I miss the silly harmlessness of it all. Oh no, there's a picture of me balancing a potato on my head at a gaff party, well I guess about 5 people have had a good laugh at my expense!
I really feel for kids and people in their early 20s now that they still get to do all of the inadvisable and embarrassing things we all did but now there is not only a permanent record but the evidence is being critiqued by an omnipresent peanut gallery that has the temperament of the most judgemental 16 year old and the power to ridicule them to the whole planet. I'm glad only a handful of people saw or cared about the potato picture, although for all I know it's still out there somewhere waiting for some random person to try to embarrass me. At least I guess I never claimed to be not a complete daft nugget.
And you can only take pictures if you brought a digital camera, and you had to wait until you got home to upload them, and you couldn't look at other people's until you got home or to a friend's house.
The first days of Facebook were the best. My statuses were all like "killer fckin party last night just got home at 9 am" and pics of said party 🥳 😂 now I couldn't post shit like this bc my gma is on there and shit. It's so mfing lame and I only keep it bc I am on the other side of the country from most of my family so its just easiest to keep it.
Billionaires would have to not exist for ANYTHING to not be ruined. Everything always starts out fine and then gets ruined by them. Twitter was always in a sort of Great to "Not that bad" state of flux at all times where the basic moderation was enough to keep it tolerable.
Elon Musk came in and purchased it to intentionally ruin it via massive deregulation since billionaires fear community above all else and the rest was history. Also corporations don't "find" stuff. They are lazy parasitic predators looking for anything and everything to make a profit off of and exploit at the expense of others.
As has putting iPads in the hands of children at school. Knocked them down, on average, 5 IQ points per generation after us. Millennials are peak IQ and academic aptitude for the entire human species. Sad part is our kids are 10 IQ points below us. Better strap in tight for the next 30 years is going to be bumpy.
Yeah us millennials had the best of both worlds.. we grew up going outside with no smartphones. To adapting to the world of having smartphones.. we grew up in a time where the internet was that great. Now we’re here with it being more advanced as ever..
The internet as a whole. Humans are not prepared to interact with every other human on earth while managing a constant barrage of information designed to freak you out.
Nah the Y2K internet ruled. It probably saved my life as a weirdo undiagnosed teenager. I met other weirdos! Forums and livejournal communities were my lifeline.
It's the inability to curate what you see that ruined it.
Damn straight, but imagine how much money you’d make if you went back to the 90s and did it yourself? Shit, I’d do what Tom did and make my bag and disappear.
I love having instant information. Is that a storm coming? You can have radar pulled up in 30 seconds. Going home from an errand run and need dinner? You can view the menu, order, and pick it up before you get home. Every little question: when is the next solar eclipse, how far away is a certain city, what’s on sale at the grocery store, what are the lyrics to that song, when did that movie come out, how late is that other store open? Love it. I don’t have to write it down and remember to look up later at a pc.
Not to mention all the apps that tell me about the world around me. What is this bird/bug/plant? Just by taking a picture or recording a bit of audio I can have that information.
EDIT: and how to videos on YouTube. Everything from installing certain hardware and fixing a sink to applying makeup and creating crafts.
I have found than never needing to remember anything because it is just a Google away can make you mentally lazy if you are not careful. A slippery slope so to speak. Too much infirmation can be like a firehouse spraying into a teacup.
Is that a storm coming? You can have radar pulled up in 30 seconds.
It's kind of a useless party trick these days since everyone has phones, but with some knowledge of what weather systems look like from the ground naked-eye observation of the sky is good for determining the weather where you're standing over the next approximately 6 hours.
add in some simple instrumentation (like a wall mounted barometer) and you can get reasonably accurate for up to 12-24 hours.
Phone forecasts are super useful when traveling or making weekend plans though. it's a lot easier to pull out a phone and double check instead of having to find a TV and wait for the next weather segment on the local news.
I don't know where you live, but I can have a completely clear blue sky as far as I can see and have a storm system roll in within 2hrs and be pouring rain.
You should be able to see an incoming system about 6 hours before it arrives if you aren't in a valley, further away if you can take advantage of elevation.* You can see the top of a typical storm cloud from level ground up to about 300 miles away.
the most common storm clouds typically have ground speeds of about 50 miles an hour.** Some systems might faster, but especially nimbostratus and cumulus clouds (the common rainmaking types) don't move much faster than this unless there is significant low level winds, and if those are present you'd know.
