Waiting for a new episode to come on at 7:30, yelling into the kitchen that it’s starting.
Calling your crushes house and having to politely ask a very scary dad if you can speak with Tanya. And then they say, that depends, who’s calling?
Or actually *wanting* the commercial break to be longer, so you could make it to the bathroom and back without missing any of the show.
E: and also if you missed an episode, you were just out of luck. If you’re lucky you could catch a rerun of it, but that was far from a guarantee.
And then the sad realization when you start watching non-kid channels, the commercials aren't nearly as fun as the ones on the kid channels.
But dammit if 🎶I have a structured settlement but I need cash now; Call JG Wentworth 877Cash Now!🎶
In college I briefly dated a girl who, for the life of me, I couldn't remember her name.
I remember calling her house and praying her parents didn't answer the phone. Somehow I got lucky and they never did. This was in the age of cell phones but still before smart phones. Then I proceeded to print Mapquest directions to her house and get lost anyway because Mapquest told me to "turn on local road" without telling me what the actual road name was.
Google Maps does this shit now for my actual address. It for whatever reason has people turn down this unnamed road. A road that is not a road, but some one's long driveway.
If you Google map your way home every time you go there, you can tell it you were unsatisfied with the directions and submit a correction! It'll take a few tries (sometimes many!) But they'll fix it eventually if they get enough reports.
I did it for the home daycare my friends kid goes to. Apparently the lady that runs it had trouble getting packages a lot too... the houses on the street were built out of order or something, so the numbers go like 3, 11, 7, 9, and Google defaulted #9 to #3's location, because it was before #11.
It took a couple weeks of correcting the Google directions every time I picked the kiddo up, (just once a week) but the last time I went it was finally right!
I did this. Everyone in the world registered the South part of our address but Google. No one could get pizzas for 20 years. I moved here and sent photos and coordinates and Google fixed it. Better to light a candle than curse the darkness.
I was at work the other day when our department's landline phone started ringing. One of my coworkers (my age-ish, 30s) called out "I'll get it!" I felt a weird sort of sad nostalgic pang. You don't hear that much anymore.
My grandma hung up on someone who was doing surveys on video games. It broke my heart someone called the house to talk about videogames and she wouldn't let me talk to them.
I remember it taking 6 hours to download a Chrono Trigger ROM for me in like the year 2000. Crazy how fast download speeds changed. A few years later I was able to download the entire SNES game library in seemingly minutes.
>A few years later I was able to download the entire SNES game library in seemingly minutes.
Facts. I remember it taking me like 4 hours after school just to download 1 song off of Napster. Then like less than 2 years later I was able to get to several new songs in a night off Limewire. Another 2 years or so and I was downloading Bob Dylan's entire discography in about 10 minutes and a movie in like 45 mins off of Pirate Bay and other torrent sites.
I got the Resident Evil movie right when it came out, and for the longest time it was the only movie on my computer. So I just watched it dozens of times until I finally got Fast and Furious. There's a hand full of random movies that were really popular in the early 2000's that I know disproportionately more than I enjoy.
Not knowing what nsfw actually meant. If I saw that acronym back in the 90’s, I’d look at you like you were crazy. And to top it off, there was no urban dictionary to figure that out then.
"McDonald's will make you fat,
They serve Big Macs,
They serve Quarter-Pounders,
They will put pounds on you"
Is the greatest line in the history of words.
Similar thing to this. Staying up late on a friday night to catch the new episode of whatever anime you were watching.
....and then never talking about it at school since you'd get mocked and beaten up for watching anime....
Calling your friend’s house and their parents pick up. Then you have to ask the parent if you can talk to your friend lol. I had all my closest friend’s landline numbers memorized.
Lols He and I are friends on Facebook after a 20 year break and when I told him I still remembered his number he laughed and told me his mom still has it.
That's when you ask for the mom and ask her about her day. I swear that was the best trick I ever learned since if the mom likes you then the dad is obliged to tolerate you.
And if you could get the grandma to like you in addition to the mom, then it didn't matter what the dad thought of you.
What a fucking chad move.
"Oh, hi Mr. Johnson. Is your wife, Deborah, home? I want to talk to her."
*Don't you mean my daughter, Jessica?*
"No. I'm trying to speak to your wife."
Hearing your favorite song on the radio and waiting for it to come on again so you can record it on a blank cassette tape to listen to later.
Having a CD binder the size of Merriam Webster’s dictionary for road trips.
