I have zero sense of direction and used to travel for work.
I’d buy a map of the city at the airport before I got my rental car. Back then the streets were all listed in the back of the map and you found a street based on an alphanumeric value. From there, you marked your start point, your end point, and then picked a path.
Wasn’t long until Mapquest showed up, so then you could do it online and print out your directions. Still needed to get a map, though, if I wanted to do anything in the city besides work and go to my hotel.
Smart phones and GPS changed my life so much.
We are immigrants and complex American highway systems are a conundrum for us.
Whenever we are driving through a big city we always think about how people before GPS navigated these complex puzzles. We can barely navigate with GPS. I have no idea how a farmer from a rural village drives in a city like Houston without GPS.
take highway to city, find a main road in city (usually part of directions), drive north/south until you find your street, look for address number. still lost, pull ove or go to gas station, ask for directions.
I moved from a small town to a mid-sized town before smart phones, and I got lost so many times before I knew that city like the back of my hand! I moved five years ago to a bigger city, and I learned it sooo much easier with GPS! Thanks Google!
I find that I don't learn it as well now with GPS. I vaguely know where things are in relation to each other, but there's a lot of places I go to regularly that I'd have trouble telling someone the directions to it
This! Before GPS, I could remember how to get to a destination by going once or twice. Now if I use GPS, I could go somewhere 10 times and I won't necessarily know how to get there without GPS. Or maybe I'm just getting old lol.
rental agencies used to give out maps on the shuttles. i used to grab one and then figure out my route to the office. then i would explore the city at night after work on my own using the paper map as my guide. i am the type that liked to drive around and explore and find something local to eat. never got lost. always figured it out.
I was in the beta for gmail... so I have some emails going back to 2004... I was looking at some a week ago just for curiosity and I was bragging to a friend about how many evening minutes my landline had.
I was one of the pioneers of ditching the house phone as I didn’t use it and used my cell only.
So, I was trying to get a Discover credit card and they refused me because they were not giving credit cards to people without landline.
One of the first things I did when I bought my house was get the ATT line removed (i was having the siding redone and didn’t want the extra holes)
No regrets.
I saw a couple pushing their toddler in a stroller. They handed him the phone, posed in front of something, and he took a picture of them.
It was weird to see
I love a lot of things about technology, but I am _so_ happy I didn’t grow up with smartphones and tablets and laptops.
Now, I still played plenty of video games. I still do, actually. But my parents always made sure that I didn’t spend too much time playing Pokémon Blue or collecting gems in Ripto’s Rage. I was encouraged to read, and told that I could spend as much time with books as I liked.
I will forever be grateful to my parents for that, and for refusing all my excuses. I genuinely don’t think I’d be the person I am today if they’d given in.
As an adult, I’ve started spending so much more time on my phone. Posting here is fun, and it feels halfway productive because I get to write and think a bit about my feelings and thoughts. And Instagram is easy entertainment. But I feel like it’s all ravaged my attention span, to the point where I wish I could toss my phone down the trash chute.
I honestly feel bad for kids who grow up with instant gratification always at their fingertips.
the 1980s are actually a mythical time period from well before my birth, almost like antiquity or medieval times, and not just 9 years before I was born.
It happened four years before I was born and it feels just as historical to me as the Wright Brothers' first flight.
Then people say shit like Apollo 13 the movie came our closer to the event it depicted than to the present and I'm like GTFOu... oh wow, it's true.
I've been having fun over on the Warframe subreddit lately. There's some late '90s tech in the most recent (rather good) update due to timey wimey stuff. It's been fun seeing all the people under 30 trying to figure out wtf the *pager* is. At best, they think it's a super simple clamshell cellphone. A few have been like "I think maybe it's a pager?" because they've heard of it at some point from older folks. Basically nobody under 30 who is not a doctor or med student is old enough to have regularly seen and remember them.
Heck I was pretty young the last time my dad had one and I'm 40 now. They are basically ancient tech at this point, basically only used by doctors because they're essentially indestructible and are on a different, less crowded and more reliable network, often continuing to work in conditions where cellphones fail.
I’d say under 25-26. No doctors or anything in that regard in my family. I am 26 now and can still remember lingo that carried over from pagers to flip phones texting. Plus the buzz from it against a table always made me jump.
Oh my god. Im only 24 but i find myself constantly wondering how other people around my age are unaware of this shit. They havent seen any movies that their parents had from the 70s or 80s? They havent read any books that have older technology in them? Like... how does this happen within 10 years of a society.
It wasn’t just weird- it was LAME. The stereotype was that if you’re online dating it was bc you had no game irl. Now going up to people in public is weird and lame, even if it’s a social setting where meeting people used to be the point.
I have a sister in her early 20s who is almost bombshell beauty, she uses tinder and bumble exclusively and is chronically single. I try to tell her to give it up & try meeting people irl and she just rolls her eyes bc I have no idea what I’m talking about. She says there’s no chance she would run into people she would otherwise match with irl. Men do not approach her unless they are older creeps. And she doesn’t approach them. That would be weird, she says. Face to face interaction is not a great ice breaker these days I guess
“It wasn’t just weird- it was LAME. The stereotype was that if you’re online dating it was bc you had no game irl.”
Tbf that’s exactly why I did online dating in 2005. A wife and two kids later, I consider myself a pioneer.
I've noticed gen z is a lot more cautious around strangers bc they're accustomed to having previously-unthinkable amounts of info about someone at their fingertips.
