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Get offa my lawn
I was wearing an onion for a belt, as was the fashion at the time.
As a belt? Was this popular in Europe? In America we merely wore onions on our belt
Did you keep any of the bees when we got nickels back?
i understand this reference
Better in a lot of ways
Imagine life with no internet, no cell phones, and personal computers were both very rare and very few people knew how to use them.
The Internet was slow and weird (in a good way).
The food wasn’t great.
And the music was distressingly square.
That all changed with the Arcade Fire attacked.
I love so much about this comment.
Instead of doomscrolling, I read the newspaper. Having to go out and get it was a nice little nudge towards sociability.
I would hang out at a cafe in the city, reading and having coffee, and inevitably, someone I knew would come along and have a chat, maybe get a cuppa, tell me about something crazy, etc. Like a group chat in real life. We would never really organise to meet there, you would just turn up if you felt like it.
The paper itself being curated was good, too, because while it was definitely skewed by its corporate masters, or the inclinations of its editor, the stories had more time to be well-written and well-sourced within those constraints.
With experience, you could read between the lines to infer what wasn’t being said, or know that something was missing and to check by other sources. Since everyone else was reading similar things, you could sometimes talk about the issues in more depth, without having to explain the basic facts.
Oh, and most people agreed on those basic facts.
Also, people were casually racist and sexist and bigoted, and lots of things we care about today were not even acknowledged by the majority as being problems.
A friend of mine got gaybashed (there’s a term you might need to look up, hopefully) and it was like he’d just suffered an accident. People just shook their heads and muttered sympathies, like it was an inevitable result of being gay in public, instead of a brutal fucking hate crime. That sort of thing didn’t even make the news unless the guy died.
Analog. I didn’t have the internet until my last year of college (and i didn’t have a celphone until 2013). I grew up completely outside. My parents had no idea where i was until the sun went down…every day. I spent my childhood skateboarding, and wasn’t allowed to play videogames, or eat at McDonalds.
Quick on the bathroom note… Meeting groups was wild. “Okay, everyone’s gonna be at the food court at 2.” And if you didn’t make it we’d hang out and wait until the group decided you’d died or something and we’d hear about it in school in a couple of days.
Also, getting loser drunk in front of your friends was a learning experience, not a thing that would circle the school forever in video form.
late 80s here. We had a nice world before 9/11. there was hope.
Yeah my children remind me daily how awesome I had it, and I had no clue how just good I had it.
It’s definitely felt that way. But climate change, the biodiversity crisis, and end-stage capitalism were all already in the pipeline, most of us just weren’t being forced to confront them yet.
they might have been in the pipeline, but due to the success we had against CFCs and other pollution issues, we felt like it was just another battle to progress. Then 9/11 happened, and instead of fighting to improve things, we fought to keep things, and then just got kicked in the face repeatedly.
So I’ve been told. I was born mid to late '90s. I finally got my mom to admit she wouldn’t have had me if she knew things would be this bad. I can’t remember a time when I had hope.
This. Hope was something we all had back in the 90s. We all thought we were still moving in the right direction. Nobody (even the wealthy) feels that way anymore. These days, we’re either just trying to survive, or we’re cashing in as fast as we can before it all collapses.
Most people you’d meet in real life were still jerks, but there was less existential dread. It was more “you win some, you lose some” and less “humanity is doomed and the human condition is irredeemable.”
Products were designed to last.
Most of the people you’d chat with on the internet were curious, benevolent nerds, not narcissistic political hacks.
One of the things I miss the most about the 1900s is that people didn’t expect you to be reachable 24/7. Even though cellphones had been around since the 80s very few people had one. That meant that most people could only be reached through the family landline. If you didn’t answer people would just assume you were out of the house, thus unreachable. That all started to change in the 2000s when cellphones became common place. Now days I feel like everyone expects me to pick up when they call, and if I don’t they expect a better excuse than “I don’t feel like talking right now.” As a very introverted person who often needs a lot of alone time, it sucks, and sometimes I really wish I could go back to a world without cellphones.
