It was a struggle. We lived in caves and had to hunt for food.
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
Yup. Climate change is going to suck, but actual existential risk is way lower now. And before the 20th century people did the same end-is-nigh thing on supernatural grounds.
If you’re thinking of the submarine, it wasn’t a specialist, it was an admiral who just happened to be on the right boat and belayed the captain and political officer’s order. One of the same guys that was on K-19, interestingly. There was also an armed nuke the French just kind of dropped on themselves by accident. Here’s the list of known close calls on Wikipedia.
That was it,thanks
No social media. All the stupid stuff I did and said as a kid stays where it belongs, haunting my memories as I lie awake at 3 AM.
Anyone born in the 1900’s would be at least 117. You’ll struggle to find anyone from back then.
Presumably they meant the century.
No shit.
Remember when the 1900’s were called the “20th century?” Pepperridge farm remembers.
The 1900’s used to be call the 20th century, they still are, but they used to.
The 90s was the last good decade.
Born in 1979. I’ve seen rotary phones, touch tone phones, cordless phones, pagers cellphones, PC computing pre windows (DOS anyone,) floppy discs (they didn’t just used to be a save icon,) the internet before the internet when it was just hyperboards you dialed up manually and then put the receiver into a baud modem, cassette tapes, CDs, MP3s and ipods, car windows that had to be manually rolled down. I had a TV where you had to get up and manually change the channel.
I’m in that weird space where I could be a millenial, or could be gen x. I was a latch key kid and had no parental supervision. As an 9 year old, I came home from school and cared for my 4 y/o sister. We played outside, in the street, we walked to the park. I’d ride my bike and put my sister on the seat and we would go get ice cream, or go to the comic shop. It was normal to just be a kid doing your own thing and for your parents to have no idea where you were or how to contact you.
If you didn’t know where you were going, you had to purchase a map/atlas and learn how to read it to get directions.
I lived through the contra scandal/Iraq Iran war, the war on drugs, desert storm, the war on terror, and whatever the fuck this new Iran straight of hormuz war is. I’ve seen lived through lots of genocide, (I’m not a victim, just got to see it play out in the news;) Sabra and Shatila massacre, Anfal campaign, Isaaq genocide (somali), Bosnian genocide, Rwandan genocide, Massacres of Hutus during the First Congo War, DRC and ethnic cleansing of Pygmies from the Congo’s eastern region, Darfur genocide (2003–2005), Yazidi genocide, Ukrainian genocide (via Russia and still ongoing,) Persecution of Uyghurs in China, Rohingya genocide, and Gaza genocide. We have always been at war.
Pre-internet, there was tons of news you would never hear of, or if you did you got the propaganda version because there was no way to access the facts. The newspaper and TV news were still considered reputable. Now with smartphones and cameras everywhere, people can share information with each other directly and we can all call bullshit on misreporting and propaganda, for all the good it does.
Life was hard then, and it’s hard now. It’s just hard in different ways.
Better in some ways. Worse in others. About like any time really. And that “better” can easily be tinted by nostalgia.
Really missing the pre 2005-2010ish internet though. Can’t really pinpoint where everything died for the internet.
I think it was around 2014, but it’s been a slow downhill ever since. I used to visit many sites in my nightly rounds, but it became just Imgur, YouTube, Reddit, and NewGrounds, for the most part around then. I just lost Reddit to a perm Suspension, and I swore of Imgur after it got to woke to post jokes and dark humor/observations. (and they IP banned me for 6 months)
Slower computers, slower internet, and you had to record shows to skip ads. On the plus side, video games and consoles would actually get cheaper over time. So that was nice.
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I genuinely have learned a lot of useful things from threads like this, though. Reddit/Lemmy gets you that firsthand experience stuff you can usually only get from your small collection of IRL friends.
I was wearing an onion for a belt, as was the fashion at the time.
i understand this reference
Did you keep any of the bees when we got nickels back?
As a belt? Was this popular in Europe? In America we merely wore onions on our belt
late 80s here. We had a nice world before 9/11. there was hope.
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It’s definitely felt that way. But climate change, the biodiversity crisis, and end-stage capitalism were all already in the pipeline, most of us just weren’t being forced to confront them yet.
they might have been in the pipeline, but due to the success we had against CFCs and other pollution issues, we felt like it was just another battle to progress. Then 9/11 happened, and instead of fighting to improve things, we fought to keep things, and then just got kicked in the face repeatedly.