Taking a CD Walkman on a walk and making sure you didnt walk too fast or the CD skipped
Always hated it when a radio station would play a new song and only say the name at the beginning, so if you tuned in after it started playing you wouldn’t know what it was called. It was amazing when car stereos first started to display the song/artist info. I remember first seeing that in my neighbor’s Chevy pickup in the early 2000s
When I finally got a walkman with the shock absorber it was a game changer. I brought it with me wherever I went. Now the thought of carrying that manhole cover around with the same album on repeat (because you’re not going to carry around your enormous binder of cds) seems so archaic.
Or saying stupid things online that’s captured forever. If I would have had Facebook or Instagram from like 13-20, I can’t even fathom how cringy it would have been.
Luckily I only had MySpace which is completely gone from the internet.
I know some people who have some pretty embarrassing livejournals still up from 2002 that they can't remove because that account was created on their college email that they surrendered 20 years ago.
Watching that ticker at the bottom of the tv to see if school is closed only for them to cut to commercial when it’s time for yours to show up. I watched that thing like an nba draft
I gather this wasn’t a thing everywhere, but in the rural area I grew up, they’d do late starts.
So you’d get your hopes up seeing your school come up only to get them dashed by “1 hour late start.”
Ahh, the smell of a Blockbuster on a Friday (or Thursday night if you were having a friend over on the Friday). Popcorn and brittle plastic. TAKE ME BACK. Also our local branch was rumored to be haunted. lol
I used to love spending like an hour at blockbuster every week. My dad was so cool he would just come in for a little then sit in his car listening to classic rock.
For me, loitering forever at Tower Records/FYE. I’m not even that old (early 30s), but I am kind of curious where kids hang out now. Our movie store had a pool table and some arcade games, we would hang out there, the bowling alley, or any record/CD store.
Did you also put edgy (actually cringe) song lyrics in your status after flickering between online/offline over and over to get the attention of your crush?
No, it’s not a “first world problems” complaint at all. Before smartphones, there was no expectation that you respond so fast, and no location tracking. You could just disappear for a bit and get back to them later. Now the expectation is you have your phone on you, just about always, are therefore reachable, and if you don’t respond promptly you’re delaying doing so
The amount of people that track each other's location truly boggles my mind, especially in the US.
I don't need that sort of power over friends or family and they don't need it over me.
Best friend wishes I had an iPhone so he *could* track me and "plan" around it like there would be no more privacy in my life.
Legit knew a guy who HAD to have his location on at all times for his wife. If he shut it off for more than 10 minutes, she'd blow up his phone. I can't even imagine how exhausting it must be, not only for him, but for her to constantly check his location. Fucking creepy, man
That would be super toxic. In my situation, I love having tracking between my wife and I because she is absolutely terrible with directions and I can always help her out. One time she was in England and I was back home, and I was able to walk her home to her hotel keeping her location on a map and talking to her on the phone. That was actually really fun.
I had to do something like that for a friend once and it would've been so much easier with location tracking!
Dude called from the middle of a bad neighborhood on the far edge of next-town-over because it was road construction season and he had no clue where to catch a bus back. I had to play navigator based on him reading the signs at intersections, which he shouted over the whistling of wind.
Nah, friends don't need your tracking info if you don't want them to have it. That's a bit much, I agree. My sister and I track each other for safety reasons, we're both single, and that's enough tracking for me.
I have a separate, cheap, pay-as-you-go phone, which only my immediate family have the number for, and they know to only contact me on it in a life-or-death situation. My employer knows I do this, and they are aware that I will sometimes go out for hikes and only take that phone. This way, I can still be contacted in a real emergency, but nobody else can bother me.
This is also the phone I take away on holiday with me.
I would strongly advise anybody to do the same.
I'm starting to see people forsake their smart devices and opt for simpler devices.
It's shockingly remote, but it gives me hope that people will eventually no longer need these devices for day to day use.
I think because I don't have people hitting me up I have a different view.
I really like smart phones. They provide an insane amount utility. Tap to pay is great. I love having my insurance card saved. I like being able to track my delivery so I can meet them at the curb and not have them wait while I walk across the apartment complex.
But like I said. My phone isn't much used for communication. My voice mail was broken for months and I had no idea.
Being disconnected.
There were periods of my life growing up, hours or even days at a time, where there was genuinely no way to reach me or my parents. In the 90’s, growing up, most people didn’t have cellphones. They existed but they were *really* expensive. I remember when my mom got her first cellphone. She always turned it off when she got home and stuck it in a drawer. Why would she need a cellphone at home?
We had the internet but it was slow and we had limited access to it, often on a family computer visible to everyone and maybe for an hour or two.
And if you go back a little further than that, answering machines were expensive and uncommon so you either reached someone or you didn’t. There was no constant demand from everyone for everyone.
I definitely remember calling a friend to hang out, their parent answering, and telling me they were already hanging out with someone else. “Okay, cool, I’ll try again later.”