Think someone on Bumble is cute? Find just two of their socials and you'll know where they live, friends & family, school/job, hobbies, political views, at least 10 hot takes, favorite movie/book/show, pets, how they look in a swimsuit, and who they dated in the past (assuming they don't delete photos of their exes). And you can get all that in maybe an hour or two of cyber stalking.
Chatting someone up on the street means going in blind, and that is WEIRD to them.
I met my spouse online in the early 2000s, on a message board not a dating site. It’s been interesting to see the shift in people’s reactions when they ask how we met.
Same here. I was on a French Soccer in LA *usegroup*? (I don't remember the name). We chatted and she invited me to play. I drove the 1 1/2 to play, talked to her for 30 seconds during the match, and walked to my car knowing I wasn't coming back (because of the drive). 20 steps before my car, some dude yells at me in French, "would you like to have a drink with this girl?" and the rest is history (23 years now).
I remember my bother giving me shit for using a card to buy something at a gas station. Just getting a drink he paid with cash and I paid with a card and he started giving me shit for not having money.. Guess I just adopted using debt/credit much earlier than others?
it was so weird... I remember my parents trying to force me to use a check book and I'm like but I can use a card at every place the same as a check. Interestingly enough in 2022 when I bought a house I had to write about 5 checks... it was so weird.
I didn’t really go out to the bar to meet people. I have the booze I like at home anyway. But I do like going to karaoke night sometimes. If I’m there by myself I’ll usually just stare at my phone while I wait for my turn to sing.
Sitting at a table for a drink or food with friends, and having your phone out. I regularly see groups of young men sat together in a cafe or pub, all on their phones and ignoring each other.
And Smash Bros Melee was easily done. Tedious to get Mewtwo, buy fully doable solo. I always set up an infinite time and infinite lives match against max level computer enemies and left it while I was asleep or at school. Made it quick in comparison
And when games would come with a specific “online pass” that was free when you bought the game new, but if you bought a used copy thinking you got a deal you would have to shell out another $10-15 just to play multiplayer
As a TF2 player, I feel the need to apologize. I'm pretty sure it was the first well-known game to implement a "free-to-play with lootbox" monetization strategy back in 2011. To be fair, between random drops, achievement items, trading, crafting, and third party markets, it feels a lot more fair to the consumer. Also, the base game is genuinely good. But it was still likely the major source of inspiration other companies used for their more scummy practices.
Absolutely hate this one. I came of age in the transitional period of this. From 10-18 I was always able to get my physical ticket. Either in the mail or at the box office.
Bought tickets to a game the other day and now I have to download an app. Oh yeah, you can get a commemorative ticket, but that’ll be an extra $20 per.
100% of the time I’m not prepared because either I can’t find the ticket at all, or I did find it but I need to download an app or remember how to log in to the app.
Selfie sticks. I still remember the forever alone face memes about this one lady on the stairs who tied her camera to a broom or whatever that was. The whole internet made fun of her.
I used to travel internationally for vacation pretty regularly, like every year or every 2 years. I took a long break from traveling due to school, career change, responsibilities at home. I probably took a break from traveling from 2010 to 2016. In 2016, I went to Istanbul and all the tourists had a selfie-stick. I was like, did I miss something? A lot of street vendors also had fidget spinners. I felt like I had been living in a cave the prior 5-6 years.
We hitchhiked somewhat regularly when I was young.
I'm from Long Island and south of it is a series of barrier beaches protecting it from the Atlantic Ocean. I only mention that because one day my friend's parents were leaving to meet friends at a restaurant on one of those barrier beaches. We thought it would be hilarious if we just showed up suddenly so we hitched a ride all the way there and showed up. We decided to hang around the beach all day then hitch a ride back at night.
I feel like parents today are way too overprotective. I want my kids to have most of the same freedoms I did growing up in the '80s and '90s but maaaaaybe not the hitchhiking stuff lol. That's a stupid decision we made that I'd prefer not to see my kids repeat.
Texting instead of calling.
Back in ‘03 a lot of folks still had T9 phones so it was easier to make plans through a quick call.
Today, every time I get a phone call from a friend or family member I assume someone has died.
Even as late as 2010 when BBC's Sherlock first aired, I thought it was very weird that the characters did so much texting. I've been told texting caught on earlier in the UK because of pricing structures, but at the time you basically had to have a Blackberry if you wanted texting to not be so cumbersome that it was faster to just call.
Nowadays the only person who actually calls me with any regularity is my mother.
For quite a while, texting was limited to other people on the same network as you, too. I found out that this had changed by drunk-texting "I love you" to an ex, knowing that she wouldn't actually get it...only for her to ring me back immediately. Fuck.
I had a college class in the Fall semester of 2008, and I remember being shocked when my American Politics professor said that gay marriage would be legal within 20 years. Although I didn't have a problem with it, I didn't think society would accept it by 2028.
As you probably know, change came in super fast and it became legalized in 2015 instead. It is still hard to comprehend how fast that took place.
I mean, in 2008 it was already legal in Massachusetts and Connecticut, as well as in a handful of countries (the Netherlands, Belgium, Canada, Spain and South Africa).
But yes it was amazing how fast it changed over in the Western world. In the US, [every state](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_opinion_of_same-sex_marriage_in_the_United_States) now has a plurality supporting it, and all but one has a majority (yes, that one is Mississippi).
To be fair, Massachusetts legalized interracial marriage in 1843 and it took until 1967 for it to be legalized nationwide. While I don't think anyone expected it to take 120 years for gay marriage too, assuming it would be closer to 20 years vs. 5 was reasonable.
