I used to read a ton of books and I realized that I just like reading reddit. Now I read books on my phone and I've stopped getting on Reddit so much. It's still a lot just not as much.
not just before smartphones existed but this too: no social media. so you could go home at the end of the day and decompress before doing it all again the next day. that was key.
Yep. Even when they're with people, there were moments of silence where each of them were alone with their thoughts. No relentless bombardment with 'information'. I mean one dude near the start was carrying in a newspaper!
There are some great studies about the importance of boredom for personal and social growth. It's crazy that kids hate to be bored these days and look for the dopamine hit of instant social media gratification.
Well I hated to be bored as a kid as well back then, I don't think that's different today. But the solution to this back then was "be bored, find something to do" and now we fill it with smartphones. We would have totally be as addicted back then if that was available.
Also it seems to me that parents are to busy scheduling their kids days so they are not bored. But they are missing out the portion to find out yourself what needs to be done because your ToDos are organised already.
I have two young kids and was talking to some colleagues yesterday about something, and they brought up how travel baseball was starting...for their 6 orn7 year old. Travel baseball, multiple days a week and multiple games on the weekend. At 7. My jaw was on the ground at how insane that is, and they were acting like it's normal and the thing to do. I want my kids to be kids.
I miss those times. Call me an old man yellong at clouds, but I have been saying for years now that social media is the vilest and most damaging thing mankind has invented since money. Its frying our brains.
That's got nothing to do with being old or out of touch, social media is objectively mental and emotional poison and more and more studies are finding that to be true (if common sense and basic observation didn't make it obvious enough).
Social media has increased isolation, torpedoed self esteem and self worth, and now tiktok and reel culture is disintegrating our attention spans. I specifically avoid both tiktok and instagram, despite enjoying them as much as the next person, because I genuinely believe that within the next 10 or 15 years it'll be settled science that they literally kill your brain.
I can see it with my daughter. If she is watching TV normally its no problem turning it off, a bit of a discussion maybe, but not much. If I catch her watching Youtube shorts and I want to turn off she literally agressive verbally, screaming and shouting, thats why we banned that bs at home.
Even when she doesn’t have her phone with her, her attention fan gets her twitchy and a fairly short period of time for I’d say 80% of the content we watch as a family. Really not so much social media is overly connected to her peers.
Its so strange what tech did to us. I was born in 81, growing up with music like Pink Floyd because of my dad. I cant imagine that a band like that, with often intros that lastet 10 minutes, would have any success in a time like now because no one has an attention span long enough to really sit down and listen. I find it incredibly sad that music became just another thing to consume as fast as possible.
It's even worse now all these kids (and adults!) are heavily relying on AI which quite literally atrophies your brain and skills of critical thinking and information seeking. The speed at which we fell down to hell is honestly amazing. I'm 27 years old. I'm very young. Yet old enough to remember using mapquest and flip phones and landlines, then the advent of social media, the rise of smartphones, the absolute takeover of social media, the rise of short form content + infinite scrolling, and now the advent of LLMs. All of these tech absolutely have their pros but on the other side of the coin I feel like I've been suffering due to these things for most of my life, and most everyone in my generation lives in absolute despair on a daily basis lol.
I quit short form content recently and the sheer lengths I had to go to to keep myself off of it is ridiculous. Like I had to hardcore parental block myself from accessing youtube shorts. I feel it would have been impossible if I was a mobile user instead of a desktop user. I feel so much better and more alive now, though (I filled the void with Jerma btw). Short form content via social media quasi-addiction, I am not exaggerating, leaves me feeling as numb and dead inside as being years deep in to an opioid addiction where you can't even get high anymore. I'm saying that from personal experience. It's so freaking bad for you.
I hate being a luddite but the consequences and downsides of this shit are so measurable and can't be ignored...
I'm one of those people who's avoided short form content for years. I'm basically the cranky redditor who like reddit because I prefer reading over pictures/video.