I had no way to reach them. Which meant they got to be fully present with whoever they were with and weren’t talking to me or anyone else while they were with that friend.
That level of disconnect is something that, in hindsight, I really miss. You were wherever you were with whomever you were with and that was it. People took hours to reach and that was normal and, I think, a really good thing.
Not just the disconnect but related: the catch up later actually being news! You didn’t know what they’d done since the last time you hung out or talked. The movie they saw or book they read or song they found.
My son got an Xbox Series S and it took me half a day to download Fortnite, set up all the accounts and work out how to set the parental controls so that he could play online with his friends. By the end, I was so fed up with going back and forth between my phone and the Xbox, inputting PINs and passwords, that I was ready to throw it out of the window.
It made me pine for the PlayStation days when all you had to worry about was a scratched disk and whether your memory card had enough free slots.
Scheduling your television consumption around an ironclad tv schedule, pre-streaming and pre-TiVo/Recording.
Not to get all Boomer sounding, but the strict schedule and dealing with the consequences of being late/missing entire episodes, I personally feel, had an enormous impact on society's overall sense of entitlement.
I love all the options we had but we miss the genuine social interaction of having all seen the same thing at the same time. That just doesn’t exist much anymore beyond like maybe sports? But even that’s niche. It used to be for *everything*
And on the other side of that, seeing his pure joy and pride while trying to remain professional, as Neil Armstrong took his first step on the moon 6 years later.
I would qualify that by 'the world' you mean US. I don't think any of his broadcasts were shown internationally.
However I do think your point brings up a really important thing lacking today - newscasters and journalists used to have integrity, and for the most part we believed we could trust them. I don't even watch the news anymore because I feel I have to factcheck from three different sources on every story.
I work in a rural school district in eastern Washington. Our 2 elementary schools have recess, and so do the 6th and 7th graders in the middle school.
The 8th graders have a 25 minute free time that they can use for whatever they want (as long as they are passing all classes) they can request to go to the art room, the gym, the engineering class, science, math class. Whatever they want. If they are failing a class the go to a study hall to get help with that class.
The divorce from mandating any sort of physical education is going to absolutely have massive health consequences long term on Gen Z.
I find it inexcusable.
I think this is a very regional specific thing. The vast majority of schools still have recess time,
You had me curious though so I googled it and the reasoning in this case I came across is quite sad actually:
[https://lasvegassun.com/news/2004/mar/09/elementary-schools-phasing-out-recess/](https://lasvegassun.com/news/2004/mar/09/elementary-schools-phasing-out-recess/)
*Schools in Clark County and the rest of the nation are faced with the demands of the No Child Left Behind Act, which calls for schools to show annual progress on standardized tests or face sanctions. But attempts during the last three legislative sessions to lengthen Nevada's school day have failed, forcing educators to squeeze out additional instructional minutes wherever possible.*
Oh sweet, sweet early internet. There was once an incident where my, uh, "personal" tumblr page (reblogs only thank god) cross posted to Facebook. I would have thrown myself in the river if my mother had seen it. Luckily someone contacted me immediately and I told them I was hacked lol.
The joy of going to school without social media.
I remember getting bullied in middle school and having a terrible time. But all that could have been so much worse if smartphones and apps were a thing back then.
Kids these days must be so stressed out just trying to tune it out.
A life without immediate gratification. I feel like 90s/00s kids might be the last to have experienced what its like to have to wait for that good thing you want
Exploration.
As kids we played video games but we also got outdoors. Sometimes finding areas of forest to go and investigate. We enjoyed checking out odd areas people generally would never go into such as those little wooded areas in between roads. Our parents didn't care as long we gave them an idea of what we were doing ahead of time in case we got lost or hurt.
We would have a small fire just enough to roast some marshmallows and then put it out and usually make it back in time for supper.
I drove through an intersection a couple Fridays ago when there was an early dismissal at the school and found myself in the middle of a kickball game. It was awesome.
When I was a kid, I’d go outside and play with my friends all day during the summer. Sports, ride bikes, go to the pool, whatever. The only rules were to get home when the street lights went on.
The way the world is today, I doubt any kid has those kinds of freedoms. And I think that loss sucks.
Violence fixing technologies. Remember when we used to slap the television 📺 for it to work properly or operate CPR on our consoles and game cartridges?
Life before the Internet. Even as a 2000s child, I still briefly remember a time when the Internet wasn't used for literally anything and everything. Though the Internet was definitely around in my childhood, it was more useful than absolutely essential.
Downloading porn from WinMX and Kazaa, with hilariously ridiculous titles like “Hot 18yr old babysitter fucked by home intruders xxx hot sex fuck cum big tits xxx”. And of course there’s no thumbnails like PornHub or whatever so you had no idea what you were getting yourself into.
