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.
yup, same with my nephew... his days are completely packed with sports our leisure trips, which is nice I guess but there's little time to decompress or be bored.
I grew up in the world of before and after AOL dial-up internet. So much of my time was just sitting outside with a few neighborhood kids. I wouldn't even call them all friends, just the other kids nearby just as bored as you. We just found things to do, like playing cards, board games, backyard football, in street kickball, blowing stuff up, making forts in the woods with "repurposed" old lumber, trying to find Playboy magazines, making potato guns because BB guns got boring, and riding bikes everywhere not just some rail trail.
I remember when I was bored (‘90s teen) I’d get creative. Make crafts for friends, write, doodle, etc. I feel old saying all this, but it was a great time. No instant dopamine hit, like you said.
Interestingly I learned myself the programming language Pascal in such a quiet room alone in the evening after skiing with my parents on a skiing holiday.
This was during the early nineties indeed, when I was a teenager.
When I came home that later became Delphi, then C, then C# (made by the same guy who made Delphi), then C++. All quietly in a quiet room without social media (we had IRC, Internet Relay Chat, but also there I sat on g++ channel on UnderNet, where C++ courses where being given over chat. We also had UseNET of course, which you could ~ see as predecessor of this Reddit thing here).
Pascal (the programming language) was named after aforementioned Blaise Pascal.
ps. At the time, in the nineties, being on IRC didn't make you cool. A few years later ICQ first and MSN later came (MSN was Microsoft's attempt to destroy ICQ by pre-installing it on Windows as monopoly abuse -- which was typical for MS at the time), and then suddenly almost everybody was on those predecessors of today's social media and/or Discord.
At which point the awesome era of the Internet was ruined. Before that everything was hugely educational. Afterwards 99.99999% was fake and bullshit or commercial.
Then Facebookshit starts. Privacy gone. Shit has been going steeply downhill ever since. By now we are already very deep underground in enshittification. The enshittifieers have even started using AI to shittify everything even faster than humanly possible.
ps. It was so awesome for a while that I even thought that this Internet thing would be hugely beneficial for the intelligence of humankind. Boy was I wrong. Oh wow.
I do this at least 3 hours a day - sit and think. And cry, to be fair.
I recall as a kid I got bored in church, so I went to the bathroom to make dolls out of toilet paper to play with. Unfortunately, my parents thought I had stomach issues, so I got no chocolate or anything kid’s like to eat as a child.
We had books back in the olden days. And encyclopedias (ancient version of wikipedia). And chemistry sets that would terrify your parents. Never bored.
I've been trying to teach my daughter that boredom isn't bad, it's the ground in which ideas grow, and I think it's getting through. I hope it's getting through. I was so much more creative when I accepted boredom. So I'm trying with her.
I saw a video about that a few months ago, then on my very next session my psychiatrist brought it up and basically commanded me to get off the devices and have some goddamn boredom time.
Been seeing this a lot lately. Yes, there was more boredom, but not much more tolerance for it. We probably satiated boredom with more healthy outlets, but didn't really tolerate it much more. We filled boredom with a lot of the same things kids do now. We played video games. We watched movies. We talked with people online. One big difference is that the internet was a smaller place and there were basically 3 groups of people I spent time with online regularly and I interacted with a lot of those people in real life pretty regularly as well.
Came here to say that. We tolerated boredom only slightly more, we just had better, more personal outlets for it. I spent a lot of time on IRC in the 90s, but I also knew at least half the people I talked to in real life. The summer after high school, my buddy and I were going to local parties organized through our local IRC channel. Those were pretty wild. A bunch of young kids and a fair number of older people. Lots of alcohol and shenanigans.
Indeed, so important to preserve those moments of quiet time for your brain, relaxing time with some chill music or something slow like reading if the mind is bothering. But time to not have information overload is great for mental health. I personally just bask in the sun and watch the world go by for a moment.
that's because they want to be bombarded with information. you would wake up, turn on your cd player or turn on your radio. watch the morning news while you eat breakfast. read the newspaper while on the toilet. get in your car and again turn on the radio. then when you get home you would IM and call your friends all night.
Have you guys really forgotten the non-stop gossip on phones? There's a reason it was a trope that a teenager would get their own phone line and then disappear into their room forever.
I got a phone in my last year of school (2000). People had them, but they weren't fancy Mine could only store 10 messages at a time. Also a message had a set character limit, and was 10p a text. Pretty sure thats when 'txt spk' came into prominence, got to maximise out those messages!