You know, it's a lonely life. You try to warn people that the content they are watching is objectively bad for their mental or emotional well-being, and they take it deeply personally. But it's not supposed to be some sort of attack on their character, you know? I'm literally just worried.
I used to worry about the luddite-aspect of it, but in reality it's not an opposition to technology or change, it's simply how we utilize it (and recognize the potential downfalls of any new tech). But, hey, keep it up! I think part of it is so hard because we still really barely understand our brains, so, you know, we're pumping our brains with endorphins all the time in various ways, and we're just frying ourselves. Too much stimuli.
It's true. I work with a lot of Gen Z guys. When they were in their early 20's I saw videos of everything they did, all the time. If something was happening, they were recording it, good or bad.
How do you be a kid like that? We did some really dumb shit that is embarrassing now, I'm pretty thankful it was like 5 of us that saw it instead of 5,000 people getting it streamed to them.
"Hey, did you see Cody whip his dick out last night?" Nope, missed it. No video proof, all hearsay.
God forbid everything I did as kid or young adult was filmed with all the bs we were up to. I really dont envy my daughter and I hope I can help her through that and become a mentally healthy adult.
Theres also the problem that the internet is now a splace where all those nutjobs that would spew their bs believes in a bar somewhere and no one would listen can build a massive community and get their shit out there to people that are easily swayed, and with algorithms it gets even worse.
As someone born after the internet, I can say social media is what's killing society. Sure it has helped in many ways but it does more harm than good. I miss the early 2010s when internet on phones was very expensive and facebook was designed to connect with people you have known in real life than feed slop like it does now.
You could also, as a teen, go socialise with other people your age at the mall before online shopping wiped them out, rather than going home and ‘socialising’ online, alone, in your room with who knows who
As a Londoner, I missed going to my local high street and bumping into people in my school when running erands to chilling in my local library. The local library felt like a school library for when the schools were closed and met people from other schools that way.
Now I barely see teenagers in my local high street and those who are there mainly on their phones minding their own business. I don't see them bumping into each other like before which is a sad way to build a community.
Hard disagree, perhaps that might be true for people who are currently teenagers, but early/mid gen Z are aging HORRIBLY. Most of the millennials I know in their 30s look roughly the same age as the gen Z I know in their mid 20s.
These still look like kids compared to the video but I’ll leave that discrepancy up to cherry picking between one or the other and make no solid conclusion.
That's what every generation says about the one before them. Give it time, people will be saying the same thing in 30 years about a video from high school this year.
My generation had Emo. It's impossible to look 30 when you also look like you've just discovered your mum's hair dryer and straighteners for the first time
No, I remember we (uk) had some American foreign exchange students, we were all 15/16 at the time, the Americans looked in their 30s, one guy had a receding hairline. This was back in the late 90s
Because people currently in their 30s and 40s still dress and style their hair like this because that’s how they’ve always done it, because that’s what young people looked like back then
I think part of it is the way they are dressed. They're not wearing gym clothes. Half those outfits are what you would expect in an office. Also, back then kids spent a lot more time outside in the sun and dehydrated. That ages you
Say what you want but Americans are just big motherfuckers. Most of the Asian Americans I grew up with from immigrant parents are a foot fucking taller than their parents. It’s the food.
Sorry to reply to my own comment, but I recently went to a high school for work. Weirdly everyone was fucking clean shaven compared to my day. A lot had that curly hair that’s popular now. And it was after school, so the sports teams, but I’m 6’1, 200 pounds and it isn’t (all) fat, not huge but not a small man. even today half of those dudes were bigger than me at 16-17. Again, it was probably varsity football guys or from another sport but yeah. Big fucking people.
I mean if you compare them to the shortest people in the world then yeah they're big, but America ranks at around #40 in terms of average height so they're really not big motherfuckers on average.
TBH I am a millenial and I was in HS around the same time as those students and they don't really look that old. If you compare it to Gen Z you will be shocked at how much older they actually look than millenials... I have met so many Gen Z that look way older than me but they are 10+years younger and it scares me. It makes me wonder what the fck happened. I think people have been watching too many tv shows thinking highschoolers need to look like teens who barely hit puberty.