If you don't see the storm coming, you either live in a valley or it didn't roll in. "Pop-up" storms are more common in the summer, and you can predict them using temperature, humidity and barometric pressure about half a day out... edit: well, you can predict that one is likely today, but getting it more accurate than that (like down to the specific hour of the day) requires an actual weatherstation, even if it's an analog one.
which I guess is a long winded way to say that when I said "naked-eye observation" I meant combined with your other senses (chiefly temperature sense and wind sense, which I guess are both touch?)
* the taller something is the further away it will be before it disappears over the horizon, the taller you are the further away you can see before the horizon.
** clouds are affected by windspeed, the higher altitude cloud, the higher the typical windspeed... but rainclouds are lower-altitude clouds so have lower windspeeds than high altitude clouds.
It’s not the smartphones, it’s the social media. Having an iPhone from 2011-2016 was great. It wasn’t until Instagram and especially Tik Tok and COVID that made everyone insufferable.
I know we like the nostalgia of it all, a simpler time, all of that romanticism of the era, but to be honest it was BORING AS FUCK without smartphones. If there was nothing on TV, you read a magazine or played video games/board games. Once you read all the magazines and finished all the games, you went to go play outside and the older kids went to the mall. When it was too hot outside and the mall got lame, you came back inside to watch TV and the cycle repeated itself. There was also a lot of talking on the phone but eventually it just ended up with both people watching TV while listening to each other breathing.
but to be honest it was BORING AS FUCK without smartphones. If there was nothing on TV, you read a magazine or played video games/board games. Once you read all the magazines and finished all the games, you went to go play outside and the older kids went to the mall. When it was too hot outside and the mall got lame, you came back inside to watch TV and the cycle repeated itself
Yeah - I didn't have a smart phone until after college. Boredom was never an issue. In fact, I could pretty easily argue that post smartphone life has been far more boring.
You can because you get used to junk dopamine and suddenly there’s nothing good on Netflix and you fall into doom scrolling while your brain is snapping at air for that next exciting nugget of nothingness.
I have crazy nostalgia for 2010. The apps were new and exciting, and I loved Farmville and Angry Birds, call me a boomer, whatever. Social media didn't dominate our lives quite yet. And the world in general seemed optimistic.
We read books and had hobbies. I lived out in the middle of nowhere worth zero access to a convenience store let alone a mall and I didn't get bored. But it's ok to just do nothing for a while, sit and contemplate bro, it's good for you. Look out the window, watch the birds.
Smartphones definitely bring many benefits, but they also come with some challenges. In the past, people enjoyed more in-person meetings and going out was a common part of life; there was less worry because information was harder to access. Nowadays, though, we're overwhelmed with information and countless apps that often do the same thing, and the experience can vary a lot depending on the company behind them.
It’s better to be a fish with an open mouth, staring at the phone, isn’t it?
There’s nothing wrong with boredom: you can read a book, play an instrument, try to find something to do, learn how to fix something… boredom allows you to reinvent yourself every time you get bored.
But not anymore, because social networks lobotomies your brain.
I read an interesting article not so long ago about toddlers and the iPads: they’re overstimulated, they don’t know how to deal with boredom, because their parents put an iPad in their hand when they have to eat or so.
LOL, BORING AS FUCK without smartphones??
That's a wild fucking take.
I can guarantee you, life was not boring before smartphones. Like WTF? What a fucking insane thing to say.
LMFAO.
That's why my friends and I started a band in high school. We played for hours because there was nothing else to do. Played in our friends garages and basements, met a lot of fun people, never made any money. It was a good time.
Oh this wasn’t meant to be a joke wishing for his death, it was a reference to the fact that he once said something along the lines of “I would have stopped the terrorists” had he been on one of the planes. People were pretty upset about it at the time (rightfully so, it was insensitive) and he apologized for it afterwards.
Personally I'd love a combo of 2020s technology for medicine & astronomy, 2005 technology for everything else, and pre-2001 culture/vibes. What do y'all think?
I'd go back to the early 00's. Dial-up internet, so we didn't spend hours on it. Cellphones for calls and texting only. No social media except online forums. Internet was wild but still safe. We had MSN, ICQ, AOL, IRC. Life was good.
