Grew up in the 70s and 80s.
After school, kids would roam around on bikes. We’d go to grocery and convenience stores to play the latest arcade games.
Alternately we’d find an empty lot and make our own bike parks out of dirt and whatever scrap wood we could find.
No mobile phones, so nobody knew where anyone was, we’d just agree to meet some place at an agreed time.
Parents didn’t care. “Come home when it gets dark.” When the street lights kicked on, you knew it was time to head home.
You had to think for yourself, because nobody was there to help you. If you wiped out on your bike, blew a tire, got attacked by a dog, or threw a chain, you fixed it yourself or dealt with it yourself, nobody was coming to save you.
Everyone’s saying what was better.
Bullshit, lol.
We were still people, and we still had all the people problems. Misogyny was worse, racism was worse, homophobia was really bad still, and “trans” was just a guy who liked wearing women’s clothes. Not that any man would ever admit that. Schools were super clique-ish, bullying was public and not prevented. Rapes were swept under the rug even worse than today. Pollution was really bad. I don’t think anyone born after 1990 has a clue how shitty the air quality was in cities back in the ‘80s and earlier. I can personally vouch for how amazing the environmental laws are and have improved air quality. Want to buy something that wasn’t available at a local store? Plan on waiting a month or more for it to arrive on order. Cars were more unsafe, often only had lap belts, and wtf is an airbag, lol. Car seats for kids were all but nonexistent. Air travel was crazy expensive, too.
All that said, yeah, there were some good things. We weren’t tied to screens all day. If someone stayed in and watched TV all day all the time you thought something might be wrong with them. We weren’t “on-call” 24-7 with cell phones. Basic jobs were easy to get. All my first jobs were walk in and ask if they needed anyone or just word of mouth, show up, and start working. Mass shootings weren’t the thing they are today. You actually owned the music or games you bought. Local stores had a huge variety of stuff and hadn’t been crushed by walmart and big box stores (I actually remember when big box stores were new and touted as sources of better variety for consumers. Lol, that worked out great). Concert tickets to top bands were less than $10. Local radio was great, your DJ told you about local events, and we had Dr Demento and Casey Kasem on weekends. Nobody was forcing you to pay subscriptions for everything, homes and cars were more affordable, so was education, and health care hadn’t gone nuts yet. You could actually talk to your political opponents, you wanted the same things mostly, it was just how you wanted it to happen was different. Crazy wingnuts were just that. Crazy wingnuts and not mainstream. Nobody gave them platforms unless it was “The National Enquirer.”
So yeah. We had plenty of problems. But there was a lot of good shit too.
the house had one telephone line, but often there were two or three phones sharing it. an incoming call could be for anyone, and would ring all of the phones, and any or all of the phones could answer it or join it just by picking up.
so if one was quiet enough, one could easily eavesdrop on the phone conversation in the kitchen by using the basement phone.
if a call came in while someone was on the line, busy signal. MAYBE call waiting where you put one on hold and answer the incoming.
and of course dialup internet coexisted with all of this. your massive download could get corrupted if someone picked up a phone while you’re connected.
I’m guessing you mean the 20th century in general rather than 1900-1910? Because not many of us are going to be that old.
It was… wonderful and fucking awful in equal amounts. The details have changed between then and now, but the ratio is probably about the same.
Everywhere smelled like an ashtray until the late 90s when smoking bans started picking up steam.
I liked the smell of fresh cigarette smoke. Still do, actually. But yeah, smoking indoors is wild. Can’t believe thst was normal when I was a kid.
Now everyone vapes and smells like Barbie farts instead.
All US college campuses had this smell until around 2010 when they began banning smoking even outside. I miss that smell so much.
Ew
Ya it’s weird. Ever since I was very little I’ve loved the smell of second hand smoke, maybe because it was everywhere. One of my earliest memories is playing with a half full ash tray INSIDE a McDonalds.
I graduated in 2k. I rarely smelled smoke. Even at the parties there wasn’t that much of it. What I did smell came from the older staff and such taking smoking breaks, which were always outside. And I went to school in a red state.
Well there were a lot more bugs and a lot fewer wildfires, for starters.
Things were getting better and people still had some hope.