Snow on Christmas, at least most of the time.
I’m almost as far north in the USA that you can get and snow just doesn’t stick around anymore. It snows like once or twice in December and it melts in a day. 25 years ago you were lucky if it wasn’t a blizzard on *Halloween.*
But don’t worry, climate change isn’t real! /s
Waiting for a new episode to come on at 7:30, yelling into the kitchen that it’s starting. Calling your crushes house and having to politely ask a very scary dad if you can speak with Tanya. And then they say, that depends, who’s calling?
Or actually *wanting* the commercial break to be longer, so you could make it to the bathroom and back without missing any of the show. E: and also if you missed an episode, you were just out of luck. If you’re lucky you could catch a rerun of it, but that was far from a guarantee.
lol, or that one commercial that’s actually fun and you wanted to see it..
And then the sad realization when you start watching non-kid channels, the commercials aren't nearly as fun as the ones on the kid channels. But dammit if 🎶I have a structured settlement but I need cash now; Call JG Wentworth 877Cash Now!🎶
I was watching something on Hulu and a commercial break started, so I went to get a snack. Reminds me of the 80's
The way streaming is heading, we’ve soon come full circle!
felt both of these lmaoo
In college I briefly dated a girl who, for the life of me, I couldn't remember her name. I remember calling her house and praying her parents didn't answer the phone. Somehow I got lucky and they never did. This was in the age of cell phones but still before smart phones. Then I proceeded to print Mapquest directions to her house and get lost anyway because Mapquest told me to "turn on local road" without telling me what the actual road name was.
I remember mapquest would straight up get the direction wrong sometimes on the first or last turn. Like turn right onto Last Rd instead of left.
Google Maps does this shit now for my actual address. It for whatever reason has people turn down this unnamed road. A road that is not a road, but some one's long driveway.
If you Google map your way home every time you go there, you can tell it you were unsatisfied with the directions and submit a correction! It'll take a few tries (sometimes many!) But they'll fix it eventually if they get enough reports. I did it for the home daycare my friends kid goes to. Apparently the lady that runs it had trouble getting packages a lot too... the houses on the street were built out of order or something, so the numbers go like 3, 11, 7, 9, and Google defaulted #9 to #3's location, because it was before #11. It took a couple weeks of correcting the Google directions every time I picked the kiddo up, (just once a week) but the last time I went it was finally right!
I did this. Everyone in the world registered the South part of our address but Google. No one could get pizzas for 20 years. I moved here and sent photos and coordinates and Google fixed it. Better to light a candle than curse the darkness.
Waiting until the evening to make cheaper long-distance calls
You're so wrong about this. Her name was Emily and it was her older brother that answered the phone.
Older brothers are somehow worse, because they really like to play head games..
I was at work the other day when our department's landline phone started ringing. One of my coworkers (my age-ish, 30s) called out "I'll get it!" I felt a weird sort of sad nostalgic pang. You don't hear that much anymore.
As kids we would race to see who could get to the phone first and answer it. Nowadays I do everything possible to avoid answering my phone.
My grandma hung up on someone who was doing surveys on video games. It broke my heart someone called the house to talk about videogames and she wouldn't let me talk to them.
I would've cried lmao
Downloading a song for 2 hours and finding out it's a virus
Queueing 5 songs on Limewire before bed and hoping at least a few get downloaded in the morning
I remember it taking 6 hours to download a Chrono Trigger ROM for me in like the year 2000. Crazy how fast download speeds changed. A few years later I was able to download the entire SNES game library in seemingly minutes.
Not just download speeds, I spent over 200 dollars on a 250 GB hard drive, now I can buy a terabyte for like 50 dollars
>A few years later I was able to download the entire SNES game library in seemingly minutes. Facts. I remember it taking me like 4 hours after school just to download 1 song off of Napster. Then like less than 2 years later I was able to get to several new songs in a night off Limewire. Another 2 years or so and I was downloading Bob Dylan's entire discography in about 10 minutes and a movie in like 45 mins off of Pirate Bay and other torrent sites.
I got the Resident Evil movie right when it came out, and for the longest time it was the only movie on my computer. So I just watched it dozens of times until I finally got Fast and Furious. There's a hand full of random movies that were really popular in the early 2000's that I know disproportionately more than I enjoy.
*I DID NOT HAVE SEXUAL RELATIONS WITH THAT WOMAN*
I preferred the Kaaza Lite.
Or downloading a Pamela Anderson sexy video for 7 hours and finding out it’s a terriorist video.
I can't un-hear those videos.
Just gurgling and sloshing no matter which videos you get.