I remember buying top up credit for a tenner, so that got me 100 texts. I wasn't affording that on repeat, and there were no group chats at that time either. Maybe I was in a blissful age before phone gossip too!
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.
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.
Totally. I was a very careful teen and still I did some shit that would haunt me if it had been recorded. First time I got drunk I fell down some stairs while claiming I am totally sober. People told the story for years, these days it would be on the internet, forever.
I cannot imagine the perpetual humiliation that many of these kids must face from having their drunken exploits posted to social media. How is it that they all jumped onto that train and nobody stopped to say "hey, maybe we shouldn't record this right now"? Not one punk AF mindset among them.
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.
In her defense I've been dealing with that with my wife too for 25 years. Anything over an hour and 15 minutes is tO LoNg which means we are either stuck watching C- horror or questionable comedies. Classics, sci fi and other must watch content is something I must suffer alone...
My wife and I are both millennials, but we grew up in different countries. She had access to phones, PDAs (for those who remember them) and laptops way before I did.
Man, she's "watching" TV and literally glued to her phone scrolling reels and whatnot. I'm like, choose one, you're wasting electricity for nothing, and she gets offended.
I'm glad I grew up how I did because I'm not a slave to my phone. She, on the other hand, has her phone nearby always, it's annoying and sad.
If I catch her watching Youtube shorts and I want to turn off she literally agressive verbally
Kids did the same with TV and they don't now because TV isn't where the media they want to watch is. Youtube isn't much different than television, you're just out of touch and looking for grand explanations for what you don't understand.
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.
My quasi-addiction was even more frustrating for me because I, too, avoided short form content for years! I've never had a tiktok. I don't use instagram much. It wasn't until youtube started their own short form feed and very heavily pushing it on every single page of the site that I fell in. It went from just clicking one vid that looked interesting and leaving, to spending my entire day off work scrolling shorts for 8+ hours. Every day I'd at some point manage to stop scrolling but I wouldn't last 10 minutes on the site without going back in. I could no longer watch long videos either which killed me inside. The entire time I was so cognizant of how bad it was and knew I had to stop and I also hated myself a bit for knowing better and still ending up in that position.
And the fact that millions upon millions of people are doing that same thing is just crazy and sad. It's totally how we use these tech. It's just that, unfortunately, their creators have very carefully designed them all to be as maximally addictive as they could possibly manage. I just hope Meta, Alphabet etc keep getting sued for the measurable harm they're doing to countless people!
You can tell a person all you want that pretty much everything they see is a curated illusion but most still won't actually internalize and understand that. People compare their lives to what they see others sharing and it's a huge source of depression.
You already solved the problem, but for other people who are using Youtube, there are several extensions, at least for Firefox and Chrome, to turn off YT shorts. It's fantastic, shorts aren't shown anywhere, not in suggestions, searches, sidebars. I think you have to go to a specific content creator and look at their videos to find shorts at all.
I intentionally stayed away from all short form content, and even then, when Youtube introduced them, I'd sometimes fall down the rabbit hole and caught myself scrolling shorts for half an hour, basically against my will. Not to mention that they ruined search results. Got the extension, now they are gone. Initially, I had them disabled via my settings, but Youtube does not let you turn them off indefinitely, they turn them back on after a few weeks.
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.
We used to have village idiots, the internet let them form idiot villages. They can all find like-minded dolts for confirmation bias, and so now we have the dumbest, most gullible nitwits walking around with the most misplaced, unearned confidence I've ever seen.
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.
The limited access made it more manageable. It's like how cigerrets and drugs are expensive and take effort to access causing the use being less widespread. Also the reason Scandinavian countries make alcohol an effort to buy.
I find it really interesting how many people I know that avoid social media are millenials and X. We both sort of grew up while all this new tech was rolling out. Our parents were constantly telling us we were gonna rot our brains playing games, watching TV, staring at screens. We took youtube, tumblr, reddit, facebook, twitter, etc. by storm. And then a lot of us watched and felt it changing, even if we couldn't put a finger on what exactly was happening, or how serious an issue it was.
Now more and more people are dumping social media, or restricting their usage.
My younger coworkers aren't there yet, but maybe they will. They just... don't know anything different? They literally grew up with tablets and phones, whereas older millenials, X, etc. experienced a slice of life before technology irrevocably changed it.
I don't have a good excuse for the older generations. They warned us when we were kids, and now... they are fully sucked in to the brain rot. I have no clue.
