Nowadays, if the phone rings or if someone knocks on the door, it causes fear and anxiety.

When I was a kid, if the house phone rang or there was a knock at the door, we’d rush to answer in excitement. “the cousins are coming over.”

simpler times

The day’s work turning up in the morning post and there being no chance of further work appearing afterwards. The days working in an office before email and PCs were wonderful.

I miss being able to make embarrassing mistakes without the risk of it being recorded and shared with the world. It’s not even that I make a lot of them, or that anyone would care, I just hate the principle that anything could potentially be used against you. It’s more that the threat itself takes the enjoyment out of being outside, like everyone has to be so guarded and fake all the time.

The first time I saw this was in the early days of YouTube and smart phones, some kids had found a video of a teacher who was peer pressured by some people into very shyly singing a popular song, which they put on YouTube. After that nobody took him seriously anymore.

Note: this is for actual small silly things only, the kind that can happen to anyone. I absolutely do not support people who try to excuse their crimes, harassment or bigotry as “it was just an embarrassing mistake when I was young haha”, that sort of thing absolutely should be used against them later.

The ability to disappear, just go out and come home a few hours later with no one, not even my parents have any way to verify my whereabouts during this time.

Play. Actual children’s play. I have kids in the house, two sets, one lives with mom most of the time, others live with me. One set has screen limits, the other doesn’t. One 10 year old plays with their Legos and one doesn’t. Now this could be chalked up to personal differences, but it seems very correlated to me. And I see it clearly when other kids are visiting, less screen time = more creativity and play.

My attention span

Being outside until the street lights come on. The neighborhood ice cream truck that came routinely. Aspects of life that weren’t mined and extracted for shareholder profit.

Nothing. It was dreadful.

Learning stuff from books post full time education. It used to be if you wanted to learn about stuff once you left education you would have to read a book, so picking up a new programming language would be either from courses (assuming work is paying), books (like the O’Reilly ones), and self study.

It required more application from the learner than the internet has enabled as instead of having to read an entire book or at least the relevant chapter, you could just read a few stack overflow questions that were vaguely similar to what you needed to know, then copy and paste the bits that you thought would fit.

AI has made that even quicker, and increased the chance of a wrong or misleading answer, and that assumes you are asking it to explain concepts rather than just getting it to write the code for you and hoping it works.

Its reduced the barrier for entry, but is it actually maintaining output quality as understanding of the topic is almost always not the same.

Things that happened at the party, mostly stayed at the party. Now you can find yourself on TikTok the next morning

The shared experience of Television and Movies.

Nearly everyone watched The Simpsons, for instance. It was more reliable than Game of Thrones ever was.

More truth and fewer media bubbles. The “WMDs in Iraq” lie was a huge understanding, and not everyone believed it, just enough. Now you can do that more easily with some social media accounts and algorithms. People just choose their own news.

I miss people writing essays by doing research rather than creating click bait posts on social media and expecting the world to fill in the blanks for them.

My parents never used to know where I was and had no way of contacting me. At the time I liked that though I I’m glad smartphones exist now so I can keep track of my kids. If they start doing what I did when I was a kid it would worry me.

We also used to jump off a bridge into the local river, but 2 years ago a kid drowned doing that so now I’m worried about it.

We could go outside unsupervised.