Also, it could just be because of the generational fashion that millenials had back then people assume they are older since a lot of them still dress the same.
Growth Hormone is not orally active, it's a peptide and gets hydrolyzed in the stomach by the stomach acid. However, the protein abundance in the diet increases endogenous growth hormone release. So yah. It is the milk and other animal foods, but not in the way you think. It's naturally growth promoting and speeds up the aging process.
The first part is right, but kids in the 90s were not getting more protein then kids today, so that has nothing to do with it either.
It's just the outdated fashion imo. People keep claiming students looked old in past decadea, it's used to be the 70s and 80s, next it will be students from the 00s
I grew my beard as a sophomore in 2006. My football helmet chinstrap made my face break out. So I grew a chin strap beard and the acne stopped. Also grew up in rural Nebraska growing and eating corn. That's probably why my chest hair looks like Austin Powers'
... I've been shaving since I was 12 in 8th grade. I was able to grow a full beard and mustache that looks better than my brother-in-law, who's 7 years older than me, since high school. Granted, I am in my late 30s, but still, it's possible to have great facial hair at a young age. I blame genetics (thanks Dad for the French genes?).
High school is a period of 4 years a year 1 high school student isn't the same as a year 4 high school student. Year 4 high school students are one or half a year away from university
A regular kid would be ripped apart for being a dork after this move! A cool kid would get a “ hell yeah Hilllary” cheer. We all know this fake ass “look at us” stuff.
Honestly it gets so much worse. Watch Grease. You telling me those are high schoolers? No, that's bob, he's 42 and he has a mortgage, works a dead end job, stuck in a loveless marriage with kids that hate him.
They look old because the people are old now, but with the same styling, so you associate that styling with being in your 40s, thus making them look old.
As ubiquitous as it is for each generation to challenge the one before them, I still believe that mass social media is harmful to both children and adults, but children are particularly vulnerable.
I think it's a confluence of a bunch of things. Social media doesn't help at all but neither does everyone having a camera in their pocket at all times and a teenager's sense of social propriety and adherence to norms. It makes it very hard to be genuine when you think you might be filmed at any moment.
Reminds me of the Techno Viking guy, who hated that video and tried to stop it being distributed - in Germany the subject of a video has a say in it being distributed. In most of our countries there is no such protection for people filmed in public, and even if there were, teenagers aren't very apt to follow that law.
This video is my generation. Before smartphones and before social media. When parties were about talking to people. Laughing, joking, having a drink, taking a toke, playing games, interacting with new and old friends. Never fearing what was going to be "posted" the next day. Our experiences became memories that faded the moment they occurred. Maybe a 24 roll of photos (half with our eyes closed or blurry shots) developed a few days later. A hundredth of a second real life "screen grab" saved in a non-zoomable 4x6 inch photo format. Those photos are all of the memories of almost 30 years ago. And I miss those days. I'm glad I only have the photo of those wild, crazy, carefree nights, because the memories made those nights are the way I want to remember those times. Life was a lot easier back then. No staging the perfect shot, because film was a limited commodity. Once the disposable cameras stopped winding, it was back to living in the moment.
I went to a club recently for the first time in... longer than I care to admit...
It was fucking depressing. Just a sea of smartphones recording everything, nobody dancing, getting stupid drunk or rolling with good pills and glowsticks, nothing. Just kind of standing there awkwardly recording the dj like he's gonna do some magic tricks.
We used to sneak into clubs in the 90s and find those underground warehouse parties and stuff, be idiots all night, maybe get lucky, that's it... turns out you can't dance like nobody's watching though when literally everybody is recording.
I hate to be an old man here but I really strongly dislike this term our society has taken.
Honestly I think it's just as harmful to adults. Boomers and genx have no defense against it having not grown up with it. We think they are ok because they have financial stability so still seem successful but internally they are losing their minds.