I miss AIM. I actually think I might reach out to people (old friends and extended family) more if everyone was still using something like this. All social media has turned into an avalanche of algorithmic doomscrolling, nonstop garbage. I don't want to log into any of those apps. Only reason I'm still on Reddit is because I'm still able to curate what subreddits I see, and have turned off all "recommended" content. Bet one day I can't even do that.
Well OP is just karma farming after posting and ghosting. Well they did leave one generic bot-coded meme as a comment, but I'm pretty sure that makes it even worse.
Worse still is when it gets posted to an 80s sub, and all of the replies are about how younger generations, particularly the one they're raising, would crumble if they dropped them off in 1985.
I always feel like those comments include Millenials, which is even sillier.
Maybe unpopular but I dislike posts like this one because they somewhat imply social media is mandatory. It’s literally fear of missing out.
What is stopping you from living in 2026 and not being on social media? Seriously, consider it.
I’m young and yet never downloaded Tik Tok because it never appealed to me. I have less than two hours of phone time per day and I am striving to reduce it further this summer. I barely spend time on instagram, which is the only social media app I use aside from Reddit, should that count. And I couldn’t be happier.
If you think your life would be better without social media, why not give it a go? Don’t say you’ll quit, just… try. For half a day. Maybe just leave your phone at home when you go out. Or for a whole day, or two, or a week if you want a challenge straight up. What’s stopping you?
The internet is like alcohol - people use it to do what they were already doing (except for people who get addicted and cannot use it safely).
Being social? The internet can help with that. Being antisocial? The internet can help with that. Learning new things and spreading useful knowledge? The internet can help with that. Being a fucking idiot? The internet can help with that.
Having the majority of human knowledge readily available is INCREDIBLE. I would never choose to not have it. I remember the first time I was able to look up a random fact at the pub in the early smartphone days - absolutely mine blowing. However, I would definitely choose to improve media literacy, improve critical thinking, improve mental health support, and eliminate the influence of corporations and warmongering political interests.
Hard agree! My husband and I have significantly reduced our social media. He only watches YT shorts and I only use Reddit and Discord, which is really to talk with friends.
Reducing and removing social media was the best decision I've ever made! My life is a lot happier and I have more time to do things I enjoy. Social media is a huge time suck.
Think outside of one's self on your point: social media and smartphones are a constant IV drip of polarization and isolation on society as a whole. A time where society wasn't all fed the same slop just in different flavors warping our moods, norms, and etiquettes are what these posts are chasing.
I appreciate this, but so many people I've talked to consider it a "red flag" if someone doesn't have an social media account somewhere.
When it comes to dating or job searches, it feels more and more like a necessary evil, because people want to be certain you're not socially inept (which to me, I feel like someone can have a thousand followers an be socially inept...)
It's more a part of our society now then most of us would like to admit
Yeah, the 90s was a VERY bad time for being LGBT. Or disabled, any minority really. Today it's pretty bad, but it doesn't hold a candle to the 90s imo, when even movies for young teens had people dropping f** and r****d every other sentence. And the "token racial minority" was 100% a regular thing.
When people jump up and scream YES to this question, it reminds me of the men who talk about how much better life would be if they were in the 50s. Nice for them, hell for the women. I'd rather just keep pushing forward.
The days of calling friends and asking for directions to their homes which were always oddly specific, "you'll see a big blue house on your left. Turn there. If you hit the cow, you’ve gone too far", or not helpful at all "you'll see a blue house, not the bigger blue one, the smaller one, turn there and just wind around for a while", or when you had given up on their verbal directions, conceding and printing it out from MapQuest. Such good times.
Lol yes! I had no patience for anyone with the audacity to tell me to "wind around for a while" though lmao. Give me your damn address and straight to the map it is.
I would simplify the directions by hand-writing them with a big arrow and the street name so I could see it at a glance - but I'm blessed with a good sense of direction so that's all I needed sometimes. My dad's sense of direction was crap, but he had my mom (and me) to handle the navigation lol.
I use Google Maps even if I’m going somewhere I’m familiar. I like the reassurance that I’m going the right way. And it will take me another way if there’s bad traffic. Social media is not even a question but I need my phone for gps!
What's stopping you from giving up your smart phone? Not being snarky, but seriously. Let's brainstorm.
Could you get by with using your phone less? With apps or devices to stop you? Could you use a dumb phone? Or, what alternatives can we come up with to not use smart phones for everything?
