Being able to not be reached for hours on end and it not being an immediate call the search and rescue team and releasing of the bloodhounds. Being able to disconnect was nice.
I regularly ignore calls and messages. Either I’m busy or just don’t want to respond. Nobody is phased by that.
Hanging out with my friends in deep parts of forest near the small town we all grew up in
We would bike out past the highway with backpacks, and make little shelters and a fire …and just be lads…throw stuff, sometimes at each other, see who could lift the biggest rock, or jump the widest part of the stream, fish, make a lean-to…we made a neat little spot over a few years
we experienced being totally and completely lost once then, which was a very humbling and powerful experience I can still remember the realization of total silence and total loss of sense of direction…but, we didnt panic, stayed together found our way home
We also played a ton of baseball w tennis balls during the summer in a park that was kinda in between everyone’s homes - tennis balls were fun cause they didnt hurt you if you got beaned , or break peoples wnidows around the park, and also dont travel very far, so make for some fun pop-up fly balls
good times
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
Nothing lol. I loved when I first got access to the internet in my early teens, the whole world opened up. Playing with friends or reading the same 20 books in the house over and over again felt very repetitive compared to even early '00s internet.
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.
It was so much easier to keep friendships. Holy fuck. The amount of people who get upset if you don’t text back within a few hours is insane. And it just keeps going forever - like a never ending game of tag.
I’d rather be lonely. God damn.
Sounds like you just need better more understanding friends
No streamers or “influencers”…
Going to video rental stores with film nerd friends
Being on holiday really felt like you were in a far away place, cut off from everything familiar. Today, no matter where you go on the planet, everything is kinda the same because you bring your digital environment with you.
This has occurred to me from time to time when I think back on living in Germany as an American in the 80s and 90s. I came back to the States in '94, just as the internet was starting to kick off. The experience I had those 10 years, “in a far away place cut off from everything familiar,” doesn’t exist any more unless you’re going to the most isolated places on the planet.
Exactly! I miss it.
Being a child. My grandparents being alive. Not having to go to work. Being able to just go out and do shit and not be answerable to anyone until I came home.
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.
The monoculture sucked
Why don’t you choose 1 of the 3 available flavours of counterculture then? It still seemed like simpler times.
We could go outside unsupervised.
Which is odd, since not only can you call for help, but crime is way down now
Ironically, it’s much safer now because of all the horrifying things that happened to kids when we were young
But fear mongering is way way up.
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
Cycling to friend’s place to see if they’re home or spinning around the town checking where the people are hanging out at
It was quite simple and nice not being connected 100% of the time
Taking that further: you had to expend a decent amount of energy with no promise that someone was there or that you didn’t have to go elsewhere.
Being a child with relatively little responsibility
Science fiction dystopias being fictional and set in the “far future”.
Hide and go seek tag with all the kids in the neighborhood at dusk.
Turning virtually any high powered device on meant it would have to spin up, power up, cycle, etc. Usually with satisfying whirring, humming, clicking. Nowadays everything boot’s up and you might get a chime.
The background noise was pretty high though. Those old circuits and tubes would hum. There was a lot of interference between them, so stereos would click, pop and hum when operating other devices nearby. Things like that.