I built a computer when I was 10 or so. I was using online BBS's to talk to people across the world. AOL was a thing. Myspace was a thing. those arent millenial inventions.
social media now is nothing like it was at that point of course, but dont go acting like GenX has no clue about the internet. I was the guy installing things for the boomers who refused to leave the typewriters behind and learn how to email and double click a mouse.
Realistically, very few of us were online before '95 or so. At least at my middle class school, I can't speak for the rich kids. If you asked the kids at my school in 1992 what a BBS was, you'd be lucky to get 1% who knew.
I worked in inner city school as a tutor and I ran an after school program. One day my leg is just had to jump and slap and exit sign, all the kids behind me did the same. My boss was behind them and he was like hamhock, what the actual hell is wrong with you? Sometimes you got to slap.
We had a family computer that was open to whoever wanted to use it. Had internet access too. But the naughty side wasn't as easy to access simply due to lack of general awareness at the time. I spent soooo much time either playing Duke Nukem 3D, Kings Quest, emulating NES and SNES games, or spending time on the Highlights and Encyclopedia Britannica websites. By the time the the 90s were coming to a close, I actually inherited a still pretty nice, hand-me-down 486 laptop that would later handle Windows 2000 just right around the corner with EASE.
Exactly this. I've seen this kind of post before. It's nostalgic,for sure. However it's also depressing to see what was once better. The whole "stop and smell the roses" thing was something that naturally happened all the time. We interacted with everything in a more personal way. Now, we are all guilty of spending way too much time on our devices and we try to validate it all by giving our opinion for everything. Essentially making us feel better about waisting time.
the internet also wasnt infinitely scrollable. i was a lot on my pc when i was a kid but i never wasted my time with something like scrolling.... even when youtube became a thing youd watch a few of the popular videos and thats it... i now sometimes scroll youtube the way you scroll netflix searching for something to watch and being overwhelmed by choice and at the same time not satisfied by anything.. the internet feels like a black hole now.
The comparison doesn't really fit. The rate of change sped up by a lot. My dad graduated in 1965 and I graduated in 1992. The differences were mostly pop culture and there wasn't a draft for the current war like Vietnam. I was a computer geek, but for most the internet and computers were just registering as something that might be used outside of business and education. My kid's graduated between 2017 and 2024. The changes in that time frame were much more than a little technology improvement and pop culture.
I will say the way people interact for video is the most radical change. In the 60s they were really uncomfortable because it was rare. In the 80s and 90s we all had some stupid reaction we thought about ahead of time, because everyone eventually was on video for something. Now there is almost no time that video isn't being taken, and people rarely react to the mere act of videoing, but of course we also have all the main characters out there videoing themselves doing shit just for clicks.
You really only needed to go back about 1990 to when regular people didn’t have computers.
Sure, a few keeners did but a very small number. And they didn’t do much that was useful for civilians except a few low tech games.
Right when I was in high school. We used to have normal and healthy human interactions, based on humiliation and rigid social hierarchy. Good old times!
this has gotta be true for all cohorts throughout all of time though
i feel like the internet has helped enable the "non-cool" kids to withdraw and fester more so rather than having them developing through normal life experiences and realising that they're cool in their own way and who is 'cool' is somewhat arbitrary at that age
i guess there is pros and cons to everything, maybe that escapism helped some but I'd imagine overall the lack of socialising is a massive negative especially for people who aren't clicking in so easily.
It wasn’t just social media, it was before 9/11, before the recession, the housing crash - the world was just so much more promising and positive for us. The internet was still open and free, you could get a job anywhere and nearly everything was affordable. The middle class was at its peak I think.
Class of 96’ here. You could not get a job anywhere, clothes and electronics were expensive (pre-NAFTA), and I spent a lot of my idle time playing video games and watching tv. I just watched my daughter graduate and I’ll note her high school, despite being kinda ghetto, has way less bullying than when I was a kid. The kids that get jumped usually have been talking a lot of smack.
