Technology

Who else remembers sitting on the toilet reading the back of your shampoo bottle for the millionth time bored out of your mind? hahaha.

Thank you for the GPT-4 summary!

In 2002 I was working for an Internet company (Genuity), had a cell phone in my pocket at all times (this one: https://mobile-review.com/phonemodels/sonyericsson/image/t68i-1.jpg), and had cable broadband (1.5MBs) at home. When I bought my first house (condo) at the time I specifically selected a location that had high speed Internet because being without it would be unbearable! I remember telling the real estate agent that I would only buy a house that had high speed Internet and she looked at me like I was crazy! I'm sure she was thinking, "Like that's important. What a weirdo!"

I guess what I'm saying here is that the people mentioned in the article were out-of-touch scrubs! It wasn't as bad as they described. My friends and I would all chat with each other online to coordinate and we'd show up at various events/locations (people's houses, concerts, theaters, etc) with tickets already paid for (usually over the phone though because not every venue had it but TicketMaster let you buy tickets over the phone since like the 1980s).

It definitely did feel like a VIP experience a lot of the time showing up with your group of friends (all in our early 20s)--bypassing the often enormous ticket line--then proceeding to walk up to the bouncer/ticket people and just giving them our names which they would verify by checking a printed list that was attached to a clipboard with a white sheet of blank paper over it to hide the names (so people couldn't just glance at it and say, "that's me!"). A few years after 2002 such tickets finally started getting bar codes and it became a bit less, "VIP" hehe.

What I'm saying was that all these things and more were available to the people in the article and they weren't expensive "luxury" features that only the rich could afford. They were available and advertised extensively for everyone to use. It's just that these folks in the article were just like soooooo many people at the time and just refused to explore or try things out on the Internet. They saw URLs (and AOL keywords, LOL) in ads and it probably didn't even register in their brains. They were probably also afraid to buy things online (a very, very common attitude back then).

These people were the early Gen Xers that would be dumbfounded when you'd ask them for their address to get to their party/event/whatever and you'd have to interrupt them when they'd start rambling off complicated landmark-based directions, "No... I just need the address." (because you were going to just print out directions using MapQuest). Then you'd be the only person to show up to the party on time because you were the only one that didn't have to navigate via landmarks ("Go three stoplights and make a right after the Sunoco station...").

Edit: I just remembered that in 2002 I was subscribed to Netflix's 3-DVD plan. DVD players were not luxury items by then. My girlfriend and I had watched so many movies thanks to Netflix we were had long since run out of good things to watch and ended up getting DVDs like, "Jack Frost" LOL!

I give employers my Google voice number and turn off notifications. Keep the tab up during work hours and don't have to worry about being reached after work.

Watching TV and playing video games hasn't changed that much. Except that people rarely play video games together in person now sadly.

"People with no boundaries or employment rights have no idea what we do after work" - In Europe we have a right to disconnect, everyone I know is more than able to use it. This is not a technology issue, this is a rights and culture issue.

Ugh, more "get off my lawn" articles. There are tons of young workers who will 100% ignore their employer the second they clock out. Anyone who has the option to do so, and complains about constantly being pinged, has no boundaries and frankly deserves it.

Your employer doesn't own you, you can turn off your notifications.

The people who are working 11 hours either don't know how to turn off or would be taking their work home anyway. How common this free labor is depends on the company/industry. People do have to learn how to setup a good balance or they will likely burn out.

I don't think the issue is new. Certainly not limited to younger people nor only a thing because of work from home became more common. And then you have shit like "grind culture", no it isn't as fun as it might sound. The whole workaholic thing has been around for a long time. People use to refer to stuff like this as the "rat race".

This mostly gibes with my experience around that time, when I was in college, working for a year, then back to school. It's a bit over-nostalgic though, and some of those "fond memories" were a goddamn pain in the ass.

• I had to attend so many garbage events because in a fit of peer pressure, I'd agreed to to something I knew I didn't want to do, but people would give me shit if I didn't show.
• The fact that you never knew where your friends and family were or how to reach them is not always a blessing, sometimes it's just stressful. As a parent now, YAY for constant connection.
• Do you know how amazing it is that I have a little glass brick in my pocket that has a GPS enabled atlas, all the basic factoids that anyone ever wondered about, and a video tutorial for almost any task that more than one hundred people have had to perform? It's amazing.
• Maybe this is just a privilege afforded to me as an X-ennial old man (with energy much more on the "X" side of that divide), but if you are willing to turn your notifications off, fewer people than you think are assholes who actually expect a response before morning.
• Moviephone sucked. It sucked a lot.
• And this is maybe the big one: for all the negatives of social media and "THE INTERNET" (insert menacing brass notes), the ability to break up the monoculture and for people who felt isolated to find their voice has been amazing. Imagine if you're the only gay kid in your town, or you're just struggling to connect with your peers, or even something as simple as you see a show or a niche sport on late-night cable and you want to talk about it with someone. The ability to connect has had some pretty unsettling knock-on effects, but people overlook the sense of alienation that many dealt with before we had it.

In the end, people and the world are what they are. You work to change them to the best of your ability, and you exist in the meantime. Stuff like this is fun to recall for the people who remember it, and I assume it's amusing for the younger folks to imagine how it worked, but in the end, it's always folks trying to get by and live life and find a way to fit in somewhere, and you just hope that the new technology solves two problems for every one that it creates.

Matt: You’d be late or they’d be late and you’d just talk to whoever was there. It was a whole skill, taking to a person you don’t know.

This is a pretty interesting quote. Being a younger person myself, waiting around for people is awkward if its busy. I've noticed older people are better at stuff like this, just chatting with others while waiting for example.

Everything can be so focused and exact nowadays. Interesting read.

swing dancing, improv classes, or simply visiting friends. Plans were made over the phone

Oh, was that what everyone else where doing while I sat home in front of a book/offline computer?

I would agree that the modern environment no longer has that "3rd Place" that previous generations got to enjoy.

There is a virtual realm we can interact with, but it doesn't share the same benefits as a physical place to go outside of work and home that you can socialize and interact with. My assumption is the costs of doing so now days has made it near impossible to consistently "go out".

The only thing I can agree with on this article is that. yes. I too had a "social life" outside of my first job when I was younger. I went to work at min wage job. Came home at 5. Dropped $100 every Friday on the kitchen table (because I had to pay rent to my mother), and immediately went back out to who knows where.

The thing is that was the only thing I had to worry about back then. I did not have a car. I could not rent an apartment because at 18 in 1995 how the hell are you gonna have Credit in the first place out of High School? And I'm from the glorious chest-beating, so proud to be neglected by my parents, Gen-X.

Other than that, I didn't read the whole article because I agree with everyone else's sentiment. I for one am happy a lot of those things are gone today.

A lot of these old farts like to point their fingers at youth today because they didn't immediately move out of their parents home at 18... well I wonder why that is?

That resonates lol, I still remember when cellphones didn't exist, what a more "peaceful" world it was :D

Seems like a typical "everything was better when I was young and had energy" article. It is easy to remember good old times fondly and fail to acknowledge that young people might have same fun just slightly differently and that times might be harder for younger generation as wages are not that great and higher education is more competitive and demanding.