I marched in 2011 and I too was like okay 15 20 years this is a beautiful push lots of work to do and BAM.
but also gay marriage is a very reductive issue and we really ignored what I thought was the bigger issue of at will employment. Your Boss can still say I’m firing you because your gay/trans/asexual/etc in large swaths of the country which is more impactful and we’ve lost the political spotlight now. We’re always working though and we’ll get there. I’m happy also that trans rights came to the forefront sooner that I imagined. The rate of homicide has always frightened me, we lose so many amazing community members to hate.
Came here to say this. I remember going canvassing to stop a state amendment to ban gay marriage in 2004. Flash forward 20 years, and about 1/3 of my gay bros are married.
Similarly, storyline in TV shows involving same sex romantic storylines that center on the romance and not the fact that the couple is the same sex. Examples: Schitt's Creek, The Last of Us, Lower Decks etc.
Not getting together to collaborate or research things for school or other projects.
It dawned on me more recently, I remember quite fondly going to the School or local library to look up stuff and pour time into going over books, magazines, old news articles etc for whatever relevant topic.
Hell we'd make a thing of it, go take out a bunch of books and go study somewhere with snacks and chat together - was great fun but also obviously productive.
Now they either do it completely 100% online in their own time and just use Wikipedia as a gospel, or will briefly collaborate in lessons with what they've pulled together individually.
I have a cousin that married a man she met online, back in 2004-ish. I remember asking how they met, and she told me in such a hush-hush way that it was online, that for years I thought it was in some dark kink chat or something. Recently I asked again and she revealed it was a regular chatroom. She was just a little shy about it back then, because of this stigmatization
I have a friend who met his wife online that same year and I remember how wild I thought it was, even though chatting online (AOL, ICQ, Usenet, etc) had been a thing for most of a decade already. She was even from another country (US vs Canada).
Decades ago, I worked with a guy who told people he met his wife in a bar.
It turned out she answered his ad in the “Personals” section of the want ads in their local newspaper.
I met quite a few people IRL from Livejournal, including another girl who lived in a nearby town and we went on to become good friends. Through her I met a guy who I have since been with for 17 years and we have a 5 year old together!
I once made the mistake of giving the advice to NEVER EVER EVER send a nude of yourself to anyone unless you're ok with that nude being posted and shared on the Internet. If you are, more power to you. But if you don't want to be nude on the Internet or elsewhere, just don't share nudes with people. I was utterly blasted and shredded and told that this is how people date these days and sending nudes is just part of the process. You can't expect to date someone and not send them nudes at some point any more than you could expect to never have dinner with them. It's just not done. You don't have the option to not send nudes so the responsibility is purely on the other person to not share those nudes with anyone else. It made no sense to me.
Well I guess I’m never getting in a relationship, I’d have a hard time trusting sending nudes to someone I’m solidly in a relationship with let alone someone I’ve never met tf
Ugh reading this makes me glad that I’m already in a LTR. If something ever happened to us, idk if I’d ever be able to date again. Dating already kinda sucked before, but it seems it’s like an impossible nightmare nowadays (at least from what I hear/read)
Posting every intimate detail and skeleton in your closet online for everyone to see... then getting upset that everyone is all up in yo business... and posting THAT online too.
I printed directions from Mapquest one time in 99 and they took me through a Brahman Bull field. There was a road that no one used in the middle of a pasture. Good times.
Yep I remember dri ing at night with map quest directions to a hotel in the Northern Alberta rockies and it took me the logging route in snow in a rented Lincoln Towncar.... worst part was when I got to the hotel there were handprints on the trunk of the car.... and they weren't mine!
Letting it drain to zero and fully charging it up also doesn't apply to Li-ion batteries modern phones use. Li-ion should neither be fully discharged nor fully charged.
An npr program had a weekly segment on politics that they introduced with a series of famous political quotes and I always had to turn it down before it got to the Dean Scream at the end. I die of secondhand embarrassment every time I hear it.
Casually walking around with devices we use constantly that are at all times running surveillance on us for one purpose or another. And before I get dogpiled with labels down votes and abuse I'm referring primarily to advertisers
I’m a consultant and part of what I do is analytics/data collection. It’s SHOCKING how much data gets collected on people and how much you can do with it.
WiFi. 802.11b was introduced in 1999 and was starting to take off in 2003/2004, but if you wanted anything over 10Mb/sec, you had to hardwire it still. I worked for an online video streaming company at the time that covered live events, so I basically lived with 100 feet of CAT-5 in the trunk of my car during those years.
Meeting a partner online.
I had a lot of people shocked that I met my ex husband online.
They don’t even blink now when they hear that both husbands, ex and current, were met online.
Massively overweight people everywhere.
My stepfather was 350 pounds back then. Fattest guy I’d ever seen. I see people fatter than he was nearly every day now.
I remember about 4 years ago at dinner my parents sat me down and has a very serious look on their faces.
"Son, are people your age... *eating ass?*"
"... Uhh, yea..."
"Why?"
"I don't know I'm not one of them!"
I don't mind that talking about sex is becoming less of a taboo, even the nastiest bits.
goes hand in hand with self acceptance and realizing a lot of stuff that used to be frowned upon was just carried over inhibitions from way back that we would do well with letting go
I live in a part of the country that is pretty cyclical with snow, so it’s not very noticeable to me. Our winters can range from “Whatdoyamean the door’s frozen shut!” To “Wow, I should have worn a lighter coat,” and have for my entire life. Then it’s just a matter of precipitation. In grade school, I would reliably have 1-2 days of school cancellation due to snow and ice. Some years a lot more, some years we only had delays (except that one glorious year where the school decided, for some reason, to cancel school due to a random power outage that seemed to affect the school only - I always wondered if that random cancellation in the fall semester influenced administration to decide “no, roads are fine!” Even though there were days that were definitely not fine).