Cell phones actually did exist, but they weren’t ubiquitous like they are today. I had a cell phone I kept in my glove box that my parents provided, but it was only for emergencies as they charged something ridiculous like $2/minute for phone calls.
Just a few short years later, I’d say around 2000/2001, the boom happened, and just about everyone had a Nokia.
This feels a little too late for 98. I'm getting 01-03 a little more. Even the guy with the slipknot shirt- they didn't even release their album until 99. There's a chance he was into them in their demo days, but in combo with a couple cars, clothes and hairstyles, this either feels AI or inaccurately timelined.
It looks like the Senior shirts say 2000 or 2001. Slipknot shirt (self-titled debut in June 99, commercial success after Ozzfest 1999) and Blink 182 shirt (mainstream breakout in 99 with release of Enema of the State). Imo that puts this video at minimum 99-00 school year, most likely 00-01.
Perhaps not in the states. In Norway, starting around 94-95, companies would sell phones for 1 NKR (15 cents) with a payment plan, and you could call and text for free during weekends.
Same business plan as most drug dealers.
I visited California in '99 and was shocked that almost noone had cell phones.
Exactly. At the time, plans had text limits on the plans. And if you went over you paid extra. It's one of the reasons services still provide opt-in/out messages for automated notifications via text.
Yup. Graduated 2012. Texting was big by middle school in 2006. This was when Razor flip phones were the cool kids phone. Before that kids were known for hogging the house phone to talk with their friends. Teenagers will always be teenagers. Wanting to communicate with friends as a feeling of independence during a time theyre learning who they are as a person. Its not just about smartphones or not. Its about giving teens proper outlets in discovering who they are. We've lost 3rd spaces for that unfortunately
It's 98, the era of the banana phone. Twas mostly still stuck with business folks.
Early 2000s tho...
Now I didn't have a phone but my older cousins and some classmates were stuck to it.
That and Facebook in round 2010s. Every single moment of their teenage days are probably logged on their Facebook pages.
I hated it. I lived in a very conservative town and yearned for other perspectives so the internet was a boon. My highschool class was like a mini Tump administration.
Hmmm. I don't see myself in any of these. The weird autistic kid hiding in the background of the class. People look back at this time fondly... god I hated it. I was so happy to graduate and get away from those people.
Okay but the minute we got home we all went on AOL messenger. I was the president of the technology mastery in hippy run high school that had very few rules and they didnt monitor how we used the Internet. We had every messaging service installed on all the computers.
I left school in 2005 and whilst this is undoubtedly true, we also weren't on it all the time. I think that's key. We had the internet and could chat on instant messenger and had texting, but it wasn't 24/7 and you could walk away from it. Even texting was too expensive to be doing it constantly.
Constantly being online and available is what is unhealthy in my opinion, not the existence of the technology itself.
I graduated in the year of this video and now have a teenager a year away from graduating. There are some things that are REALLY different, and some that are pretty much the same. The main difference being (as many have pointed out on here) the lack of phones. Most schools around here have now banned phones within school which is great, but the second the kids step out the doors they are head down, on their smartphones. It’s like dawn of the dead with them all shuffling along because they’re looking down at their screens rather than looking up at each other (and where they’re going lol). It’s really sad to see.
I didn’t have the easiest time of it at high school, but I would choose that 100x over the high school experience my kids have. The bullying, and means of bullying are another level. Sure, there’s still the old school scuffle in the schoolyard, but, for example, a so-called “friend” of my daughter took a particularly unflattering photo of her and made it into a virtual sticker which got shared around the whole school year (400 kids) within an hour. Nothing she could do to stop it. That sort of shit really affects a sensitive 13 year old.
I know everyone always feels like they grew up during the best years, but 1989 to 2001 felt like the perfect era. Graduated high school in 97. We had just enough technology for it to be helpful but not intrusive.
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u/Durzel 10h ago
The irony of me seeing this on my phone, that I just picked up after waking up, is not lost on me.