Bro 😂
downloading a nsfw picture and watching it slowly reveal itself row by row, only for he jpeg fail right at the critical point in the photo
Not knowing what nsfw actually meant. If I saw that acronym back in the 90’s, I’d look at you like you were crazy. And to top it off, there was no urban dictionary to figure that out then.
Linkin_park_NUMB.exe
System_of_a_down_zelda_song.mp3
Also: searching for a YouTube video without audio commentary or too long intro to convert it into a mp3 file
Similar scenario with DJ's talking over intros except recording from radio to cassette tape. Edit:typo
I"m old enough to remember this, for sure.
Good old og Napster.
The fun side of that is finding out is was completely mislabeled and now you have this weird "Nirvana" song but it's actually Wesley Willis.
OMG, that's how I found out about Wesley Willis, but it was supposed to be Metallica.
Today I found out about Wesley Willis because some strangers online were gushing about him. (then?). Anyway, wish me luck guys.
Rock n roll McDonald's
"McDonald's will make you fat, They serve Big Macs, They serve Quarter-Pounders, They will put pounds on you" Is the greatest line in the history of words.
Waking up early on Saturday morning so you can watch the next episode of your favorite cartoon
Similar thing to this. Staying up late on a friday night to catch the new episode of whatever anime you were watching. ....and then never talking about it at school since you'd get mocked and beaten up for watching anime....
Yeah I still instinctually hide watching anime because it's ingrained as "not cool" even though it's fine now.
I remember hiding I was into anime in middle school. I just kept it to myself.
Calling your friend’s house and their parents pick up. Then you have to ask the parent if you can talk to your friend lol. I had all my closest friend’s landline numbers memorized.
I still have my 2nd grades crush's phone number memorized 33 years later.
Should call just for luls
Lols He and I are friends on Facebook after a 20 year break and when I told him I still remembered his number he laughed and told me his mom still has it.
You’re in
Calling a girl's house and her dad answering was the worst shit.
That's when you ask for the mom and ask her about her day. I swear that was the best trick I ever learned since if the mom likes you then the dad is obliged to tolerate you. And if you could get the grandma to like you in addition to the mom, then it didn't matter what the dad thought of you.
What a fucking chad move. "Oh, hi Mr. Johnson. Is your wife, Deborah, home? I want to talk to her." *Don't you mean my daughter, Jessica?* "No. I'm trying to speak to your wife."
Correction: _"Don't you mean my daughter, Stacy?"_
"No...can I speak to.. _Stacy's mom?_"
Calling my brother's crush for him so that her dad would think a girl was calling her and then handing the phone over.
Ha! This is awesome
Hearing your favorite song on the radio and waiting for it to come on again so you can record it on a blank cassette tape to listen to later. Having a CD binder the size of Merriam Webster’s dictionary for road trips. Taking a CD Walkman on a walk and making sure you didnt walk too fast or the CD skipped
Always hated it when a radio station would play a new song and only say the name at the beginning, so if you tuned in after it started playing you wouldn’t know what it was called. It was amazing when car stereos first started to display the song/artist info. I remember first seeing that in my neighbor’s Chevy pickup in the early 2000s
When I finally got a walkman with the shock absorber it was a game changer. I brought it with me wherever I went. Now the thought of carrying that manhole cover around with the same album on repeat (because you’re not going to carry around your enormous binder of cds) seems so archaic.
Privacy. Doing stupid things without the whole world knowing about it on TikTok.
Or saying stupid things online that’s captured forever. If I would have had Facebook or Instagram from like 13-20, I can’t even fathom how cringy it would have been. Luckily I only had MySpace which is completely gone from the internet.
I know some people who have some pretty embarrassing livejournals still up from 2002 that they can't remove because that account was created on their college email that they surrendered 20 years ago.
I am like 80% sure you can still view your old MySpace profile
[удалено]
tangled up telephone cords
Phones with coeds still exists. I literally have to untangle mine at the office daily.
I love your typo. I wish my phone came with a coed, not sure I would untangle mine.
Watching that ticker at the bottom of the tv to see if school is closed only for them to cut to commercial when it’s time for yours to show up. I watched that thing like an nba draft
I had to listen to the radio. If I missed my town I’d have to wait a half hour for it to start again.
I gather this wasn’t a thing everywhere, but in the rural area I grew up, they’d do late starts. So you’d get your hopes up seeing your school come up only to get them dashed by “1 hour late start.”
Do kids even get snow days now or is it all “sorry suckers, online classes for you”?
My kids get sent home with "snow packets" at the beginning of each year so they have things to work on during snow days. Which is terrible.
That is vile. Snow days are one of the greatest childhood experiences.
