Ask Lemmy

Most people you'd meet in real life were still jerks, but there was less existential dread. It was more "you win some, you lose some" and less "humanity is doomed and the human condition is irredeemable."

Products were designed to last.

Most of the people you'd chat with on the internet were curious, benevolent nerds, not narcissistic political hacks.

Model 1964 human here.. Life in the past was a lot more free if you were a kid.

After school we'd be out the door with rocket boosters on and not come back inside until it got dark. Parents didn't know where we were, and usually didn't care as long as we did not get into trouble.

Rode bikes everywhere and played at the parks or would go to friends houses that had color TVs and watch afternoon cartoons. The closest we'd got to electronics would be a small AM/FM transistor radio. (If you got one of those, you were super lucky! I had this model.)

If you got 50 cents from the parents you were set for the day. Could get a can of Coke and a candy bar.

For the grownups, politics could be just as harrowing, Vietnam was a super hot topic and as kids, yeah you'd see lots of fucked up vets..

It's easy to look back and say "Ah, the good old days.." esp. if you were a kid - since mom and dad were doing the heavy lifting, but things were slower and the speed of stuff today seems to be down to the fact that people do not understand that they CAN slow down.

When we got internet in 1999, we bailed on the cable TV - having both was too costly. In the 27 years we're not had a TV (attached to cable service - I do game on a 50-inch 4k WalMart special (not-so) smart TV..) it's been a real show, watching friends and family get sucked up and into the maw of the mainstream media. Shit's poison.

You really want to slow down and touch grass, kick as much of the commercial-driven media as you can, to the curb.

You have a lot of answers to go through so there’s just one thing I will focus on: bees and clover.

Where I grew up, nearly every space with grass - so backyards, parks, etc - had at least some amount of clover in it. And more importantly, there were honeybees all over that clover. I distinctly remember as a kid being more afraid of honeybees than most kids. And walking through a field of grass with clover scared me because I knew there would be honeybees all over.

Nowadays, I don’t know if there’s less clover but there are so much less honeybees around. More often than not when I see clover I don’t see bees on it, and that’s very different from when I was a kid.

Born in the late 80s, making me a 90s kid.

My siblings, neighbors, and I would play in the woods behind our neighborhood. There were trails and a creek that flowed through it. My older brothers and their friends would build bridges over the water (which vandals would destroy, so they rebuilt several times.) My parents allowed me to go play there as long as I didn't go alone. There was evidence of past generations playing in the same place, like platforms from old tree houses that had mostly fallen apart and strings along the tree line from old cup+string "phones" that kids in the past used to communicate. I'd also pick wild blueberries and climb trees. My siblings would fish and just chill.

We were among the last families to give their kids such freedom. One of our neighbor families had early "helicopter parents," so the kids lived very different childhoods from us. I remember other parents talking about that family, almost always disparagingly about how the kids were always stuck at home and were being raised on video games. It was like most adults saw adventuring outdoors with other kids as a typical way to spend childhood. I learned to navigate on my own, walking and bike riding around town without any way to contact my parents for hours on end. It was normal, it was expected, it was even seen as important for a child's budding independence.

Some kids would use payphones to make prank calls. There was one trail behind a park where somebody left a bunch of porn magazines, because it seems every town had a random "porn mag" patch somewhere. It was the first time I saw adult content, and I remember us kids treating it like it was funny.

I spent a lot of my childhood outdoors. My first kiss was on a nature trail in my home town. There was even a tire swing that the boy pushed me on, before we walked to the edge of the inlet for that first kiss moment.

When indoors, I played NES and SNES games. My family also played board games and my siblings and I made up our own creative games to play together. Car rides were great, too, with plenty of time to stare out the window and let my mind wander. At one point my mom bought a van and it came with a heavy-ass TV for the back, but my parents got rid of it. It only played VHS tapes and although at first I thought it would've been so cool to have a TV in the vehicle, I look back on it now and am glad that we didn't keep it. Even when we drove for 25 hours to get to Florida, I didn't miss having a screen. I brought books, a portable CD player, and toys, then spent most of the time gazing outside anyway. I remember seeing the full moon in the sky and thinking about how cool it was that it was always there, no matter where I went...

Thanks for the walk down memory lane. I often think about the shitty parts of my childhood, so it's nice to remember the parts that didn't suck. I'm really glad I got to enjoy the outdoors as much as I did, without being treated like a delinquent for having a childhood that mirrored all the generations of children that came before me.

