The 90s was the last good decade.

Slower computers, slower internet, and you had to record shows to skip ads. On the plus side, video games and consoles would actually get cheaper over time. So that was nice.

Born in 1979. I've seen rotary phones, touch tone phones, cordless phones, pagers cellphones, PC computing pre windows (DOS anyone,) floppy discs (they didn't just used to be a save icon,) the internet before the internet when it was just hyperboards you dialed up manually and then put the receiver into a baud modem, cassette tapes, CDs, MP3s and ipods, car windows that had to be manually rolled down. I had a TV where you had to get up and manually change the channel.

I'm in that weird space where I could be a millenial, or could be gen x. I was a latch key kid and had no parental supervision. As an 9 year old, I came home from school and cared for my 4 y/o sister. We played outside, in the street, we walked to the park. I'd ride my bike and put my sister on the seat and we would go get ice cream, or go to the comic shop. It was normal to just be a kid doing your own thing and for your parents to have no idea where you were or how to contact you.

If you didn't know where you were going, you had to purchase a map/atlas and learn how to read it to get directions.

I lived through the contra scandal/Iraq Iran war, the war on drugs, desert storm, the war on terror, and whatever the fuck this new Iran straight of hormuz war is. I've seen lived through lots of genocide, (I'm not a victim, just got to see it play out in the news;) Sabra and Shatila massacre, Anfal campaign, Isaaq genocide (somali), Bosnian genocide, Rwandan genocide, Massacres of Hutus during the First Congo War, DRC and ethnic cleansing of Pygmies from the Congo's eastern region, Darfur genocide (2003–2005), Yazidi genocide, Ukrainian genocide (via Russia and still ongoing,) Persecution of Uyghurs in China, Rohingya genocide, and Gaza genocide. We have always been at war.

Pre-internet, there was tons of news you would never hear of, or if you did you got the propaganda version because there was no way to access the facts. The newspaper and TV news were still considered reputable. Now with smartphones and cameras everywhere, people can share information with each other directly and we can all call bullshit on misreporting and propaganda, for all the good it does.

Life was hard then, and it's hard now. It's just hard in different ways.

Anyone born in the 1900's would be at least 117. You'll struggle to find anyone from back then.

This might be the worst possible way to get a genuine feel for what life was like. For whom?

Industrialization and telephones were ubiquitous. We'd witness the rise of automobiles, flight, antibiotics, DNA, nuclear power, computers, space exploration...

A massive shift towards urbanization. Life expectancy jumped up. Migration took off. Society became more consolidated, diverse, and aged.

Human rights started getting more institutionalized. Civil rights and feminist movements made great gains. Globalism and mass consumer culture similarly boomed.

A great depression and two world wars generated a sense of unity from people coming together to get through hard times and overcome common enemies, but it deteriorated quickly under the pressure of rapidly shifting cultures and lifestyles.

A person's experience of this depends on a lot. People in different demographics would have drastically different stories to tell.

Imho the best way to get a broad feel is to track the technology. People were able to call each other, travel long distances with relative ease, get effective medicine for common maladies, and pop into the corner store to buy handy items.

But it was a lot harder to access information generally, and a lot less was available before everyone was carrying around gps enabled cameras all the time. It was a lot easier to believe in urban legends and a lot harder to understand how advanced technology worked.

To counteract all the rose colored glasses looking back decades and the doom and gloom now …….

We also had the Cold War. Mutually Assured Destruction. And you never knew whether anyone would be M.A.D. Enough to end the world. Later on we found out they were, and at least one time the world didn’t end because of a Russian specialist disobeying launch orders

there was no expectation to be constantly immediately available. you didn't have the world at your fingertips, so there was no pressure to immediately resolve all situations.

it was nice. slower. less pressure.

oh and the lower level of blatant exploitation and theft by mega corps and the uber wealthy was nice. not good enough still, but better than now

I was born in 1999 and am therefore completely qualified to talk about life in the 1900s. It was a lot of milk drinking and shitting in diapers.

I was born in the late 70s so I can comment on the 80s onwards.

It was ok. It's better now though. Some stuff got worse. A lot got better. We know more, have better toys, live longer, cheaper travel and so on.

The major thing that's worse is the internet blasting every negative thing into your brain 24/7

You could be unreachable and your job would have to accept that fact. There was typically a single landline per house so if it was busy or you weren't there then they had to suck it up.

You weren't pressured by society that you must be efficient in your leisure time. Play a game, best become the best at it otherwise you're a loser now. Painting something? You best be Van Gough in quality or it's shit. Feels like people forgot you're not supposed to monetize your hobbies, there were there to get away from work.

Everyone’s saying what was better.

Bullshit, lol.