I remember meeting up with friends was either you stay together after school or try to guess where they might be at that moment. Maybe they’re in this persons basement because they just got an n64, or maybe they’re playing ball in the field, etc.
Now it’s all very organized and less chances to get lost and find your way back. I sometimes wonder what would happen if the cell network was just gone one day, for whatever reason.
This and FOMO was very limited.
However, it was also normal for people to come and visit unannounced because they were close by. It is rare people don’t phone ahead now before visiting. This can be a good or a bad thing, you don’t tend to get visitors when it is inconvenient but there is also less spontaneity.
There is nothing stopping you from putting your phone on… say, a kitchen counter, and leaving it there and only talking on it while in that room and don’t take it with you, when you go out.
I had a rotary phone until 2017 (and needed to stay in touch with my grandfather after my grandmother died) so I ported my landline number to a cellphone.
Now that most of my family is gone, I routinely leave the phone at home. I can let it go to voicemail just like I used to let the answering machine take the calls when I was out.
It’s only a digital leash if you let it be.
and if I don’t they expect a better excuse than “I don’t feel like talking right now.”
You don’t owe them a explanation though. If they demand a answer, you can just lie, joke or tease them a bit. “I was busy, painting a horse” or “I was attempting a new record at standing on my head.” Or just reply with “did you want something?” if they keep pushing the issue.
My go to is: I was uh… doing something
My default… (which often is the actual case)
“Ack… The phone battery died again.”
Or alternatively, have your friends worry about you. Say you unavailable as you were drunk/high/intoxicated out of your mind. As times goes on, cite inebriation by ever-more exotic and illegal substances.
I leave my phone on do not disturb, all of the time. I make it a point to tell people that when I give out my number, so they never expect an immediate answer or response. The phone is there for my convenience, not so others have me at theirs.
We walked to school in the snow. Uphill. Both ways!
Now get off my lawn!Jokes aside, I think one thing we had pretty good was not having to live in constant fear of every stupid thing we did likely being put online immediately. And there not being an “online” where your mistakes would haunt you forever. I did a lot of stupid stuff in my late teens and early 20’s. And there is thankfully very little evidence of any of it. Kids these days don’t often have that luxury. We’re all young and stupid at some point. As you get older, that stupid stuff should be something you and your friends laugh about over beers, not something you fear a current employer is going to find at the top of the results when they google your name.
That said, the easy access to media and information is insanely cool. If I want to learn about the mating habits of marmosets, there is likely an in-depth Wikipedia article with way, way too much information. And it’s likely up to date and well edited. Compare that to whatever blurb might be in the encyclopedias at your local or school library, plus anything you could dig out of the periodicals and microfiche, and it’s not even in the same universe of information availability. Sure, there’s a lot more to sift through online. And it’s getting easier and easier to get lost in a sea of misinformation. But, you still stand a much better chance today of finding more, faster, than what we had back then. It’s funny to think back about instructors making a big deal about not using Wikipedia when it first came out. Now, it’s likely recommended as the first stop in researching something.
Also, I have a fucking computer in my pocket with more processing power than the entire world had available when we sent men to the moon. And I can use that computer to communicate with nearly anyone in the world instantaneously. And that computer can access that insane wealth of knowledge I just mentioned above. Again, almost instantly, from most places I am likely to be. I can be taking a shit in the woods and reading up on marmosets fucking while chatting with someone shitting on Twitter. It’s the goddamn future over here.
We all wore onions on our belts, which was the style at the time.
More srsly by the 1990s we were about as internet addicted as we are now. There just weren’t smartphones, so you were offline when you went out of the house away from your computer. You usually did have a voice cell phone, initially analog (AMPS) but later digital with SMS messages. Also, when you were online, the web didn’t suck as badly as it does now. There was less bandwidth for megabytes of javascript bloat, etc.
I was five.
It was the free-est, most affordable, and happiest days that the world will be in my lifetime.
