I know it’s legion, but let’s start making a list.
I’ll go first.
When I was a kid (I’m 48 years old)
There were red delicious apples and green apples at the grocery store. That was it.
Everybody was being doxxed by the phone book
College football was on Saturday, and the NFL was on Sunday, except one game on Monday night (well, with the exception of Thanksgiving, and then it was Dallas and Detroit and their opponents, and that was it)
Planes and restaurants had smoking sections
Cars came standard with ash trays and cigarette lighters
Jeopardy stopped a winning streak at 5 games, and the most valuable Double Jeopardy clue was worth $1,000
What about you?
Let us know your age, too, if you don’t mind.
Leaving the house during the summer to go run feral from 8am until 10pm, often stopping for meals with some neighborhood kid’s family or them eating at my house. Our parents mainly just trusted we’d make it back eventually.
Everything was more decorated. Even things like light switches and doorknobs had ornamentation. Now everything is as minimalist and functional as possible.
I was bullied constantly as a child, and couldn’t do anything about it. People like to talk about how things are tougher for adults but in many ways that’s nonsense; as an adult I could deal with such behavior by having them arrested for assault, or just shooting them in self defense (if I had a gun at least). Not coincidentally, that sort of behavior stopped once there would be consequences for it.
No internet, better television.
A general feeling of hope, that is was possible for the world could get better.
Being shorter than nearly everyone of the same age. It was a formative experience; I had a late growth spurt that brought me to about average, but I spent most of my childhood shorter than everyone I knew but this one girl named Robin. Decades later it’s still sometimes a little surprising to look around and notice that there’s a lot of people shorter than I am.
When I was a kid, I was let loose in the morning and came back when I was hungry. There was no such thing as helicopter parenting. I had the run of the town, or at least as far as my bike and feet would carry me, and never any serious fear of stranger danger. I walked to school or rode my bike and had no worry about the bike being stolen.
When I was very young, you picked up the phone handset and an operator would ask you for the number you wanted to reach, which was generally three or four numbers, as I recall. If you wanted to call outside of the town, you had to ask for “long distance, please” and you’d be forwarded to that operator, who would place your call and call you back when connected.
We had one TV channel in Juneau, AK in the 50s, and it was black and white and grainy as hell. I think we had two channels in Anchorage. They went off the air at about 10 or 11pm, signing off with the national anthem, and you could only see a test pattern on the screen after that. You had to adjust the vertical roll on the screen by using a knob on the back of the set.
To listen to the radio, the tubes in the radio had to warm up first. FM stations were in the future or didn’t play music. The radio was a big, clunky console that also contained a record changer. If you said “Alexa, play music”, nothing happened unless that was your sister’s name.
When I was a kid in central Indiana, there were five apple orchards within an eight mile radius of our house. Each had at least a dozen different varieties through the season. From early September through late October my dad and I would hit at least one of them every weekend. None of those orchards exist now. I particularly liked Winesaps and King Davids, both varieties with tastes and textures Granny Smiths weakly aspire to.
When I was 7 years old my parents let me take a city bus by myself on a 10-minute ride to what passed for downtown in our community, to visit the public library.
These days they’d probably be reported for child endangerment.
Hitch-hiking was okay and fairly widespread.
Never wore sunscreen.
Drinking and driving was legal(at least in TX) as long as you weren’t drunk.
I’m 67.
My cousins came to visit Florida from California about 1990. They were probably about 10 and 8. My Aunt has home video of dropping them off at the airport to go home. They let her walk them on the plane.
I was a latchkey kid from about age 7. My mom had signed me up for afterschool daycare, but I talked her into just letting me go home instead.
I was a teenager in the early 2000s. We had the Internet, however, it was still more separate from real life. Sitting down to use the computer was a specific activity. When the computer was off, we were done with the Internet until next time. If you spent a bunch of nights at your computer, many kids would think of you as a “loser” with “no life”. (Although, if someone was willing to download music and make CDs for $10-$20, they were cool.)
We used more email, forums, and blogging sites. MySpace was the first social media website that was “mainstream” popular. I graduated from high school in 2006 and many of us had MySpace. Facebook was not nearly as popular. A few of my classmates, though, still had no interest in the Internet. They hadn’t even made email accounts.
We went to malls and shopping centers. Sometimes we were at the mall just to “hang out”. Saw movies at the theater. Went to video stores and walking around for almost an hour, looking a different movies and talking about them, before deciding what to rent. I enjoyed going to the library for books or movies/shows. We walked around our neighborhoods and talked about whatever, maybe walked to a local park.
In 2002-2005, many of us teens still didn’t have cell phones. You still had to call their house and talk to their parents first. People were still harder to reach outside of school or work. Many job applications were still paper, not done online.
One of my first jobs was at a grocery store in the mid-2000s. I remember there being more cashiers and more baggers - usually one bagger per cashier.
Friends of mine went to Europe, from Australia, by boat in, probably, 1972. When they were leaving, a few of us went to see them off. We accompanied them onto the ship and wandered around looking at stuff for a long while before the ship departed and we waved them farewell from the dock.
