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.
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.
Wasn’t much different for me. I usually walked around reading a mass market paperback book instead of a cell phone just took up more pocket space. I grew up in the 90’s so I still had portable gaming like the Gameboy advance too. Thr one I had before that, the nomad was… let’s just say NOT as portable. Oh. And my Walkman CD player. Nowadays I just have it all on one device… my legion go. I use my cell phone exclusively for social media which I had ro go to my computer for, use slow as he’ll 56k dial up internet, and browse all message boards and chat rooms for that online social aspect.
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
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.
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…
Being inaccessible was a hidden pleasure. Just be where you are
Not being constantly bombarded with information. Not just the internet, but every source of information (TV, radio, music, even written media) has grown by orders of magnitude. Then you pile email, messaging, social media etc on top of that, dump a shitload of advertising on top of the whole mess, add on a bunch of algorithms to keep you hooked and AI to churn out drivel. We went from information scarcity to a ludicrous excess and perhaps people of my age find it hard not to try to voraciously consume all we can, because that’s what we did when we were young, when it was scarce.
Life was quieter back then. You had to find ways to fill your time. Read a book. Draw something. Make something. Of course you can still do those things but now I have to fight to find the time and attention. We live in a world of constant interruption, so many things fighting for our attention. It’s tiring.
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
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).
Climbing trees
Spending time with my brain and coming up with creative ways to stimulate it. Didn’t have a little device to do it with. Books, writing, daydreaming, drawing, bugging my old sister but also those nice bonding moments.
Hell, I used to write essays for fun 😂
Conversations where people didn’t pull out their phone to Google something neither of you could recall and the conversation just went on until hours went by and you were “ah, it was Daniel Radcliffe in that movie!” “Oh yeah!” and then you get to circle back around to it. Idk, just letting the brain naturally rejig it’s own memory!
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