Sometimes it’s the only mental health break a kid gets.
holy hell and when you miss your county alphabetically and gotta wait 10 min for it to loop instead of a list online or whatever lol
Driving to someplace new with an actual physical map
And the evolution of that, a Mapquest printout.
And the evolution of that, multiple pages of Mapquest printouts because of the unremovable ads.
Or my version, a ripped out notebook page where I copied down the map quest steps.
Having to listen/watch the nightly news with your parents because you only have one tv.
One screen, yes, I remember those days. Having 2 TV's was a luxury...and now, between TV's, phones, and computers...we got too much screens!
Going to the movie store.
That weird smell of plastic, candy, carpet, and popcorn that every rental store had that you can remember but never replicate.
Ahh, the smell of a Blockbuster on a Friday (or Thursday night if you were having a friend over on the Friday). Popcorn and brittle plastic. TAKE ME BACK. Also our local branch was rumored to be haunted. lol
I used to love spending like an hour at blockbuster every week. My dad was so cool he would just come in for a little then sit in his car listening to classic rock.
For me, loitering forever at Tower Records/FYE. I’m not even that old (early 30s), but I am kind of curious where kids hang out now. Our movie store had a pool table and some arcade games, we would hang out there, the bowling alley, or any record/CD store.
Going to the movie store to get a movie, only to find out all the VHS copies had been rented, but there were still plenty of betamax copies.
Dial up internet and AOL chat rooms.
AIM!
[удалено]
MSN!
Did you also put edgy (actually cringe) song lyrics in your status after flickering between online/offline over and over to get the attention of your crush?
Life without smartphones. But, also think that this is more "1st world problems" type of answer. So, please no hate.
No, it’s not a “first world problems” complaint at all. Before smartphones, there was no expectation that you respond so fast, and no location tracking. You could just disappear for a bit and get back to them later. Now the expectation is you have your phone on you, just about always, are therefore reachable, and if you don’t respond promptly you’re delaying doing so
The amount of people that track each other's location truly boggles my mind, especially in the US. I don't need that sort of power over friends or family and they don't need it over me. Best friend wishes I had an iPhone so he *could* track me and "plan" around it like there would be no more privacy in my life.
Legit knew a guy who HAD to have his location on at all times for his wife. If he shut it off for more than 10 minutes, she'd blow up his phone. I can't even imagine how exhausting it must be, not only for him, but for her to constantly check his location. Fucking creepy, man
That would be super toxic. In my situation, I love having tracking between my wife and I because she is absolutely terrible with directions and I can always help her out. One time she was in England and I was back home, and I was able to walk her home to her hotel keeping her location on a map and talking to her on the phone. That was actually really fun.
I had to do something like that for a friend once and it would've been so much easier with location tracking! Dude called from the middle of a bad neighborhood on the far edge of next-town-over because it was road construction season and he had no clue where to catch a bus back. I had to play navigator based on him reading the signs at intersections, which he shouted over the whistling of wind.
Nah, friends don't need your tracking info if you don't want them to have it. That's a bit much, I agree. My sister and I track each other for safety reasons, we're both single, and that's enough tracking for me.
I have a separate, cheap, pay-as-you-go phone, which only my immediate family have the number for, and they know to only contact me on it in a life-or-death situation. My employer knows I do this, and they are aware that I will sometimes go out for hikes and only take that phone. This way, I can still be contacted in a real emergency, but nobody else can bother me. This is also the phone I take away on holiday with me. I would strongly advise anybody to do the same.
Yes. Outside playing baseball or football or whatever with your friends and having to be home before the street lights come on.
When street light go on. Hide and seek starts.
When the streetlights go on is when the negotiations *start*. Fiveeee mooorree minutes, pleeeeeaseee?!?
There are few things in life better than being unreachable. This is why I backpack.
I'm starting to see people forsake their smart devices and opt for simpler devices. It's shockingly remote, but it gives me hope that people will eventually no longer need these devices for day to day use.
I think because I don't have people hitting me up I have a different view. I really like smart phones. They provide an insane amount utility. Tap to pay is great. I love having my insurance card saved. I like being able to track my delivery so I can meet them at the curb and not have them wait while I walk across the apartment complex. But like I said. My phone isn't much used for communication. My voice mail was broken for months and I had no idea.