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

I was mid-late teens when the internet started to become widespread. I didn't like the idea, had a bad feeling about it. Then I relaxed a bit and the more I used it, became comfortable with it.

Social media is what I was initially worried about, though I wouldn't have been able to know it back then. I"d want the pre-internet world back if I had one wish.

People were generally more respectful and forgiving to one another. There was a sense of we're in this together that has steadily eroded. We had our problems mind you, but I was sure my generation and I would make things better. By and large the only people saying everything's fucked were the "end is nigh" crazies in the streets.

Maybe my perspective was just more idealistic back then (excluding the internet), and the world was just as grim as it seems today.

But having college graduates reject AI--that gives me a little hope.

I remember accepting candy from a man in a white van when I was six years old, in 1968. Afterwards I went and played with my friend. No rape at all, just candy. Life was simple and good.

The Internet was slow and weird (in a good way).

The food wasn't great.

And the music was distressingly square.

Books and CDs/casettes were much more important and impressive. Kind of like magical in a way. You can say they still are, but imo it's not the same. Back then you had to buy them or risk forever losing that piece of media. You liked two songs but you got the whole CD anyway, you got that book just in case and if you were into collecting images you would buy loads, on stuff you didn't even care about, just because the photos were interesting.

Video rental places had an energy similar to a candy shop. You wanted to taste all of them.

In a way all those media now feel maybe valuable, collectible, but not really essential. They aren't as special anymore. I think it's easy to imagine what it was like but if you didn't live through it you wouldn't fully get it, it's like explaining doing drugs or giving birth, one of those things that you can easily understand logically but only when you experience it you grasp the concept entirely. Crazy to think that probably most things from our cultural past are exactly like that and no matter how much we study them we will never truly understand them.

Get offa my lawn

More specific questions would help. The biggest changes I notice are related to Internet and communication. The fundamentals were about the same. Now there's 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).

Lots of ppl have happy memories but all my memories sucked on the day to day living:

Wanted to learn something new or fact check it? Nope not happening unless it was in a library. Wanted to see a cat in a frog hat? Not happening.

Central Air was way less common

Everything we ate was super unhealthy unless your family made it. See movie super size me for reference.

TV had no pause. In fact you had read news paper to figure out what was showing when. Then you had to rent physical copies and sometimes fight for it like black friday for 2 day rental or have to wait until next week.

Wanted to pirate a song? You had to wait for it to be on air to hit record. So you miss a bit.

Nothing small portable anything. Cell phones and some tvs had radiation. Walkmen with radio were size of a thick sandwich.

Internet was slow when it first came out and you couldn't be on it for long as it was expensive and used up the phone.

Ppl listen into your call from another phone in house.

Rotary phones hurt my finders.

No cordless anything. Wires everywhere.

Smog was everywhere.

Acid rain was everywhere.

Being bullied was standard thing.

And the clothing options! What a joke.

Better in a lot of ways

Imagine life with no internet, no cell phones, and personal computers were both very rare and very few people knew how to use them.

People were a lot less emotionally literate or aware of mental health issues. Autism and ADHD went undiagnosed if you were able to compensate half decently (you were just treated like you were being difficult on purpose). And kids were more brutal to each other.

The music was on point, though. I still enjoy me some Goldfinger.

It was just easier. I grew up after the Vietnam war and before the gulf one.

There was more help for people from the government. There was more freedom in daily life.living was easier. A 17year old could get a roommate and support themselves living independently working part time at fast food places. Simply having a job was enough to live.

There was a difference between being poor and being in poverty.

College was something you could get a job and work through with minimal debt.

Computers were just getting popular when I was young and it was easy to get a job based On what would now be basic technical skills.

The internet made noises and was crunchy.

People still struggled but I was easier for my generation than it is for the current kids.

Them dang Krauts stirred up trouble not once, but TWICE! then some idiot teli personality with dementia up his hoohaw became president in the USA and things went to shit, also kind of TWICE! And now the same thing looky be happening again. At least this pandemic wasn't as bad as that Spanish Flu.

I miss the onion belts...

We can’t bust heads like we used to, but we have our ways. One trick is to tell them stories that don’t go anywhere, like the time I caught the ferry over to Shelbyville. I needed a new heel for my shoe, so, I decided to go to Morganville, which is what they call Shelbyville in those days, so I tied an onion to my belt, which was the style at the time. So, to take the ferry cost a nickel, and in those days, nickels had pictures of bumblebees on ‘em. Give me five bees for a quarter you’d say. Now where were we? Oh yeah! The important thing was I had an onion on my belt, which was the style at the time. They didn’t have white onions, because of the war. The only thing you could was those big yellow ones.

