Anyone born in the 1900’s would be at least 117. You’ll struggle to find anyone from back then.
This might be the worst possible way to get a genuine feel for what life was like. For whom?
Industrialization and telephones were ubiquitous. We’d witness the rise of automobiles, flight, antibiotics, DNA, nuclear power, computers, space exploration…
A massive shift towards urbanization. Life expectancy jumped up. Migration took off. Society became more consolidated, diverse, and aged.
Human rights started getting more institutionalized. Civil rights and feminist movements made great gains. Globalism and mass consumer culture similarly boomed.
A great depression and two world wars generated a sense of unity from people coming together to get through hard times and overcome common enemies, but it deteriorated quickly under the pressure of rapidly shifting cultures and lifestyles.
A person’s experience of this depends on a lot. People in different demographics would have drastically different stories to tell.
Imho the best way to get a broad feel is to track the technology. People were able to call each other, travel long distances with relative ease, get effective medicine for common maladies, and pop into the corner store to buy handy items.
But it was a lot harder to access information generally, and a lot less was available before everyone was carrying around gps enabled cameras all the time. It was a lot easier to believe in urban legends and a lot harder to understand how advanced technology worked.
To counteract all the rose colored glasses looking back decades and the doom and gloom now …….
We also had the Cold War. Mutually Assured Destruction. And you never knew whether anyone would be M.A.D. Enough to end the world. Later on we found out they were, and at least one time the world didn’t end because of a Russian specialist disobeying launch orders
there was no expectation to be constantly immediately available. you didn’t have the world at your fingertips, so there was no pressure to immediately resolve all situations.
it was nice. slower. less pressure.
oh and the lower level of blatant exploitation and theft by mega corps and the uber wealthy was nice. not good enough still, but better than now
I was born in 1999 and am therefore completely qualified to talk about life in the 1900s. It was a lot of milk drinking and shitting in diapers.
Ah I’m glad to hear from a typical 90s kid about it! Lol <- to prove I’m older than that.
The good old days.
The streets were paved with gold and everyone said “hello” to strangers in the street with a smile. Getting a job was a matter of walking up to a person in a suit and giving them a firm handshake. VAR wasn’t a thing in sports because the referees got every decision right. Cats and dogs got along fine with each other. Everyone had enough friends to play Goldeneye on N64 multiplayer. People didn’t gain weight despite eating no vegetables. They hadn’t invented 2nd hand smoking yet so everyone was free to smoke inside without it affecting anyone else. Musicians did drugs but never OD’d, just produced classic albums on demand. People read books constantly and you could expect to strike up a conversation with a petrol station employee about Satre where you’d get caught for hours marveling at their insight. You could have 3 pints at lunch during the working day with your boss. Concorde took you across the Atlantic in a matter of hours. Everyone had a tamagotchi and none of them starved.
This is what they took from us.
I was born in the late 70s so I can comment on the 80s onwards.
It was ok. It’s better now though. Some stuff got worse. A lot got better. We know more, have better toys, live longer, cheaper travel and so on.
The major thing that’s worse is the internet blasting every negative thing into your brain 24/7
You could be unreachable and your job would have to accept that fact. There was typically a single landline per house so if it was busy or you weren’t there then they had to suck it up.
You weren’t pressured by society that you must be efficient in your leisure time. Play a game, best become the best at it otherwise you’re a loser now. Painting something? You best be Van Gough in quality or it’s shit. Feels like people forgot you’re not supposed to monetize your hobbies, there were there to get away from work.
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.
It’s funny to hear my childhood years described and it feels like this when past times were described when I was a kid:
Same here. When we weren’t outside in the yard or the pool, we were out in the woods.
My parents installed a large bell that my Mom could ring for dinner time, that we could hear from far away.
The only time my parents objected was when we described the fort that some neighbor kids had built, “you know they stole that material from our house under construction, right?”
This depended entirely on where you lived. My parents were divorced and one lived in the country and one lived in the suburbs. I could ride freely around the neighborhood in both places, which was literally within sight of my house, but beyond that were dangerous roads and nowhere nearby to go anyway.
Neighboring kids were hard to find. In the country, there were 5 houses on our road and only one had kids my age. We were kinda friends but they were kinda weird.
The suburban neighborhood had 25 homes, and all the kids were older or younger. I never met anyone my age in that neighborhood.
Hanging out with friends meant you called them to see if they could come over. If both parents agreed and one was available to drive, you had a friend for the day.
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.
One other thing that was ubiquitous… Cigarettes, and consequently cigarette smoke; EVERYWHERE!! Doesn’t matter whether you smoked or not, you smelled like cigarettes. Every bar, every restaurant, every club… Bus stops, movie theaters, trains… Cigarettes
You’re right, lol. I completely forgot. “Smoking or non?” was a completely normal question when entering a restaurant, and bars or whatever didn’t bother asking. A night out meant smelling like cigarette smoke when you got home.
How quickly we forget.
Pollution was really bad
1970-1980’s was the first environmental movement. We were all excited to change the world. Some of the worst cases of pollution were because people finally cared enough to find them. Some things didn’t work and something’s had backtracking
This was the era of huge successes like the clean air act, clean water act, and bottle deposit laws! Superfund cleanup for the worst of the worst.
Cars were more unsafe
Car safety was becoming a concern and we started doing something about it
Air travel was crazy expensive
But also the rise of discount airlines
No shit. The question was “what was life like?” Not “what changed everything?”
I’m well aware of the things I mentioned because they’re different than today which is what the question asked for.
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.
Lived through this world
- my grandparents were on a party line for ast my college graduation
- my parents built their house when AT&T started being opened up, so it was a new thing that we had many phone jacks throughout the house without having to pay them
- my parents had a single phone line, shared among multiple phones and dialup
- in the 80s I started knowing people with multiple phone lines, for dialup and voice.
- about 1990 I got my own ISDN connection for high speed internet (arguably before internet existed) so I didn’t have to block my voice line
To be complete, dsl in the late 90s, then fiber in early 00s, gigabit fiber in 2020
Everywhere smelled like an ashtray until the late 90s when smoking bans started picking up steam.
If you went to a bar, or a bowling alley, everything you had on you smelled of smoke until it was thoroughly washed.
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.
The problem is it isn’t usually fresh. At the time I didn’t mind that so much either but the lingering smell of stale smoke and ash tray over clothes, hair, buildings, was always a problem.
Now that we don’t live with the constant stench, I realize even fresh smoke was never good. It was only less bad than the stale lingering stench and we didn’t have clean air to compare to
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.
I graduated in 1988, in a blue state.
I saw things go from smoking everywhere, to there being non-smoking sections, to eventually no smoking inside
While there were still way too many smokers, they were already becoming less common. I saw smoking go from something the “cool kids” did, to individuals saying “come on out with me for a smoke so I’m not alone”
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.
Well there were a lot more bugs and a lot fewer wildfires, for starters.