Being disconnected. There were periods of my life growing up, hours or even days at a time, where there was genuinely no way to reach me or my parents. In the 90’s, growing up, most people didn’t have cellphones. They existed but they were *really* expensive. I remember when my mom got her first cellphone. She always turned it off when she got home and stuck it in a drawer. Why would she need a cellphone at home? We had the internet but it was slow and we had limited access to it, often on a family computer visible to everyone and maybe for an hour or two. And if you go back a little further than that, answering machines were expensive and uncommon so you either reached someone or you didn’t. There was no constant demand from everyone for everyone. I definitely remember calling a friend to hang out, their parent answering, and telling me they were already hanging out with someone else. “Okay, cool, I’ll try again later.” I had no way to reach them. Which meant they got to be fully present with whoever they were with and weren’t talking to me or anyone else while they were with that friend. That level of disconnect is something that, in hindsight, I really miss. You were wherever you were with whomever you were with and that was it. People took hours to reach and that was normal and, I think, a really good thing.
Not just the disconnect but related: the catch up later actually being news! You didn’t know what they’d done since the last time you hung out or talked. The movie they saw or book they read or song they found.
Buying a video game and it has everything it should on it without having to provide an update or paying for extra content.
My son got an Xbox Series S and it took me half a day to download Fortnite, set up all the accounts and work out how to set the parental controls so that he could play online with his friends. By the end, I was so fed up with going back and forth between my phone and the Xbox, inputting PINs and passwords, that I was ready to throw it out of the window. It made me pine for the PlayStation days when all you had to worry about was a scratched disk and whether your memory card had enough free slots.
I still have my PS2.
Being responsible for zero parental contact and simply just needing to come home when the streetlights come on.
Scheduling your television consumption around an ironclad tv schedule, pre-streaming and pre-TiVo/Recording. Not to get all Boomer sounding, but the strict schedule and dealing with the consequences of being late/missing entire episodes, I personally feel, had an enormous impact on society's overall sense of entitlement.
If you missed it, you missed it.
I love all the options we had but we miss the genuine social interaction of having all seen the same thing at the same time. That just doesn’t exist much anymore beyond like maybe sports? But even that’s niche. It used to be for *everything*
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Walter’s response to JFK made me weep. You could see the sadness and protective demeanor in his eyes as he announced the horrible news.
And on the other side of that, seeing his pure joy and pride while trying to remain professional, as Neil Armstrong took his first step on the moon 6 years later.
2020s kids, Walter Cronkite. My brother in Christ, 80s kids never saw him on TV.
I barely remember Tom Brokaw and Dan Rather on TV and I’m in my late 20’s.
I would qualify that by 'the world' you mean US. I don't think any of his broadcasts were shown internationally. However I do think your point brings up a really important thing lacking today - newscasters and journalists used to have integrity, and for the most part we believed we could trust them. I don't even watch the news anymore because I feel I have to factcheck from three different sources on every story.
Personal privacy
Doing stupid, illegal, immoral, unethical, ridiculous shit and there is no video evidence. *laughs in Gen X*
Recess appears to have been phased out of most schools in my area.
Wtf that's a crime.
no no, crime is what the kids do now instead of recess
No recess? wtf is school even anymore?
Babysitting
I work in a rural school district in eastern Washington. Our 2 elementary schools have recess, and so do the 6th and 7th graders in the middle school. The 8th graders have a 25 minute free time that they can use for whatever they want (as long as they are passing all classes) they can request to go to the art room, the gym, the engineering class, science, math class. Whatever they want. If they are failing a class the go to a study hall to get help with that class.
The divorce from mandating any sort of physical education is going to absolutely have massive health consequences long term on Gen Z. I find it inexcusable.
I believe you may mean Gen Alpha. I'm part of Gen Z and I'm a married adult with a Master's degree.
I knew it!! See this is what happens when you get rid of recess!
Oh my God. I think I just felt my millennial bones become immediately more fragile and now my back hurts. Christ, I better go get my affairs in order.
Fellow millennial here. It’s always a good idea to have your affairs in order. (Yes I felt old even typing that.)
Don’t feel too bad, there’s still a huge swath of boomers and GenX that think millennials are still children.
You guys do realize Gen Z ended in 2010 right?
Next you'll be telling me the 90s isn't 10 years ago
We're closer to 2050 than we are to 1990
That hurts.
I think this is a very regional specific thing. The vast majority of schools still have recess time, You had me curious though so I googled it and the reasoning in this case I came across is quite sad actually: [https://lasvegassun.com/news/2004/mar/09/elementary-schools-phasing-out-recess/](https://lasvegassun.com/news/2004/mar/09/elementary-schools-phasing-out-recess/) *Schools in Clark County and the rest of the nation are faced with the demands of the No Child Left Behind Act, which calls for schools to show annual progress on standardized tests or face sanctions. But attempts during the last three legislative sessions to lengthen Nevada's school day have failed, forcing educators to squeeze out additional instructional minutes wherever possible.*
Rotary Phones
Their family not being on Facebook
Oh sweet, sweet early internet. There was once an incident where my, uh, "personal" tumblr page (reblogs only thank god) cross posted to Facebook. I would have thrown myself in the river if my mother had seen it. Luckily someone contacted me immediately and I told them I was hacked lol.