I think the biggest difference was having/getting to discover things for yourself. No internet to look up whatever. We had to mail order cheat books for our video games if we got stuck. You had to actually watch the movie to see what happened instead of a highlight reel on youtube. For good or bad, it was different.
More specific questions would help. The biggest changes I notice are related to Internet and communication. The fundamentals were about the same. More focus on convenience, less on doing things yourself. I mean the store didn’t sell bags of pre-grated cheese and pre-shredded lettuce - those things would have seemed stupid (well I mean they still are, but somehow they don’t seem like it).
Totally. People would debate facts in arguments because you couldn’t just Google it. Okay, I know you might say it’s the same today with MAGA or whatever. But I mean like silly things like which car is faster, which country is bigger etc, who sang a certain song or played a certain character in a movie.
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Back then it was boring, but the trade off was you could be someone without being the best in the world. What used to be “let me tell you about my friend” became “let me show you this internet video.” You didn’t have to be the top player in the world to be the top player at the arcade. You didn’t have to be a prodigy to have people think your art was cool. The internet moved the goal posts out of reach and we were all suddenly nobody, consumers, wannabe influencers at best. The technology thought to allow everyone to find an audience put us in our place and we’re all nobody now. You get zero views, zero interest, the famous get a billion.
Something I’d like to mention, money was still mostly cash. I remember when credit cards became a thing. Getting credit and loans was rare. If you didn’t have the cash, you didn’t get it.
You could actually feel and count what you spent and realize how many hours of work it took to make. Now it’s just a fuzzy digital idea of how much youve earned and how much you owe.
Interestingly though… There was still the concept of “bad money, blood money, or filthy lucre.” If you thought someone was buying something with money they’d gotten from drugs, or whoring women or hurting people, you had the option of not taking it. Black balling that person and not dealing with them.
Now it’s so digital, and there is no concept of dirty money. The goal is get it anywhere and everywhere at all costs, and that’s wrong. The morality has gone out of trade and economics. And as crazy as that sounds, yes, there used to be morality in economics.
Certainly more than there is since the start of the new millennium.
Now it’s so digital, and there is no concept of dirty money.
Dude’s never heard of crypto.
Like 80% of what drove the rise of Bitcoins value was the drugmarket, ie dirty money. I myself had more than 120 Bitcoins for a few hours. I never invested in any crypto, just to make it clear. I just went to an anonymous automat in a mall, inserted cash, wrote in a crypto wallet address, went home and purchased drugs online.
Had I been a bit smarter I prolly would’ve invested a few euros into bitcoin, but to be fair I’ve not been in a financial situation where I’ve would’ve justified waited for it to grow for 10 years. I would’ve def cashed out at a few k.
Other than that yeah I feel your comment. I remember when all the adults had proper credit cards and kids had Visa Electrons, meaning it needed verification of funds before allowing a purchase, unlike a credit card you could just charge without verification. With one of these.. Dad had one, as he had a taxi. They don’t call it a “click-clack” for nothing. Using it felt like being an actionhero and loading a shotgun.
Are coin pockets even still a thing on jeans btw?
I’ve heard of cryptocurrency/bit coin and spice road, but real physical money and face to face exchange was a different feel.
Rule #3 Internet is anonymous.
It’s the way it is… But it’s different.
I never mentioned anything about a spice road, so either that’s shitty sarcasm or shitty lying.Edit sorry just bad reading by me I read “I’ve never heard of…” instead of “I have heard of”. Apologies.
Yeah cash is different, but dirty money isn’t always cash. If you believe that then you’re probably not aware how larger scale crimes work.
I am kinda annoyed with stores being allowed to not accept cash nowadays. When I was younger and drove a taxi I always had to have my own change on me, and sometimes I was broke when going to work and couldn’t break a 50 or a hundred and I’d just have to lower the fare to a sum I was able to break. Luckily hundreds were pretty rare and not being able to break one wasn’t a big deal. But breaking a 50 was assumed and once you were somewhere 20km from the nearest atm, the only choice for me was to just lower the price. Sometimes they’d tip the difference, but more often than not I had to round down like 5-10€.
If you were a woman, you might not be able to get a credit card, either. I don’t think women regularly being able to get their own credit became a thing until the ‘70’s.