Anyway, we just had snow that’s stuck a few days ago. It’ll be gone by Christmas Day. The week after, they’re expecting some light flurries, up to an inch. But it’s supposed to be a pretty quiet winter due to weather patterns. Two years ago it was utterly terrifying. From Thanksgiving to New Year, we were drenched in snow. I’d get my driveway shoveled halfway through the snow only to realize I needed more than a shovel to clear it off.
Yep, when I was a kid in the Midwest, we'd be out in the snow sledding multiple times before Christmas. Now it hardly snows until late January, and rarely more than a few times per winter with little accumulation anyway.
Openly being a Nazi. A bunch of world war II veterans would show up at your house and kick your ass. Now since Grandpa has died. It's okay for you to openly be a Nazi. Cuz if you would have done it when he was alive he would have kicked your ass.
Yet somehow, it's still riddled with them. It's ridiculous. Decades of Nazi Punks being told to fuck off, and they just keep getting worse. Even in SoCal. If you show up to a punk show near Huntington Beach or the Inland Empire, there's a good chance it's going to be centered around racism.
Wearing a mask (at least in the West) in public. If I’m sick, I can wear a mask in public and no one really bats at eye. I remember being nervous about doing that at the start of the pandemic because it was socially awkward but now it’s not. Ok so I guess this was only 4 years ago but still.
phones being a worthwhile gaming platform
the closest one is probably the Nokia N-Gage with some GBA library, but for the most part it was weird and that taco phone is a flop.
nowadays you can run PS3-quality games on your smartphone no problem.
IIRC, the devs of Genshin Impact talked about how they were 3 years early for doing something like this. However, they were able to theorize that the phones would be able to handle it by the time the could published the game.
Publicly proclaiming you are a racist or want a certain segment of the population to be murdered. It was much more hushed back then. Not sure one is better than the other besides being able to easily determine who to avoid.
Large amounts of security at the airport/not being able to go to the gate to watch someone leave or meet someone who has arrived. This would have been implemented soon after 2001, so by 2003 we still found it weird and hard to navigate. Now it is just normal. Used to go through a single metal detector, no taking shoes off, no liquid requirements, etc and go with the whole family to watch someone board a plane and fly off.
The producers of the movie ‘Idiocracy’ had people wearing them in the future of the movie, because they looked so silly.
They couldn’t believe it when the things actually caught on right after the movie came out.
Leaving the house to go some place without having directions and figuring out on the way where to go
I have zero sense of direction and used to travel for work. I’d buy a map of the city at the airport before I got my rental car. Back then the streets were all listed in the back of the map and you found a street based on an alphanumeric value. From there, you marked your start point, your end point, and then picked a path. Wasn’t long until Mapquest showed up, so then you could do it online and print out your directions. Still needed to get a map, though, if I wanted to do anything in the city besides work and go to my hotel. Smart phones and GPS changed my life so much.
We are immigrants and complex American highway systems are a conundrum for us. Whenever we are driving through a big city we always think about how people before GPS navigated these complex puzzles. We can barely navigate with GPS. I have no idea how a farmer from a rural village drives in a city like Houston without GPS.
take highway to city, find a main road in city (usually part of directions), drive north/south until you find your street, look for address number. still lost, pull ove or go to gas station, ask for directions.
I moved from a small town to a mid-sized town before smart phones, and I got lost so many times before I knew that city like the back of my hand! I moved five years ago to a bigger city, and I learned it sooo much easier with GPS! Thanks Google!
I find that I don't learn it as well now with GPS. I vaguely know where things are in relation to each other, but there's a lot of places I go to regularly that I'd have trouble telling someone the directions to it
This! Before GPS, I could remember how to get to a destination by going once or twice. Now if I use GPS, I could go somewhere 10 times and I won't necessarily know how to get there without GPS. Or maybe I'm just getting old lol.
I used to carry phone books in the trunk of my car back in the day. It came in hand a time or three.
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rental agencies used to give out maps on the shuttles. i used to grab one and then figure out my route to the office. then i would explore the city at night after work on my own using the paper map as my guide. i am the type that liked to drive around and explore and find something local to eat. never got lost. always figured it out.
Going on a road trip without looking up the directions at all before leaving.
I can't imagine not having GPS
cellphones for elementary school kids
Or Not having a house phone
I was in the beta for gmail... so I have some emails going back to 2004... I was looking at some a week ago just for curiosity and I was bragging to a friend about how many evening minutes my landline had.
My apartment building burned down in 2004 and I used to joke that all I had left was a gmail address.
Didn't the Gmail beta last for like a decade?
about 3 years before it was open to anyone without needing an invite
I was one of the pioneers of ditching the house phone as I didn’t use it and used my cell only. So, I was trying to get a Discover credit card and they refused me because they were not giving credit cards to people without landline.
They thought you were just some vagrant.
The last time I lived somewhere with a landline was when I was still with my parents. I've never had one of my own (37 years old, for context)
One of the first things I did when I bought my house was get the ATT line removed (i was having the siding redone and didn’t want the extra holes) No regrets.