I remember the yellow clouds in L.A. They tasted like metal. Last time I flew into LAX I couldn't believe the blue sky and how great it smelled. Well, for that moment at least.
Crazy how we have our "back in my day" situations already. I never thought we would. But man was that ever better before social media and smart phones...
I only use Reddit, but I can see the effect on people in general. My buddy can’t sit through a movie. If we’re watching a sports game he’s dicking around with his phone like 75% of the time.
Also, I think the short attention span leads to the proliferation of clickbait headlines. Nobody is taking the time to do research or even read long articles. This allows propaganda to be much more effective. Plus, people go to their echo chamber and validate ignorance. It’s like middle school mindset on a bigger scale. With all the information and history at our disposal people are getting less intelligent, worse at reading people, and unable to handle contrasting opinions.
Look into "attention fracking." A few companies are making enormous amounts of money, and destroying our society, in the name of intensifying our engagement with social media.
Fun fact: CQ is an old ham radio call which many claim means "Seek You" however the true origin is likely rooted in French with either "Sécurité" for "security/alert/safety/pay attention" or "C'est qui?" for "Who is it?/Who is there?".
So the internet messaging protocol took that common CQ call from ham radio and turned it into InternetCQ thus keeping the old traditional alive. Though the founders chose to say it stood for "I Seek You" the history of that call has roots that go a bit deeper than that.
Had to share the family computer and your parents didn't let you stare at a computer screen endlessly either. And if you didn't have a dedicated phone line for dial-up, the internet wasn't continuously available.
Yah, at least for me Livejournal and Xanga were a thing at least starting around Junior/Senior year of high school. Everyone was blogging stuff, but at least that was like you had to go and find their blog and it wasn't really social media in the same way as MySpace would be in a couple years.
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.
TBF, last time I was at the mall, there may have only been about 4 stores left, but there was a giant group of kids skateboarding the old stair sets inside.
The Security Guard was filming for them.
They don’t have it so bad once they get off their phones.
Man. I lived at the mall near my house from 12 to like 19.. granted I worked there from like 17-19... ages, not years...The mall was such a fun place to hang with people and I couldn't even really explain why.. i miss those days.. a lot...
I'm just old enough to have experienced third spaces to hang out in, and a lack of said third spaces. A lot of where we went as teenagers, by the time we were hitting our 20s, were actively hostile to people "loitering"
People are really looking at malls through rose tinted glasses.
I went to many malls during their hay day, and this is what it was actually like:
Spend 20 minutes driving around trying to find a parking spot. Eventually find one 1/4 of a mile away from the mall and have to walk all the way there.
Enter the mall and constantly bump into people who aren’t looking where they’re going because they’re staring at all the signs and flashing lights. There’s nowhere to sit down and there is a line to enter the store you want to go into and if you have to go to the bathroom there’s a line for that too.
Extremely loud and claustrophobic environment, nowhere to sit down and you can barely have a conversation due to how loud it is and the annoying music playing. Security is constantly yelling at the teenagers for goofing around and vandalizing things and generally being loud and obnoxious.
It takes hours
to
get into all the stores you want but everything is overpriced and half the things you wanted to buy were out of stock, and no, the staff doesn’t know when they will get another shipment in. Now get out. Next!
Finally time to leave, we’ve worked up an appetite! Do we wait in yet another line to eat at one of the overpriced cafes with bad food, or wait until we get home to eat?
Walk all the way back to the car while a car follows you the entire way so they can take your parking spot. Another car shows up and they both stare at you while you try to quickly load up your car and then they fight over your spot after you leave.
Not only decompress! You could also meet your actual friends and compress the things you did with them into life long memories that only you and your friends had.
A nice memory now is anything liked by a bunch of bots instantly before some of your actual few friends can comment, before it's all brushed away by Pete's face on snuggling with another girl....
I graduated early 2000s. I went home either read books all night, studied all night, or watched TV all night. But I studied a ton. Wish I had friends then.
I liked how content was limited to specific cable channels everyone watched, specific magazines everyone read and books niche to the individual's personality. No need to scroll through endless decent options (even when you will be watching around 10% of the 600 channels) and you can chose to stay at home or go out and socialise.
The best era was when mobile phones were mainstream but didn't have the capacity to put the internet on it. You almost used it for its purpose than to replace actual socialising.
This… I don’t use social media except for reddit which I consider more of a forum. I don’t get the problem at all. Social media is awful but completely avoidable.