Yeah my children remind me daily how awesome I had it, and I had no clue how just good I had it.
So I’ve been told. I was born mid to late '90s. I finally got my mom to admit she wouldn’t have had me if she knew things would be this bad. I can’t remember a time when I had hope.
It was just the 90s though, the 80s sucked too
One of the things I miss the most about the 1900s is that people didn’t expect you to be reachable 24/7. Even though cellphones had been around since the 80s very few people had one. That meant that most people could only be reached through the family landline. If you didn’t answer people would just assume you were out of the house, thus unreachable. That all started to change in the 2000s when cellphones became common place. Now days I feel like everyone expects me to pick up when they call, and if I don’t they expect a better excuse than “I don’t feel like talking right now.” As a very introverted person who often needs a lot of alone time, it sucks, and sometimes I really wish I could go back to a world without cellphones.
I leave my phone on do not disturb, all of the time. I make it a point to tell people that when I give out my number, so they never expect an immediate answer or response. The phone is there for my convenience, not so others have me at theirs.
I remember meeting up with friends was either you stay together after school or try to guess where they might be at that moment. Maybe they’re in this persons basement because they just got an n64, or maybe they’re playing ball in the field, etc.
Now it’s all very organized and less chances to get lost and find your way back. I sometimes wonder what would happen if the cell network was just gone one day, for whatever reason.
There is nothing stopping you from putting your phone on… say, a kitchen counter, and leaving it there and only talking on it while in that room and don’t take it with you, when you go out.
I had a rotary phone until 2017 (and needed to stay in touch with my grandfather after my grandmother died) so I ported my landline number to a cellphone.
Now that most of my family is gone, I routinely leave the phone at home. I can let it go to voicemail just like I used to let the answering machine take the calls when I was out.
It’s only a digital leash if you let it be.
However, it was also normal for people to come and visit unannounced because they were close by. It is rare people don’t phone ahead now before visiting. This can be a good or a bad thing, you don’t tend to get visitors when it is inconvenient but there is also less spontaneity.
This and FOMO was very limited.
and if I don’t they expect a better excuse than “I don’t feel like talking right now.”
You don’t owe them a explanation though. If they demand a answer, you can just lie, joke or tease them a bit. “I was busy, painting a horse” or “I was attempting a new record at standing on my head.” Or just reply with “did you want something?” if they keep pushing the issue.
My go to is: I was uh… doing something
My default… (which often is the actual case)
“Ack… The phone battery died again.”
Or alternatively, have your friends worry about you. Say you unavailable as you were drunk/high/intoxicated out of your mind. As times goes on, cite inebriation by ever-more exotic and illegal substances.
LOL!
How deliciously evil! :)
Everywhere smelled like an ashtray until the late 90s when smoking bans started picking up steam.
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”
If you went to a bar, or a bowling alley, everything you had on you smelled of smoke until it was thoroughly washed.
Don’t miss that, or trying to get across a dance floor without getting burned …then in 2008 everything changed. Kind of bitter sweet.
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
Instead of doomscrolling, I read the newspaper. Having to go out and get it was a nice little nudge towards sociability.
I would hang out at a cafe in the city, reading and having coffee, and inevitably, someone I knew would come along and have a chat, maybe get a cuppa, tell me about something crazy, etc. Like a group chat in real life. We would never really organise to meet there, you would just turn up if you felt like it.
The paper itself being curated was good, too, because while it was definitely skewed by its corporate masters, or the inclinations of its editor, the stories had more time to be well-written and well-sourced within those constraints.
With experience, you could read between the lines to infer what wasn’t being said, or know that something was missing and to check by other sources. Since everyone else was reading similar things, you could sometimes talk about the issues in more depth, without having to explain the basic facts.
Oh, and most people agreed on those basic facts.
Also, people were casually racist and sexist and bigoted, and lots of things we care about today were not even acknowledged by the majority as being problems.
A friend of mine got gaybashed (there’s a term you might need to look up, hopefully) and it was like he’d just suffered an accident. People just shook their heads and muttered sympathies, like it was an inevitable result of being gay in public, instead of a brutal fucking hate crime. That sort of thing didn’t even make the news unless the guy died.
