Before cellphones and the internet, our after-work lives were so rich and productive that you'd barely believe it.

TL;DR (by GPT-4 🤖):

  • The author reminisces about life before the ubiquity of cellphones and the internet, particularly focusing on the after-work hours.
  • The concept of being unreachable after work hours is alien to younger generations who are constantly connected and expected to be available at all times.
  • The author and his peers recall the days when work emails didn’t exist, and work communication was restricted to work hours only.
  • The article highlights how the growth of remote work and the pandemic have blurred the boundaries between work and personal time, with a survey suggesting that U.S. workers were logged into their employers’ networks 11 hours a day in 2021, up from 8 hours pre-pandemic.
  • The author interviews people of his age group about their experiences around 2002, when they were about 27 years old. They recall waking up just in time for work, commuting with newspapers or books, and using work phones for personal calls.
  • After work, they would engage in activities like swing dancing, improv classes, or simply visiting friends. Plans were made over the phone or via work email, and people were less likely to flake as there was no option to send a last-minute text.
  • They recall the days of watching whatever was on TV, renting movies from Blockbuster, and playing games on their desktop computers.
  • The article concludes with a reflection on how different life was before the internet and cellphones became a constant presence in our lives.
  • wjrii@kbin.social
    2·
    2 years ago

    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.