was paying down the debt, the internet was new and full of wonder. In general there was a push for you to be whatever you wanted to be no matter who you were. The beginning of a lot of breaking down and removing stereotypes and gender norms.
Some of this seems to have reversed, most of it ended on 9/11/2001. That attack killed a lot of the optimism and things line the PATRIOT ACT really put us on the dystopian track we find ourselves on now. Also a lot of the economic boom were from the deregulation that would cause massive problems later...
So, yeah generally I miss the optimism we had.
Greater intentionality in mundane things. Wanted to go somewhere? Mark it on the map. Photos? You only have so much film left. Trying to remember a phone number, address, passcode, note? 9 times out of 10, you'd write it down and carry it with you.
Smartphones are a technological miracle but we lost a lot of intention through the convenience, which has pros and cons.
I miss not experiencing the pressure to be always available. To always respond.
If you were out of the house and someone wanted you they waited until you got home. If it was a true emergency, they could figure out the phone number to wherever you were, maybe, but short of that? You wouldn't be bothered.
There was also a level of spontaneity I miss where you might drive looking for a place to eat and just stop at the first place that looked good. Or you were going somewhere specific but you just drive to the general area and look for a sign.
I delivered pizza using a map of my city and I got real familiar with how roads worked.
You had to make plans in advance and stick to them.
I miss being able to make embarrassing mistakes without the risk of it being recorded and shared with the world. It's not even that I make a lot of them, or that anyone would care, I just hate the principle that anything could potentially be used against you. It's more that the threat itself takes the enjoyment out of being outside, like everyone has to be so guarded and fake all the time.
The first time I saw this was in the early days of YouTube and smart phones, some kids had found a video of a teacher who was peer pressured by some people into very shyly singing a popular song, which they put on YouTube. After that nobody took him seriously anymore.
Note: this is for actual small silly things only, the kind that can happen to anyone. I absolutely do not support people who try to excuse their crimes, harassment or bigotry as "it was just an embarrassing mistake when I was young haha", that sort of thing absolutely should be used against them later.
It can't be overstated how basic tasks or minor inconveniences would turn into multi-day quests.
Tons of movies spin up a whole plot based on a car breaking down and it'll be a week before the part can get there. Or trying to find the one guy that knows about the thing you need to know about, because he has the right book that the library doesnt have. It was an easy way to meet interesting people and learn stuff.
What I don't miss is even looking for a basic thing that's out of stock and calling 7 stores asking "hi, do you have _____ right now? No? OK, thanks." Then calling back the next week.
Hide and go seek tag with all the kids in the neighborhood at dusk.
Summer holidays as a kid. Endless summer days - and the days were long too (it didn't get dark until 10 at night) - with nothing to do but play with friends. I grew up in rural SW Scotland, so we had woods, forests, beaches, hills, rivers, streams, farmland etc. at our disposal. Our parents were all at work so we had total freedom - as long as we were home in time for dinner we'd be good. Our bikes were everything, we'd meet up and decide what we were going to do and where we were going to go. Sometimes it would be someone's house for video games (Commodore 64 or Spectrum), or building a camp in the woods, or fishing at a stream up in the Galloway Forest, or cycling to the nearest beach and swimming in the warm sea.
Fucking idyllic, but that world is gone.
Pain free joints.
Honestly very little. I hated the lack of choices for TV/Radio, being forced to watch/listen to what ever the stations decided everyone must. The limited news telling whatever biases the state wanted pushed. The limited social views and lack of represented diversity. For someone who didn't fit in with mainstream society, in a small town with limited options, it was very alienating being forced to conform to the same as everyone else.
I guess if I had to pick one thing I liked, it was going to the video store and renting a game and playing it for a weekend because I didn't have anything else, even if it was a bad game I still got a lot value out of it.
So I liked the limited choices I could make, but I didn't like the decisions made for me.
Being a child with relatively little responsibility
Having face to face conversations with my friends after playing on the streets. Getting bored because there was nothing to do or to watch on TV. Time used to pass real slowly back then. I miss that.
I miss people writing essays by doing research rather than creating click bait posts on social media and expecting the world to fill in the blanks for them.
Being excited to tell your friend something tomorrow, maybe even next week. (Still can do that, but it's less common)
Similar, but not feeling the pressure of being constantly accessible to anyone.
I traveled to Japan without knowing anything about the language or address system. I was well and truly lost. Upon landing, I had the address of my hotel and knew what subway station I needed to get to, but the numbers on the buildings made absolutely no sense to me. They did not continue by linear means.
It was amazing.
I felt like I was truly in another world. Like I was on an adventure in a video game and had a puzzle I needed to solve. I found a little police hut and asked for help by showing them the address and looking confused. They gave me a map with hand drawn directions. I still have it.
You could probably still do this but just turning off your phone, but I feel like society is different now and people are more likely to wonder why you aren't using it.
Those before what? For you it feels likethere was a “before" and a now, but for me (54 years old) it feels like continuity. So many people keep asking this question, or promoting some pseudo “better before” era, that I’m starting to wonder if the world didn’t just wake up dumb.When cellphones didn’t exist, the idea of a cellphone‑based world didn’t even occur to us...except in science fiction. Now that I have a smartphone, I’m just glad I can video‑call my kid, buy groceries online while I’m on the road, and get home to cook. There’s nothing “better” or “worse.” Rude people always existed. In my time, you’d walk into a room, say hello, and there was always that one guy who wouldn’t even lift his eyes from his sports magazine.
My son is about to be 13, doesnt have his own phone, hardly plays video games, and often doesnt watch Tv instead chooses to play outside.
He finally found a kid in the neighborhood who also isnt screen addicted and its so nice to see them play. Shortly after school hours, you see either my son or the other kid start circling on their bike waiting for the other kid to come out. Then they play outdoors for hours. They come home from their neighborhood adventures sometimes covered in mud, with new scrapes and out of breath from running and playing. I love it! I love to hear them laughing and enjoying their time, I love that they are learning social skills, figuring out who they are, while not comparing themselves to what they see on the internet. It's fantastic.
Recently a teacher was taken aback when said he didnt have a phone (he uses mine to text friends) and I scoffed a bit inside with pride. My kid has healthy self esteeme and makes friends everywhere he goes. It brings me a lot of joy to see him thrive in this way, hes begining to learn independence and idk, I love it for him.
Being outside until the street lights come on. The neighborhood ice cream truck that came routinely. Aspects of life that weren't mined and extracted for shareholder profit.
The good:
The bad:
I'm sure there's more that will come to me later.
you could absolutely buy singles of songs if you wanted (I would usually buy my singles on cassette cause they were way cheaper), however it was usually more cost effective to buy the whole album. (if you liked the artist and wanted to take the risk)
usually listening to the entire album a few times will get you some pretty decent songs and it meant you got to take time to really appreciate what you had to listen to. also I found that my enjoyment of stuff would change every listen.
the best case scenario is you bought an album and every single song was a banger. and you just don't get that anymore because you have access to everything all the time. so its much easier to just hit the skip button nowadays.
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