I’m not going to sugar coat it. There were good things and bad things, just like in any era.
On the good side, the standard of living was higher, especially for younger people. Wages, though already stagnating, had not reached the unliveability stage yet, and unions were still common. Communities were stronger because people hadn’t holed up online yet and local media hadn’t collapsed. What existed in terms of an online world was more open and trusting. They didn’t even have encryption on the www before '95 if you can imagine? Politicians were as corrupt as ever, but the media in general were more accountable.
On the bad side, there were a lot more incurable diseases. The Cold War was fucked up. Just knowing everything you know and love could end in 20 minutes just because some idiot turns a key somewhere. The air was actually really dirty in a lot of places. I know there are a lot of parts of the world where that’s still true, but clean air acts did work where implemented. Also, bars were all smoky as fuck. I couldn’t go near one with my asthma.
I could go on, but I’ll end on a more positive note. I was thinking just the other day how astronomy has been going through a golden age of discovery all throughout my life. In my childhood, they were sending out probes to give us the first close up looks at planets in our solar system. Then in the 90s we got the Hubble Space Telescope, we discovered our first exoplanets (planets around other stars) and that there is a 2nd ring system in our own solar system: the Kuiper Belt. Then we found a moon of Saturn with active geysers, Pluto sent us a ❤️, and now we have the James Webb Space Telescope joining massive ground-based telescopes that are just bursting with discoveries across the board. I just can’t get enough of this stuff!
Earth, 2150:
As the last embers of organized human civilization crumbled in the hothouse Earth catastrophe, a handful of astronomers remain in cloistered study, pouring over the data from the last of the great space telescopes, built at the height of 22nd century science. What have they learned? We are not the outlier. In the light of other Suns we find them. Dead world after dead world. Once bastions of life reduced to wastelands of ruin by technological civilization. The majority of Earth-like worlds around Sun-like stars are tombs, rendered unto sterile husks by the actions of their own offspring.
To firmly tease such a conclusion out of such ephemeral evidence as a stellar spectrum was truly a feat of the astronomical art. It required techniques undreamt of and inconceivable by 21st century scholars. But, the last of this civilization’s great astronomer’s found a way. And the conclusion was damning.
Intelligent tool-using life is a terminal disease for life on a world. Once a biosphere has dreamed up a species like ours, that world’s days are numbered. There are many forms that extinction can take, some more exotic than others. But most are through mundane causes like self-induced ecological collapse. For every one case of a civilization destroying itself in a science experiment gone wrong, there are a thousand cases of simple ecological catastrophe.
We are dying. We are alone. We are surrounded by the dead.
There are some very cool videos on YouTube of people from the late 1800’s and early 1900’s describing the experience, and worth listening to.
As for myself, life in the 80’s and 90’s was an adventure every fucking day. I grew up on county land with a huge forest behind it, and my brothers and friends and I were there so often that there were trails we’d made from walking so much. If we weren’t in the woods we were on bikes zooming around the neighborhood or up to the gas station for snacks and drinks. I gained a love of reading and spent a lot of time at the school and local library picking up books and having more adventures in my head. We had huge video game arcades where you could spend hours with your friends too. We watched plenty of TV and movies, but you actually had to commit to it because streaming didn’t exist. (Though VCR’s later mitigated this somewhat.) Lots of us have great memories of video stores though, and yeah, I miss them. And without phones feeding you constant dopamine, it was easier to focus on these things and you enjoyed them more.
Most of us had very few rules and weren’t as closely-minded by our parents as kids are now. We just had to be home by sundown. We took care of ourselves and figured shit out for ourselves, partly why GenX and elder millenials aren’t complainers by nature now.
The downside is, when your friends moved away, they were just gone. You might exchange addresses or phone numbers, but you basically just never stayed in touch because you made new friends to replace the old ones. Long-distance calls were expensive and letters took too long to write when you had shit to do, and with such a big, wide world to explore as a kid, you always had shit to do.
For me, the best way to describe it was that it was just quieter and much more peaceful. It was really nice not being able to read everyone’s mind all the time and not knowing everything that was going on in the world. If someone hated certain types of people, they actually had to say it, and most people weren’t willing to translate their personal biases and hatred into action without the veil of anonymity.
