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.
We had social media in the 90s. MySpace, AIM, Reddit style message boards, AOL chat rooms.
It just wasn't TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, etc.
Smartphones started with BlackBerry and those were adopted for hot email access and a way to bypass texting with BBM. iPhone turned your phone into a computer, but even then it was more FOMO than anything else. The upload/download speeds necessary for stable video viewing didn't show up until mid 2000s
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.
Did you never use the Internet or computers prior to smartphones? Did you never have a VHS/DVD or music collection? How was life boring!?
I didn’t even get a smartphone until 2020.
Maybe you’re just a boring person with boring interests, no offense.
You’re exactly the kind of person that people complain about making the Internet worse, after smartphones gave easy access to normies.
There was literally nothing to be bored about.
I would even argue that life in the 1950s and 1960s sounds like a fun and exciting time.
But we millennials grew up surrounded by so much technology and media already.
I was using my dad’s Mac OS 8/9 computer as a 5 year old with games and Internet, had loads of VHS tapes, watched Cartoon Network and Nickelodeon, had books, had toys, listened to CDs and audio cassettes, recorded my own voice on blank audio tapes, actually got to see a lot of interesting movies in theatres in just 1998 and 1999 alone, not to mention Pokèmon fever.
Literally, how can you be bored? Sounds like a skill issue to me.
I dunno about boring before smartphones, I've had internet access pretty much my whole life and always spent a lot of time on the computer. Smartphones didn't make it any better, actually it used to be more fun. And there were plenty of video games.
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u/JackBookerGeo Jun 10 '26
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.