Understand that most people’s comments here are about their youth or childhood, which means their perception of the 1900’s is completely different than now.

And MTV and VH1 were tight and we all know it’s disgusting now, but if you stayed up late enough you could see Girls Gone Wild commercials on TV.

My lovely 3 bedroom detached house cost 4x my salary.
People treated gay people like they treat trans people now, but it started getting better, not worse.
Most people blamed the government when it underinvested in public services instead of blaming immigrants.
Unmetered internet was something that happened to other people unless you were at a university.

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.

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

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.

Not 90s but the 2000s in the middle east (keep in mind the same technology was released here at a similar time but adoption was slower due to prices and companies at the time not knowing how to market their products in non-western markets)

I have older siblings and younger siblings and I want say me and my friends in the same age group exist in this weird transitional generation. We are too young to have embraced the optimism and hope of the older generations but we are too old to have just accepting the current status quo as how we found the world to be.

As a child I have used the entire progression of the telephone. I have used landline, dumb Nokia phones, blackberry, smart Nokia phones, and Samsung smart phones. I remember watching both satellite TV and YouTube Minecraft let's play as a kid. My dad used to take family pictures using both a film camera and a digital camera. I remember when we had to go out I would schedule the VHS recorder (or whatever it's called in English) to record my favourite cartoon tv show.

But what I believe is the most impactful aspect is the politics. I can clearly remember the Arab Spring (a series of revolutions in 2011). I was too young to understand it at the time but I sure have felt this feeling hope, optimism, and freedom in everyone around me just to realise when I grew up that we've lost.

Also LLMs and AI became a thing while I'm in the middle of university so I have seen how the concept of education slowly change from who learnt the skills better to who can make it the fastest with least tokens spent.

I'm also an introverted nerd so the moment I had internet access I was totally invested. I have seen how it turned from wholesome (and totally not wholesome) forums, chatrooms, and personal blogs, to these gated gardens, to brainrot and then AI slop. And I miss just hanging around uninvited in a small niche online community and talking to people.

I think what would resonate with my age group and some older folks is the feeling and promise that certain things and the future will be ours when we grow up, just to loose it all before we had the chance to.

Born 1972.

Life was simpler, 1 TV in the house, 1 corded phone. So technology didn’t dominate our lives like it does now. As kids we were more active than kids today are.

While some would say life was better then, that is not necessarily the case. People still struggled to pay their bills, they were scared of the Cold War, AIDS and the hole in the ozone layer. They were more likely to die of cancer, heart attacks and other illnesses that modern medicine is better at dealing with.

If life seems worse now, in many respects it’s because of the media, in all its forms, which mainly focuses on the negative, and it’s much harder to avoid than it was in the 1900’s

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.

In the US in the 1980s there was still existential dread from the cold war... nuclear war was very much a concern, although less because, well, it just hadn't happened. We also had a terrific "war on drugs", which was used to oppress minorities and in general stoke up fear and funnel money to militarized police. We had massive inflation at the start of the decade. Iran had just had a religious revolution, and the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. Trump declared war on unions and basically ended the successful policies preventing the worst excesses of capitalism that were put in place after the Great Depression (which Clinton gleefully continued). The AIDS epidemic began, and we had no idea in the beginning how bad it might become. It stoked already rampant homophobia.

As far a daily life in the US, we had the dominance of malls as a place where people went to buy stuff. It led to a lot of neighborhood businesses dying, and eliminated any place where people could meet without a commercial purpose. And because they were private property, people could be controlled. No protests allowed on private property.

We did have a few good things of course! The split of AT&T meant cheap phone calls and the ability to buy cool phones, like a hamburger phone of whatever. Computers got cheap enough that there were 8-bit microcomputers, like the Commodore 64 or the Apple II. Piracy was rampant - you could go over to a friend's place with a box of blank floppies and come home with 20 new cracked games. We got rap and break dancing and synthesizer music and music videos.

The Internet was only available at a few universities, so if you wanted knowledge you went to a library. Urban myths and misinformation were everywhere, but unamplified by any algorithm. You could shop by calling a shop or even sending a fax.

It was the free-est, most affordable, and happiest days that the world will be in my lifetime.