Being unreachable without it feeling weird—peace was built into the day.
This was such a beautiful thing.
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.
Reading. I was such a bookworm before YouTube became accessible on phones.
I would always have two books going at a time. Reading was part of my bedtime routine. Now I just fall asleep watching YouTube stuff that I’d be no worse off if I didn’t watch. Except ma girl Moriah, she’s influenced a lot of my art and craft projects.
My nephews and nieces were raised on YouTube and mobile games. They literally do not know how to play imagination games, they need so much coaching and direction. As kids, we were always acting out our own scenes from TV shows or just our own imaginations. We’d play at lost explorers, under the sea adventures, Captain Planet, etc. It’s sad that the kids in my family just have everything fed to them by YouTube, they don’t know how to imagine games like this.
Heck, we used to dig up bits of broken crockery and be so proud of this bit of random teacup we found. It’s definitely an antique and not just a cup someone broke a few years ago.
Socializing in a spontaneous way.
You showed up, no idea who was gonna be there. Genuine unplanned interactions and meet new people.
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.
I miss the higher level of engagement and interactions with another person or group when socializing.
Now that everyone has a computer in their pocket, they have an alternative (and sometimes primary) source to engage with during social interactions and events. Now instead of using social skills to change, deepen, or otherwise adjust conversation and engagement on an individual or group level, many people opt out and zone out on their phones instead.
It started with texting. I noticed that at parties or small group interactions, people would oscillate between interacting with the group and texting others either in attendance or not, whichever entertained/engaged them the most. Suddenly instead of parties being full of people who were there to be there and interact with others there, they became full of people who were there until the next exciting thing flashed on their screens and they would just leave without even really being there anyway.
What I’m saying is that people used to be engaged and dedicated in a more wholistic way when socializing, and I miss that. I hate that texting others while you have someone right in front of you that you agreed to spend time with is normal. I hate that I can’t trust anyone to value my time as much as I do theirs, and that apparently I’m taking it too seriously if I do.
Everything. The world had so much before we started spending our present in phones. I had time for art and hobbies and writing. I did so much exploration and sports and socializing. Road trips, and events, and helping others. Things were memorable.
Now is more like an addiction. The time goes but I’m never sure where it went. I barely have time to sleep, much less any other activities
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.
Yours is the root cause of a lot of grievances posted here in response to this question, thank you for so aptly putting to words a thing that is so real yet hard for many to see.
You can’t recharge in solitude anymore?
Privacy.
I remember when it all first started. They’d say “If you don’t have anything to hide then what’s the problem?” Now look where we’re at, have an emergency, trying to get out of a bad situation, maybe the forest is on fire - sorry your car won’t start until you calm down. Give it another few years and it’ll be much much worse. Anyone who supports this is a complete moron.
And healthy skepticism. People too easily hand over their personal info these days.
Lack of expectation that wherever I am and whatever I do anyone can just call me to get instant answer.
Also - less societal control. Kids nowadays can’t go anywhere in public without their parents. They either get kicked out, have police sicced at them, or spaces where anyone can hang out for free are regularly erased. Case in point - even online spaces are now slowly closed from non-adults. In my youth one could go to any of the public spaces and hang out there for free with nobody troubling you.
World now feels like it’s strongly geared towards raising slaves - always available, always under control, even rest seems to be paywalled.
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.
This. Thanks.
Yet what it did over the time with society is concerning (how much impact social media had since it was introduced). Personally, I’m just mostly annoyed, by the growing level of bullshit, and having to filter all of this. You can’t even believe shopping sites anymore because they’re infested with often incorrect AI-slop.
But yeah when filtering all that slop, it can be better even, there’s endless educative material on Youtube when you search for it. Wikipedia is a really great source of information etc. So it’s mostly the amount of information that you have to properly filter (which in itself can be exhausting though, since all these big-internet corpos are tuned to get your attention in any way).
Not knowing everything all the time led to more interesting conversations.
I made a friend a few years ago that would whip their phone out during our conversations to answer my questions or theories about the topics we were discussing. Every single time.
IMO a conversation is just that, I enjoy discussing ideas and theories about subjects I’m not 100% familiar with and want to hear your thoughts and theories as well.
To slice through all of that with a ‘let me google that for you’ was very much not the interaction I found enjoyable at all.
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.
Orson Scott Card - Ender’s Game
DilbertOne thing that was interesting to me about OSC is that he publicly came out in support of gay marriage pretty early. His reasoning wasn’t moral or supportive, though; he just said that it was inevitable and therefore not worth fighting.
That makes it even more bizarre to me that he’s a practicing Mormon.