We were still people, and we still had all the people problems. Misogyny was worse, racism was worse, homophobia was really bad still, and “trans” was just a guy who liked wearing women’s clothes. Not that any man would ever admit that. Schools were super clique-ish, bullying was public and not prevented. Rapes were swept under the rug even worse than today. Pollution was really bad. I don’t think anyone born after 1990 has a clue how shitty the air quality was in cities back in the ‘80s and earlier. I can personally vouch for how amazing the environmental laws are and have improved air quality. Want to buy something that wasn’t available at a local store? Plan on waiting a month or more for it to arrive on order. Cars were more unsafe, often only had lap belts, and wtf is an airbag, lol. Car seats for kids were all but nonexistent. Air travel was crazy expensive, too.

All that said, yeah, there were some good things. We weren’t tied to screens all day. If someone stayed in and watched TV all day all the time you thought something might be wrong with them. We weren’t “on-call” 24-7 with cell phones. Basic jobs were easy to get. All my first jobs were walk in and ask if they needed anyone or just word of mouth, show up, and start working. Mass shootings weren’t the thing they are today. You actually owned the music or games you bought. Local stores had a huge variety of stuff and hadn't been crushed by walmart and big box stores (I actually remember when big box stores were new and touted as sources of better variety for consumers. Lol, that worked out great). Concert tickets to top bands were less than $10. Local radio was great, your DJ told you about local events, and we had Dr Demento and Casey Kasem on weekends. Nobody was forcing you to pay subscriptions for everything, homes and cars were more affordable, so was education, and health care hadn’t gone nuts yet. You could actually talk to your political opponents, you wanted the same things mostly, it was just how you wanted it to happen was different. Crazy wingnuts were just that. Crazy wingnuts and not mainstream. Nobody gave them platforms unless it was “The National Enquirer.”

So yeah. We had plenty of problems. But there was a lot of good shit too.

Everywhere smelled like an ashtray until the late 90s when smoking bans started picking up steam.

the house had one telephone line, but often there were two or three phones sharing it. an incoming call could be for anyone, and would ring all of the phones, and any or all of the phones could answer it or join it just by picking up.

so if one was quiet enough, one could easily eavesdrop on the phone conversation in the kitchen by using the basement phone.

if a call came in while someone was on the line, busy signal. MAYBE call waiting where you put one on hold and answer the incoming.

and of course dialup internet coexisted with all of this. your massive download could get corrupted if someone picked up a phone while you're connected.

Things were getting better and people still had some hope.

Well there were a lot more bugs and a lot fewer wildfires, for starters.

I'm guessing you mean the 20th century in general rather than 1900-1910? Because not many of us are going to be that old.

It was... wonderful and fucking awful in equal amounts. The details have changed between then and now, but the ratio is probably about the same.

I think the biggest difference was having/getting to discover things for yourself. No internet to look up whatever. We had to mail order cheat books for our video games if we got stuck. You had to actually watch the movie to see what happened instead of a highlight reel on youtube. For good or bad, it was different.

Back then it was boring, but the trade off was you could be someone without being the best in the world. What used to be "let me tell you about my friend" became "let me show you this internet video." You didn't have to be the top player in the world to be the top player at the arcade. You didn't have to be a prodigy to have people think your art was cool. The internet moved the goal posts out of reach and we were all suddenly nobody, consumers, wannabe influencers at best. The technology thought to allow everyone to find an audience put us in our place and we're all nobody now. You get zero views, zero interest, the famous get a billion.

I'm not going to sugar coat it. There were good things and bad things, just like in any era.

On the good side, the standard of living was higher, especially for younger people. Wages, though already stagnating, had not reached the unliveability stage yet, and unions were still common. Communities were stronger because people hadn't holed up online yet and local media hadn't collapsed. What existed in terms of an online world was more open and trusting. They didn't even have encryption on the www before '95 if you can imagine? Politicians were as corrupt as ever, but the media in general were more accountable.

On the bad side, there were a lot more incurable diseases. The Cold War was fucked up. Just knowing everything you know and love could end in 20 minutes just because some idiot turns a key somewhere. The air was actually really dirty in a lot of places. I know there are a lot of parts of the world where that's still true, but clean air acts did work where implemented. Also, bars were all smoky as fuck. I couldn't go near one with my asthma.

I could go on, but I'll end on a more positive note. I was thinking just the other day how astronomy has been going through a golden age of discovery all throughout my life. In my childhood, they were sending out probes to give us the first close up looks at planets in our solar system. Then in the 90s we got the Hubble Space Telescope, we discovered our first exoplanets (planets around other stars) and that there is a 2nd ring system in our own solar system: the Kuiper Belt. Then we found a moon of Saturn with active geysers, Pluto sent us a ❤️, and now we have the James Webb Space Telescope joining massive ground-based telescopes that are just bursting with discoveries across the board. I just can't get enough of this stuff!