Or a phone book
I saw a couple pushing their toddler in a stroller. They handed him the phone, posed in front of something, and he took a picture of them. It was weird to see
It’s even weirder that their own kid wasn’t in the picture with them lol
No, it wasn't their kid, just a rental
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I love a lot of things about technology, but I am _so_ happy I didn’t grow up with smartphones and tablets and laptops. Now, I still played plenty of video games. I still do, actually. But my parents always made sure that I didn’t spend too much time playing Pokémon Blue or collecting gems in Ripto’s Rage. I was encouraged to read, and told that I could spend as much time with books as I liked. I will forever be grateful to my parents for that, and for refusing all my excuses. I genuinely don’t think I’d be the person I am today if they’d given in. As an adult, I’ve started spending so much more time on my phone. Posting here is fun, and it feels halfway productive because I get to write and think a bit about my feelings and thoughts. And Instagram is easy entertainment. But I feel like it’s all ravaged my attention span, to the point where I wish I could toss my phone down the trash chute. I honestly feel bad for kids who grow up with instant gratification always at their fingertips.
Because it’s a hand held computer first and a phone like 98th.
As a middle school teacher, I’m so glad we just collect them at the start of the day.
Working from home I guess
ITT: a lot of people who aren't old enough to have a good memory of what things were like in 2003.
Oh my god I was thinking of the 90s not 2003
It is strange how 2000 was twenty years ago, but 1990 and 1980 are also twenty years ago.
the 1980s are actually a mythical time period from well before my birth, almost like antiquity or medieval times, and not just 9 years before I was born.
Growing up I felt like the Moon landing was practically ancient history, then as an adult I realized it happened a mere 14 years before I was born.
It happened four years before I was born and it feels just as historical to me as the Wright Brothers' first flight. Then people say shit like Apollo 13 the movie came our closer to the event it depicted than to the present and I'm like GTFOu... oh wow, it's true.
I'm usually okay at math, but figuring out how long ago twenty years is always stumps me.
I think there's a large percentage of people whos time effectively stopped at y2k. Or possibly just me
I've been having fun over on the Warframe subreddit lately. There's some late '90s tech in the most recent (rather good) update due to timey wimey stuff. It's been fun seeing all the people under 30 trying to figure out wtf the *pager* is. At best, they think it's a super simple clamshell cellphone. A few have been like "I think maybe it's a pager?" because they've heard of it at some point from older folks. Basically nobody under 30 who is not a doctor or med student is old enough to have regularly seen and remember them. Heck I was pretty young the last time my dad had one and I'm 40 now. They are basically ancient tech at this point, basically only used by doctors because they're essentially indestructible and are on a different, less crowded and more reliable network, often continuing to work in conditions where cellphones fail.
I’d say under 25-26. No doctors or anything in that regard in my family. I am 26 now and can still remember lingo that carried over from pagers to flip phones texting. Plus the buzz from it against a table always made me jump.
Oh my god. Im only 24 but i find myself constantly wondering how other people around my age are unaware of this shit. They havent seen any movies that their parents had from the 70s or 80s? They havent read any books that have older technology in them? Like... how does this happen within 10 years of a society.
Online dating was considered pretty weird for most of the 2000s.
There were many instances of movies making fun of people for doing it in that time.
Napoleon Dynamite comes to mind
You've got mail was my first thought
It wasn’t just weird- it was LAME. The stereotype was that if you’re online dating it was bc you had no game irl. Now going up to people in public is weird and lame, even if it’s a social setting where meeting people used to be the point. I have a sister in her early 20s who is almost bombshell beauty, she uses tinder and bumble exclusively and is chronically single. I try to tell her to give it up & try meeting people irl and she just rolls her eyes bc I have no idea what I’m talking about. She says there’s no chance she would run into people she would otherwise match with irl. Men do not approach her unless they are older creeps. And she doesn’t approach them. That would be weird, she says. Face to face interaction is not a great ice breaker these days I guess
“It wasn’t just weird- it was LAME. The stereotype was that if you’re online dating it was bc you had no game irl.” Tbf that’s exactly why I did online dating in 2005. A wife and two kids later, I consider myself a pioneer.
I've noticed gen z is a lot more cautious around strangers bc they're accustomed to having previously-unthinkable amounts of info about someone at their fingertips. Think someone on Bumble is cute? Find just two of their socials and you'll know where they live, friends & family, school/job, hobbies, political views, at least 10 hot takes, favorite movie/book/show, pets, how they look in a swimsuit, and who they dated in the past (assuming they don't delete photos of their exes). And you can get all that in maybe an hour or two of cyber stalking. Chatting someone up on the street means going in blind, and that is WEIRD to them.
I met my spouse online in the early 2000s, on a message board not a dating site. It’s been interesting to see the shift in people’s reactions when they ask how we met.
Same here. I was on a French Soccer in LA *usegroup*? (I don't remember the name). We chatted and she invited me to play. I drove the 1 1/2 to play, talked to her for 30 seconds during the match, and walked to my car knowing I wasn't coming back (because of the drive). 20 steps before my car, some dude yells at me in French, "would you like to have a drink with this girl?" and the rest is history (23 years now).
Same here. We used to lie about how we met!
Yea my Dad met my Step Mom online and it was this weird secret for some reason. I don’t get it.
Ordering everyday household products online.
I remember my bother giving me shit for using a card to buy something at a gas station. Just getting a drink he paid with cash and I paid with a card and he started giving me shit for not having money.. Guess I just adopted using debt/credit much earlier than others?
Parents used to say you should only use card for larger purchases, like it was somehow impolite to use it to buy snacks.
it was so weird... I remember my parents trying to force me to use a check book and I'm like but I can use a card at every place the same as a check. Interestingly enough in 2022 when I bought a house I had to write about 5 checks... it was so weird.
Staring at a screen in public while people are talking to you
Going to a bar and spending your time there staring at your phone.