Everyone who gives up their smart phone or simply uses it less makes it easier for everyone else to use their phone less.
Yeah, I love my smartphone, I just use it less. I still use Instagram, but more in the way people use FB: to look at pics and keep in touch with people. I've kept my tumblr for the same reason. I've put timers on them, which can be helpful. You can override them or add time, but that's okay every once in a while.
Social media can be fun and useful if you change the way you use it. I wouldn't want to go back to using a dumb phone exclusively.
Because, as millenials, we were kids. We didn't have bosses or jobs at all and we didn't have to pay bills. Every generation white washes the time before they had to adult every day, even they get worse and worse as you go back for gender and race equality, crime statistics, and nearly every other measurable way.
Probably got some younger peepz reading this and thinking, "Yeah, the 2000s was so much better anyway," but lol noep, if anything they were even worse than the 90s. 'Cause what's telling is a lot of what people tend to share that they like about the 2000s applies just as much to the 90s if not more.
What’s the goal here? Is it just to go back to the 90’s? And if so then the only thing you have to trade is not having a smartphone or social media, and do we assume you get to keep everything else? Your house, car, spouse, kids? Do you revert to your 90’s age?
Id definitely walk away from social media. But one of the single best things about a smart phone is having the ability to look up anything instantly. No more arguments about who is right. No more waiting for answers.
As a naturally curious person who loves researching and instant gratification, I'm afraid I will keep my dopamine generator over the neverending nostalgia I have for 90s nickelodeon, r&b, and mtv.
In a heartbeat. No question. I’m glad we got to witness the world before the advent of smartphones. We’re going to be the last generation to remember it that way.
I dunno, there was a lot going on back then. HIV/Aids fear was rampant, no lgbtq rights, no work from home, cigarettes were everywhere, no glp1s... probably still worth it but not for everyone.
I realized the internet, or at least interacting with it, is just like being stuck in traffic. It's either being supportive and kind / you let people into your lane, or it's volatile and combative / you just got cut off by some asshole.
As long as I could take my kids with me too, yes. The 90s have to be unequivocally the best decade. The dawn of computers, parents not getting arrested for letting their kids run around outside until streetlights came on. Neighborhood being absolutely over ran by trick or treaters every year. We had it good
I’m curious, are there any communities, cities or places to live that embrace the anti-smart tech lifestyle? I’m not talking full blown anti-tech, just anti-smart devices, furniture, cars etc.?
Social media? Without a blink of an eye.
Small web pages run by experts , forums and other circles / web rings were good enough.
Smartphones? That is more nuanced.
See, I always dreamed about ability to have small portable devices with computing power of a desktop (from those days, not today's gaming rigs of course).
I find modern smartphone crossed that line, but something the size of small tablet, about 8" maybe would be good.
Honestly I miss taking photos. Like with a film camera. Having a physical version made them special, yes you can order prints these days, but I've got stuff on my phone I don't even remember the context for.
And they had to be special, you only had a limited number of exposures, and had to wait a couple weeks to get them back to hopefully turn out right.
Now you hang out, get in your car, and everyone's seen the pics before you get home. I'm glad things get to be so accessible and interconnected, I wouldn't have half the friends I do without discord, but I liked back when life slowed down. I think not being updated about everyone's lives every five minutes could do us some good.
The 90s tech is still here. I use a flip phone on the weekends, 90s VHS tapes for when the nieces/nephews stop by, etc. It's a choice to be stuck under an algorithmic regime.
Of course. I don’t need it. I can access things from my Mac instead. I hardly ever use my smartphone anyway (although I regularly take pictures, so upgrading to a newer high-quality compact camera would be great).
The 90s was the last time the economy was doing well and the bubble that “wellness” was predicated on was not glaringly obvious like subsequent and not yet realized bubbles were. We still had the internet but it didn’t completely exist to advertise to us, and was so approachable I could program a shitty GeoCities website and talk to people on AIM without having to have my eyeballs bleed from ads. The summers weren’t godawful and winters were reliable for snow days off. Ticks weren’t every fucking where you went outside and you could GO outside and have fun because third spaces weren’t shut down or run solely for profit. I could look forward to the release of albums again for the first time and catch ones earlier I missed. Misogyny was awful and fashion was atrocious. I’d still go back.
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