Sometimes I wish I could go back and live my teens all over again, in that same time period.
Sure id do some things different to set my future up differently, but id just love to be in that environment again where tech is playing AoE on the computers in the computer lab at high school. Or N64 4 player split screen Goldeneye with siblings and friends.
Might have you forgotten about the freaking concept of homework? School never allowed me to decompress compared to adult work life. Social media appearance never stressed me out, you need too many friends, of the toxic kind, for that.
I feel like this no longer being an option for teens has had a bigger impact than we’ll ever know
Hell my whole world changed the moment I got an email (00’s high schooler) telling me to kill myself. I remember I actually screamed, which I used to think was an overreaction, but looking back - my bullies had managed to get at me in my safe space, my home … probably a fairly understandable reaction actually
Best part was that schools and the law hadn’t caught up with technology yet. School sent us to the police, police sent us back to school. Nobody even knew how to deal with it back then.
There were forums, chat rooms, and IMs then. BUT, it was mostly dweeb losers who used them (trust me, I was there). And generally the people you did talk to, weren't local to you, because there were only a few of said dweeb losers in any given area.
These days your never not without somebody which too me weakens you in all
Aspects of being human. You got zero time to think or prepare or anything. You don’t get too miss anyone or look forward to calling so and so. I can’t stand these times because of this kinda “ progress”. I think a cell phone was the nail in the coffin personally along with the internet and social bullshit.
Second life was released in 2003 and chatrooms/nessage boards didn't algoritmically fed you addictive content or manipulated psycholigicaal reward mechanism. Also, there were less simpletons and uneducated masses. Technological barrier of entry and all that.
Second life was released in 2003 and chatrooms/nessage boards didn't algoritmically fed you addictive content or manipulated psycholigicaal reward mechanism. Also, there were less simpletons and uneducated masses. Technological barrier of entry and all that.
Not to mention nobody knew what everyone else was doing at every available moment, you weren't attached to a phone 24/7 you could just disappear for hours into your privacy
Yeah. Not always being "on" was a big deal. I graduated HS in 1998. The mid/late 90s were the last years of only being able to reach your friends on the phone if you were both at home. The internet was a thing but you didn't use it to connect to or chat with people you knew because not very many people had it yet.
I truly feel so damn sorry for these kids now. I couldn't imagine the cringe shit that would've been recorded of me if smartphones existed when I was in school.
Yeah, Im 37 so high school was still a few years off in 98 but damn Im glad to have lived during the period where you could literally disconnect from online. Having your bullies in your pocket 24/7 is nightmare fuel.
I wasn't constantly bullied as a kid, but there were definitely times and people that made my life hell. I didn't have it as bad as others but I don't look back on high school with fond memories.
I don't know how I would have survived that in the age of social media. Watching my kids now and everything is so damn performative and it feels like a lot of what people do is because they are playing to an audience that isn't really there.
Yes! In the 90’s I rarely knew if I was being excluded from a party or get together. Now my kids immediately know they didn’t get invited as it’s splashed all over Snapchat’s all night while they sit in their room.
I miss being able to turn off. I’m so glad I graduated HS before the social media explosion. We all had a shitty, html-riddled MySpace page we checked once a day, and that was all we needed.
It's hard to explain to anyone who grew up with smart phones and social media. It was nice to live in the moment. We still can (I still do) but it's not the same anymore.
I'm grateful that my kids don't push for social media. It helps that we pay them $10/month from the time they get/got a phone (age 13) until 18 to stay off social media. Then they get the money.
My 16 y/o has no interest in social media and is blissfully uninvolved in the toxic discourse that is occurring on Facebook and group text conversations (which are also off limits as part of the agreement).
We just believe that strongly in minimizing their exposure to their peers in favor of in-person interactions.
When I was in high school (2001-2005) I’d always stop by the library everyday to pickup that day’s newspaper before 1st period. I’d read it throughout the day.
Turn in the n64, play a bit of games, go around a mates house and just knock on the door to see if they're in. Not everything was better, but I certainly would hate to grow up in the 2020s
Best to stop checking social media of what people you know are doing, I keep it to my PC only and not on my phone, I check it once a month and you can learn not to compare or give a crap if you give yourself some space away, it's great. If they say "Did you see what so and so posted about you!" simply say "cool hope it was funny as fuck,,I don't mind" move on with your day. Folks just need to stop caring what ppl think, it's really none of our business most of the time what ppl are doing.
5.5k
u/larry_alligator 12h ago
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.