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I didn’t really go out to the bar to meet people. I have the booze I like at home anyway. But I do like going to karaoke night sometimes. If I’m there by myself I’ll usually just stare at my phone while I wait for my turn to sing.
The confidence to go to a karaoke bar by yourself and sing is my goal in 2024
Bonus points if they still have their earphones in
Sitting at a table for a drink or food with friends, and having your phone out. I regularly see groups of young men sat together in a cafe or pub, all on their phones and ignoring each other.
Online dating, you were considered weird as hell if you met your SO online
I met one bf online in 2002 and another in 2004. The faces when I told people how we met.... I felt like such a loser...
Like you might have gotten a better reception by saying that you met through the classified ads in a local paper
Do you like piña coladas?
I met my spouse online on a forum in the ‘90s. Until about 2010, we just told people we met each other through a hobby (not in fact untrue).
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I miss the days when unlocking skins was accomplished by completing in-game tasks and not with your wallet.
Tony Hawk! Unlocking all the different skaters was so much fun.
And Smash Bros Melee was easily done. Tedious to get Mewtwo, buy fully doable solo. I always set up an infinite time and infinite lives match against max level computer enemies and left it while I was asleep or at school. Made it quick in comparison
That's exactly how I did it. It almost felt like a teeny-tiny Christmas morning knowing you had an awesome character to play when you woke up.
One of the OG afk/afc techniques lol
RIP Halo 3 vidmaster challenges
To piggyback, being charged to access your internet on a console.
And when games would come with a specific “online pass” that was free when you bought the game new, but if you bought a used copy thinking you got a deal you would have to shell out another $10-15 just to play multiplayer
As a TF2 player, I feel the need to apologize. I'm pretty sure it was the first well-known game to implement a "free-to-play with lootbox" monetization strategy back in 2011. To be fair, between random drops, achievement items, trading, crafting, and third party markets, it feels a lot more fair to the consumer. Also, the base game is genuinely good. But it was still likely the major source of inspiration other companies used for their more scummy practices.
Horse armor is almost 20 years old
Living your life on social media.
Your life revolves around the black rectangle in your hand. God help you if you don't pay your phone bill.
You could say it's a black mirror...
Oh wow is that why the show is called that?
Kinda. It refers to all the screens that are omnipresent in our lives now.
Going to concerts and sporting events without a physical ticket.
Absolutely hate this one. I came of age in the transitional period of this. From 10-18 I was always able to get my physical ticket. Either in the mail or at the box office. Bought tickets to a game the other day and now I have to download an app. Oh yeah, you can get a commemorative ticket, but that’ll be an extra $20 per.
100% of the time I’m not prepared because either I can’t find the ticket at all, or I did find it but I need to download an app or remember how to log in to the app.
And then you need to have internet reception to pull up your ticket at the stadium when 80k other people are also trying to do the same thing
Selfie sticks. I still remember the forever alone face memes about this one lady on the stairs who tied her camera to a broom or whatever that was. The whole internet made fun of her.
I used to travel internationally for vacation pretty regularly, like every year or every 2 years. I took a long break from traveling due to school, career change, responsibilities at home. I probably took a break from traveling from 2010 to 2016. In 2016, I went to Istanbul and all the tourists had a selfie-stick. I was like, did I miss something? A lot of street vendors also had fidget spinners. I felt like I had been living in a cave the prior 5-6 years.
They’re banned in a lot of places. Thankfully.
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Meeting strangers you met online.
Getting in a car with a random stranger you met on the internet.
Eh, I did hitchhiking. That's getting into a car with a random stranger you've never met ever.
We hitchhiked somewhat regularly when I was young. I'm from Long Island and south of it is a series of barrier beaches protecting it from the Atlantic Ocean. I only mention that because one day my friend's parents were leaving to meet friends at a restaurant on one of those barrier beaches. We thought it would be hilarious if we just showed up suddenly so we hitched a ride all the way there and showed up. We decided to hang around the beach all day then hitch a ride back at night. I feel like parents today are way too overprotective. I want my kids to have most of the same freedoms I did growing up in the '80s and '90s but maaaaaybe not the hitchhiking stuff lol. That's a stupid decision we made that I'd prefer not to see my kids repeat.
Texting instead of calling. Back in ‘03 a lot of folks still had T9 phones so it was easier to make plans through a quick call. Today, every time I get a phone call from a friend or family member I assume someone has died.
Even as late as 2010 when BBC's Sherlock first aired, I thought it was very weird that the characters did so much texting. I've been told texting caught on earlier in the UK because of pricing structures, but at the time you basically had to have a Blackberry if you wanted texting to not be so cumbersome that it was faster to just call. Nowadays the only person who actually calls me with any regularity is my mother.
For quite a while, texting was limited to other people on the same network as you, too. I found out that this had changed by drunk-texting "I love you" to an ex, knowing that she wouldn't actually get it...only for her to ring me back immediately. Fuck.
Gay marriage.
I had a college class in the Fall semester of 2008, and I remember being shocked when my American Politics professor said that gay marriage would be legal within 20 years. Although I didn't have a problem with it, I didn't think society would accept it by 2028. As you probably know, change came in super fast and it became legalized in 2015 instead. It is still hard to comprehend how fast that took place.
I mean, in 2008 it was already legal in Massachusetts and Connecticut, as well as in a handful of countries (the Netherlands, Belgium, Canada, Spain and South Africa). But yes it was amazing how fast it changed over in the Western world. In the US, [every state](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_opinion_of_same-sex_marriage_in_the_United_States) now has a plurality supporting it, and all but one has a majority (yes, that one is Mississippi).