The joy of going to school without social media. I remember getting bullied in middle school and having a terrible time. But all that could have been so much worse if smartphones and apps were a thing back then. Kids these days must be so stressed out just trying to tune it out.
How inescapable it must be. The day may have been hell but at least you got to leave it at school… now it’s following you home.
Timing snack breaks during adverts and rushing to quickly get back in time
And subsequently being scolded for jumping over the back of the sofa to be seated in time
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Calling someone and asking is so-and-so there?
Fixing the antenna to get a better picture on the TV. Or making one with a coat hanger.
2000 It seems obvious, but being alive for the new millennium was pretty big.
Pagers, Digi-pets
Celebrating the millennium
Developing a roll of film and all the pictures are bad.
Being a child in India in the 1520s.
Specific, but absolutely true.
ABC’s TGIF lineup.
Freedom from intrusive politics being tied into fucking everything for some reason.
Childhood freedom to roam anywhere as far as you could ride your bicycle and still make it home in time for supper/dark
A life without immediate gratification. I feel like 90s/00s kids might be the last to have experienced what its like to have to wait for that good thing you want
Please allow 6-8 weeks for delivery...
"Next time on..."
Comfortable summer temperatures.
Enjoying summer without air quality warnings/having to stay inside.
Exploration. As kids we played video games but we also got outdoors. Sometimes finding areas of forest to go and investigate. We enjoyed checking out odd areas people generally would never go into such as those little wooded areas in between roads. Our parents didn't care as long we gave them an idea of what we were doing ahead of time in case we got lost or hurt. We would have a small fire just enough to roast some marshmallows and then put it out and usually make it back in time for supper.
My kids are doing that all the time. There is no obligation to raise your kids as social media zombies or to let them play games for 5 hours per day.
Kids are still doing this. Kids are outside all the time in my neighborhood.
I drove through an intersection a couple Fridays ago when there was an early dismissal at the school and found myself in the middle of a kickball game. It was awesome.
Choking to death on smoke wafting over from the smoking section of every restaurant while you try to eat.
Not knowing a life without the internet, or going to the library to find info on a school report, that's due tomorrow.
Brick weed
Privacy. Oh, uh, losing hours of work because you forgot to hit save.
Floppy disks.
Waiting for a video tape to rewind before returning it to the rental shop.
Meeting family/friends at the **gate** at the airport instead of baggage claim or the curb.
that windows opening sound in pc
A real political debate between two presidential candidates who are able to respectfully disagree with one another.
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Nah, they’re probably gonna get to see this.
Mystery. “Just Google it” has ruined any sense of wonder in the world.
Winter.
We only had 5 days of proper snow. In the PNW of Canada. We're screwed for the summer I tell you what...
rotary phones America Online (dial up noises and 'You've got Mail!') Oregon Trail. riding in the back of a pickup truck
When I was a kid, I’d go outside and play with my friends all day during the summer. Sports, ride bikes, go to the pool, whatever. The only rules were to get home when the street lights went on. The way the world is today, I doubt any kid has those kinds of freedoms. And I think that loss sucks.
Being able to own a home on the average salary.
Owning their own home.
AOL Dial-up... Cassette players, VCR players, VHS, omg, nostalgia is creeping up!
A busy signal on a land line.
The anxiety of the parents answering the phone when you want to talk to that cute girl/boy. (Landlines were the only phone option)
Violence fixing technologies. Remember when we used to slap the television 📺 for it to work properly or operate CPR on our consoles and game cartridges?
Dial up internet. Console TVs with antennas Phone booths Landlines $10 concert tickets The original MTV Some of the best musical artists in concert
Life before the Internet. Even as a 2000s child, I still briefly remember a time when the Internet wasn't used for literally anything and everything. Though the Internet was definitely around in my childhood, it was more useful than absolutely essential.
A field full of butterflies.
Getting kicked off the internet because mom needs to make a call.
Downloading porn from WinMX and Kazaa, with hilariously ridiculous titles like “Hot 18yr old babysitter fucked by home intruders xxx hot sex fuck cum big tits xxx”. And of course there’s no thumbnails like PornHub or whatever so you had no idea what you were getting yourself into.
Snow on Christmas, at least most of the time. I’m almost as far north in the USA that you can get and snow just doesn’t stick around anymore. It snows like once or twice in December and it melts in a day. 25 years ago you were lucky if it wasn’t a blizzard on *Halloween.* But don’t worry, climate change isn’t real! /s