No disagreement.
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.
I still say I prefer wild conjecture.
Also less self proclaimed experts.
As a self-proclaimed expert of grammar, I can tell you that the word is “fewer”, as self-proclaimed experts are (supposedly) countable.
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 think it’s more that the crimes that are committed are just more widely reported.
I don’t even live in the US but every time someone in Florida throws a bagel at an alligator it gets reported internationally.
This is actually the result of specific differences between Florida’s laws around publishing crimes in the news compared to other states. I forget what the right term is and the exact laws, but basically in Florida everything can end up in the news right away while I believe other states limit what can be published before the court rules on a crime below a certain threshold, so the crazy stuff stops being interesting and gets forgotten about long before it could ever get published in other states.
Or something along those lines.
It’s called the sunshine law. All police reports in Florida are a matter of public record that can be obtained by anyone. The press trolls those reports multiple times a day.
We’ve also seen the death of third spaces and a major wave of helicopter parenting that simply could not exist before the way it does today.
My parents were shocked when me and some people around my age were ambivalent about getting our driver’s licenses as teens, because for them it was like the first real bit of “adult freedom” in their lives. But by the mid 2000s, it was a very different world from when they were kids. Malls were dying, 3rd spaces were being monetized or removed, and existing in public for free was already becoming a difficult prospect. The idea of being able to go to a place to hang out had already been dying off when we were kids. What were we going to do, spend our time after school working to spend that money to drive somewhere that we’d then have to spend more money at to just hang out? When we could just sit around and play video games for free? Owning a car largely just meant suddenly having bills to pay and more responsibilities.
And the advent of cell phones (and social media) made it even worse. The prospect of people getting a call at any time from their parents asking where they were and who they were hanging out with was starting to raise its head as an issue. Today it’s even worse with the tracking apps on kids’ phones and devices in their backpacks or cars. I still remember the first and last time I posted something on Facebook. Right when Facebook was first starting to get big, a friend of mine made me a Facebook account. My first and last post was a comment about how 8am classes sucked, which my dad commented on “But they’ll go anyway.” Immediately upon reading that, I wondered to myself why anybody would willingly subject themselves to having their personal thoughts broadcast and judged/criticized like that and never logged in again.
GPS tracking kids like that is child abuse. It’s miserable what kids these days are subject to. No wonder mental health is in the toilet. I’m probably about a decade younger than you, can I can confirm there was nowhere to go.
I assume if you remember that you’re old enough to go outside now unsupervised too.
And yet, cameras everywhere
There were cameras everywhere in the 90s too, though. They’re just a bit smaller now.
Funnily enough I miss the internet. You can kind get the same experience in the right places, but it’s not quite the same vibe.
Yeah less infested with all those big corpo “attention-based-economy” bullshit. More personal touch. This got way worse since AI too…
Having an attention span. I used to be able to sit with a book and read for hours in silence. Now I don’t like when it’s too quiet. And if I play music to counteract that my brain also can’t read the same thing for more than a paragraph because scrolling through Reddit has made it so I don’t have the patience for anything and I want quick, digestible pieces. Watching movies and tv shows is also terrible because I’m constantly checking my phone so I miss a lot of important details. I fully acknowledge I have a phone addiction.
You can choose slow living. I felt this way a few years ago and slowly have eased myself back into the real world by choice. It’s hard but slowly going back to analog has actually made my mental health and personal relationships so much better, I’ve even made new friends, I was told that was impossible on your 30 but it’s very possible of you find other analog people.
You don’t even need to disconnect imo.
Just use the phone more consciously. It’s not crack, if you want you can put it down more often, read a book and when the brains says hey what phone doing you can acknowledge the thought and maybe not act on it every time. Soon you’ll find the balance you want between all phone all the time and being mindful 24/7.
It’s good to be aware that this kind of thing is easier for some than others. It’s been studied plenty that real addictive behaviors are being deliberately fostered and taken advantage of by those wanting us addicted to their products and platforms. Sometimes sheer mindfulness and willpower are not enough.
Honestly, for me, limiting my phone use is harder than it was to quit smoking. One main part is of course that for many things you need your phone, so its often on your person. I do try living more without it, but it can still suck me in.
What part sucks you in? Social media? Which one specifically? I find reddit is more addictive than lemmy for example.
Well its just the new information, I deleted Reddit ages ago, but I still compulsively watch Lemmy and my mail, messenger apps. (Though a lot less than when I had Reddit up). It’s a weird compulsion. I’ve blocked many attention sucking websites, but still. But gotta say, I’m resisting more and more.