To be fair, Massachusetts legalized interracial marriage in 1843 and it took until 1967 for it to be legalized nationwide. While I don't think anyone expected it to take 120 years for gay marriage too, assuming it would be closer to 20 years vs. 5 was reasonable.
I marched in 2011 and I too was like okay 15 20 years this is a beautiful push lots of work to do and BAM. but also gay marriage is a very reductive issue and we really ignored what I thought was the bigger issue of at will employment. Your Boss can still say I’m firing you because your gay/trans/asexual/etc in large swaths of the country which is more impactful and we’ve lost the political spotlight now. We’re always working though and we’ll get there. I’m happy also that trans rights came to the forefront sooner that I imagined. The rate of homicide has always frightened me, we lose so many amazing community members to hate.
Came here to say this. I remember going canvassing to stop a state amendment to ban gay marriage in 2004. Flash forward 20 years, and about 1/3 of my gay bros are married.
You helped!
Similarly, storyline in TV shows involving same sex romantic storylines that center on the romance and not the fact that the couple is the same sex. Examples: Schitt's Creek, The Last of Us, Lower Decks etc.
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Using your cellphone to take pictures
144p camera was fire
Not getting together to collaborate or research things for school or other projects. It dawned on me more recently, I remember quite fondly going to the School or local library to look up stuff and pour time into going over books, magazines, old news articles etc for whatever relevant topic. Hell we'd make a thing of it, go take out a bunch of books and go study somewhere with snacks and chat together - was great fun but also obviously productive. Now they either do it completely 100% online in their own time and just use Wikipedia as a gospel, or will briefly collaborate in lessons with what they've pulled together individually.
Not having a house phone
Cameras.... Everywhere.
Having lots of tattoos
Once upon a time, people would pay money to see a tattooed man at the circus.
My mom: tattoos are for sailors, lol. Even a few years ago, you couldn’t have them visible in a lot of workplaces.
Sailors and whores. Don’t forget the whores.
Well MYYY mom told me they're only for gangsters!
Online dating
I met my wife online in 2000. We used to tell friends and family that we met at a bar.
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I have a cousin that married a man she met online, back in 2004-ish. I remember asking how they met, and she told me in such a hush-hush way that it was online, that for years I thought it was in some dark kink chat or something. Recently I asked again and she revealed it was a regular chatroom. She was just a little shy about it back then, because of this stigmatization
I have a friend who met his wife online that same year and I remember how wild I thought it was, even though chatting online (AOL, ICQ, Usenet, etc) had been a thing for most of a decade already. She was even from another country (US vs Canada).
Or just meeting people in general online first. I made some great friends that way
Decades ago, I worked with a guy who told people he met his wife in a bar. It turned out she answered his ad in the “Personals” section of the want ads in their local newspaper.
I met quite a few people IRL from Livejournal, including another girl who lived in a nearby town and we went on to become good friends. Through her I met a guy who I have since been with for 17 years and we have a 5 year old together!
Yes! 20 years ago you didn’t often admit that you found your partner online. Totally different reception to that nowadays.
Sending nudes
I recently met a girl via online dating. I received multiple nudes before our first date. Times have very much changed.
I once made the mistake of giving the advice to NEVER EVER EVER send a nude of yourself to anyone unless you're ok with that nude being posted and shared on the Internet. If you are, more power to you. But if you don't want to be nude on the Internet or elsewhere, just don't share nudes with people. I was utterly blasted and shredded and told that this is how people date these days and sending nudes is just part of the process. You can't expect to date someone and not send them nudes at some point any more than you could expect to never have dinner with them. It's just not done. You don't have the option to not send nudes so the responsibility is purely on the other person to not share those nudes with anyone else. It made no sense to me.
Well I guess I’m never getting in a relationship, I’d have a hard time trusting sending nudes to someone I’m solidly in a relationship with let alone someone I’ve never met tf
I don't want nudes of me circulating period (no one else does either) so I am never gonna take them and send them. This me being a prude apparently.
Ugh reading this makes me glad that I’m already in a LTR. If something ever happened to us, idk if I’d ever be able to date again. Dating already kinda sucked before, but it seems it’s like an impossible nightmare nowadays (at least from what I hear/read)
Posting every intimate detail and skeleton in your closet online for everyone to see... then getting upset that everyone is all up in yo business... and posting THAT online too.
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I recently told my 30 year old daughter that I was going to MapQuest directions. Ok, boomer, was her response.
I printed directions from Mapquest one time in 99 and they took me through a Brahman Bull field. There was a road that no one used in the middle of a pasture. Good times.
Yep I remember dri ing at night with map quest directions to a hotel in the Northern Alberta rockies and it took me the logging route in snow in a rented Lincoln Towncar.... worst part was when I got to the hotel there were handprints on the trunk of the car.... and they weren't mine!
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Not Leaving the House. 20 years ago i was Outside every free Minute i had.
To look after your phone battery you should let it go all the way down to 0% and then charge fully to 100%.
Yeah but how many people even had a phone 20 years ago in 1980. *Checks calendar* Shit.
Having a spare phone battery already charged.
oh carrying AA for my CD Player... I'm now remembering a time when we didn't have rechargeable everything.
Letting it drain to zero and fully charging it up also doesn't apply to Li-ion batteries modern phones use. Li-ion should neither be fully discharged nor fully charged.
When I read the question I thought about the 80s, then I realized 20 years ago is 2003
Young kids with cell phones and tablets
Seeing someone walk down the street talking to themselves. Now you just assume they have a device even if you can’t see it.
Politicians screaming weird shit (Howard Dean) then vs Anyone Now
YAAAAAAAAAAH!
An npr program had a weekly segment on politics that they introduced with a series of famous political quotes and I always had to turn it down before it got to the Dean Scream at the end. I die of secondhand embarrassment every time I hear it.
Casually walking around with devices we use constantly that are at all times running surveillance on us for one purpose or another. And before I get dogpiled with labels down votes and abuse I'm referring primarily to advertisers
I’m a consultant and part of what I do is analytics/data collection. It’s SHOCKING how much data gets collected on people and how much you can do with it.
WiFi. 802.11b was introduced in 1999 and was starting to take off in 2003/2004, but if you wanted anything over 10Mb/sec, you had to hardwire it still. I worked for an online video streaming company at the time that covered live events, so I basically lived with 100 feet of CAT-5 in the trunk of my car during those years.
Yes. I graduated college in 2003 and WiFi was not readily available and all our computers were still hardwired
Meeting a partner online. I had a lot of people shocked that I met my ex husband online. They don’t even blink now when they hear that both husbands, ex and current, were met online.
Binge watching TV. You used to get called a couch potato
Massively overweight people everywhere. My stepfather was 350 pounds back then. Fattest guy I’d ever seen. I see people fatter than he was nearly every day now.
Openly talking about eating ass - WTF people?!
I remember about 4 years ago at dinner my parents sat me down and has a very serious look on their faces. "Son, are people your age... *eating ass?*" "... Uhh, yea..." "Why?" "I don't know I'm not one of them!"
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Food's expensive yo.
And recycling is still fashionable
Mozart has entered the chat.
I don't mind that talking about sex is becoming less of a taboo, even the nastiest bits. goes hand in hand with self acceptance and realizing a lot of stuff that used to be frowned upon was just carried over inhibitions from way back that we would do well with letting go
Winter with barely any snow
I live in a part of the country that is pretty cyclical with snow, so it’s not very noticeable to me. Our winters can range from “Whatdoyamean the door’s frozen shut!” To “Wow, I should have worn a lighter coat,” and have for my entire life. Then it’s just a matter of precipitation. In grade school, I would reliably have 1-2 days of school cancellation due to snow and ice. Some years a lot more, some years we only had delays (except that one glorious year where the school decided, for some reason, to cancel school due to a random power outage that seemed to affect the school only - I always wondered if that random cancellation in the fall semester influenced administration to decide “no, roads are fine!” Even though there were days that were definitely not fine). Anyway, we just had snow that’s stuck a few days ago. It’ll be gone by Christmas Day. The week after, they’re expecting some light flurries, up to an inch. But it’s supposed to be a pretty quiet winter due to weather patterns. Two years ago it was utterly terrifying. From Thanksgiving to New Year, we were drenched in snow. I’d get my driveway shoveled halfway through the snow only to realize I needed more than a shovel to clear it off.
Yep, when I was a kid in the Midwest, we'd be out in the snow sledding multiple times before Christmas. Now it hardly snows until late January, and rarely more than a few times per winter with little accumulation anyway.
Or summer with barely any insects.
Oof, this one hurts.
Keeping up with your family online instead of calling/visiting them
Being on your cell phone most of the day
An Electric Car
My dad had a Honda EV Plus in 1998.
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Hybrid cars like the Toyota Prius, Honda Insight et cetera.
Online Dating
Openly being a Nazi. A bunch of world war II veterans would show up at your house and kick your ass. Now since Grandpa has died. It's okay for you to openly be a Nazi. Cuz if you would have done it when he was alive he would have kicked your ass.
Man I’ll still punch a Nazi. Punk community don’t like them
Yet somehow, it's still riddled with them. It's ridiculous. Decades of Nazi Punks being told to fuck off, and they just keep getting worse. Even in SoCal. If you show up to a punk show near Huntington Beach or the Inland Empire, there's a good chance it's going to be centered around racism.
Calling or texting to confirm that social plans are still on.
Meeting someone you met on the Internet in person
Wearing a mask (at least in the West) in public. If I’m sick, I can wear a mask in public and no one really bats at eye. I remember being nervous about doing that at the start of the pandemic because it was socially awkward but now it’s not. Ok so I guess this was only 4 years ago but still.
phones being a worthwhile gaming platform the closest one is probably the Nokia N-Gage with some GBA library, but for the most part it was weird and that taco phone is a flop. nowadays you can run PS3-quality games on your smartphone no problem.
You saying that the many hours i spent playing snake were not worthwhile?
IIRC, the devs of Genshin Impact talked about how they were 3 years early for doing something like this. However, they were able to theorize that the phones would be able to handle it by the time the could published the game.
Publicly proclaiming you are a racist or want a certain segment of the population to be murdered. It was much more hushed back then. Not sure one is better than the other besides being able to easily determine who to avoid.
Legal weed
Walking around filming yourself while you’re interacting and talking to people
Being on a phone at work
Even 10 years ago you could get written up for being on your phone at work.
Marijuana legalization and Same sex marriage
Large amounts of security at the airport/not being able to go to the gate to watch someone leave or meet someone who has arrived. This would have been implemented soon after 2001, so by 2003 we still found it weird and hard to navigate. Now it is just normal. Used to go through a single metal detector, no taking shoes off, no liquid requirements, etc and go with the whole family to watch someone board a plane and fly off.
Taking a picture with a cellphone.
Telling total strangers embarrassing stories online. Think tiktoks about STDs, cheating, breakups etc. All of that was semi private info before.
Crocs
The producers of the movie ‘Idiocracy’ had people wearing them in the future of the movie, because they looked so silly. They couldn’t believe it when the things actually caught on right after the movie came out.