I think we have progressed ourselves into a box

In My Humble Opinion
1

Many were increasingly of the opinion that they’d all made a big mistake coming down from the trees in the first place, and some said that even the trees had been a bad move, and that no-one should ever have left the oceans.

So, I’m not generally a “when I was a kid, the world was great, and everything sucks now” kind of guy.
But…
I was thinking about some of the changes that have occurred over the last 50 years (and many over the last 10), and how the law of unintended consequences has really screwed up our society. To wit:

When I was a teen, I would get on my bike, ride to my friends house, and then often times ride up to one of the following places, where we would kill time:
The hobby store.
The used books / comics store
The aquarium / pet store.
The miniatures store (this was in the D&D days).
The arcade, spending all the quarters we had.

When I was in college, my friends and I would go out to the record store and spend endless hours auditioning speaker and drooling over turntables, receivers, amps and other audio gear. Of course, as photo editor of the newspaper, I could spend hours at the camera shop, looking at the gear and discussing it with the guys behind the counter.

So much of that experience is gone. There may be a record store in a good-sized town, but they used to be everywhere. Audio stores basically don’t exist anymore, other than super high-end ones, or whatever is inside Best Buy. There are still a few camera stores, but the writing is on the wall for them.

So, what do kids do with their free time these days?

I can’t argue with the convenience of on-line shopping, but I think the lack of a physical store is going to be a serious societal issue going forward.

Or, maybe I am one of those “get off my lawn” guys.

2

The very point that you regarded this as “killing time” indicates that you didn’t regard it as a productive exercise. (Certainly, burning all your quarters at the arcade is nonproductive unless you aspire to be the next King of Kong.) You could argue that the loss of availability to expertise by knowledgable store staffers (e.g. hobbyists, gamers, music lovers, photographers, et cetera) is an negative consequence of the loss of brick and mortar stores, but in fact Youtube.com and other media sites have made ready access to high quality information about any hobby or area of interest so much more readily available that it is difficult to even make a comparison. Of course, watching a video isn’t the same as having a peer-to-mentor interaction, but I doubt most store clerks really offered all that much personal service or more than cursory interest. Back when I was a squirt interested in electronics, my infrequent trips to Eagle or Radio Shack to try to figure out how to build a robot were largely met with disinterest by employees because I didn’t really know what to ask for, and nobody was interested in sitting down and explaining how a 555 timer circuit worked. Today, you can buy an Arduino kit online, watch a few videos, and join a message board to get guidance and get up to speed enough to at least making a working device in a few hours.

The larger problem of “what do kids do with their free time these days,” is that they spend so much of it enthralled with social media that they don’t actually spend time on productive hobbies or interests that bring them into contact with others sharing their interests. Of course, this isn’t just limited to kids; it is a larger societal problem and this generation of kids are just the first to grow up in a world where social media can be literally more important than direct social contact. The answer to this isn’t to somehow force a shift back to brick and mortar stores (though I think that there are other economic advantages to doing so) but to encourage socialization via establishing and joining clubs and encouraging mentorship, which is something Western society has moved away from.

Stranger

3

Yes, we have a load of breezy people who go around saying yaka-wow. Is that the society we want?

4

Isn’t it ironic that our intelligence is going to be the very thing that kills us off much faster than any of the lesser species?

One good thing is kids do seem to be more engaged in politics, and civil liberties than the genx crowd.

5

I don’t feel as bad about kids not having anything good to waste their free time on as much as I feel sorry for them not having much free time to do anything. Parents today way over-schedule their kids with extracurricular activities. When do they have time to just toss rocks into mud puddles or kick a can down the street?

6

Basically it is now … I want to say … impossible to be bored? I worry a bit about this for our kids. Because my partner and I remember sooo much boredom in our childhoods… entire summers!

We now have infinite entertainment (and learning!) boxes strapped to our bodies almost 24/7.

7

Obligatory xkcd:

8

A friend posted from a doctor’s waiting room (pre-covid) about how sad it was to look around the room these days and see everyone engrossed in their phones.

I guess she was longing for the old days, when the patients would break out into a good old sing-along to pass the time, and you’d make lifelong friends when you chatted to those around you, comparing ailments and making plans to meet up afterwards.

My doctor’s office was never like that. It was just full of miserable-looking, bored, sick people, who were flicking through ancient magazines (that can’t possibly have been sanitized between uses) and watching the TV in the corner as it played infomercials with the volume on mute.

In all seriousness, I hear you about how sad it is that a lot of the things we took for granted in our youth are gone, and our kids lead much more insular lives. However, the world has gone helicopter-parent mad and if those places still existed, I couldn’t let my kids roam to them, and they’d have few friends who would be allowed to go with them. A lynch mob would come after me for being a neglectful parent of I let my kids out of my sight. It’s extremely fortunate* that technology has made boredom extinct, because kids aren’t allowed to play in the street, ride bikes to the arcade with their friends or hang out at the mall.

  • Yeah, there’s going to be a correlation between the decline of kid-friendly spaces and the increase in parental supervision, and a link between kids being easier to occupy at home and a decrease in kids being allowed out. It’s not “fortune”, it’s consequence.
9

You forgot another signifant part of the 50-years-ago days:

– Cutting the grass with a push mower
– Raking the leaves with a hand rake
– Clearing a foot of snow with a shovel
–Putting coal in the furnace with a shovel
– Putting up and taking down the storm windows on an extension ladder
– Tilling the garden with a spade
– Washing the dinner dishes in a pan of hot water
– Doing a 7-day paper route on a bike.

Those were the experiences that added up to something of value that is now lost.

::

10

Things haven’t changed that much really.

11

The kids in my neighborhood still ride their bikes almost two miles down to the lake to go fishing in the summers. Of course they are really young and haven’t picked up the sports/jobs thing yet.

Back when I was a kid in the late 90s I rode my bike everywhere but we never hung out in stores if nothing else they didn’t want people without money touching the merchandise. We did do things like paintball (or used pellet guns) or raft the local river but most of my life in junior high and beyond was school and sports. The last summer vacation I had to be bored was after 7th grade (after 8th grade i did summer school to learn algebra and typing). As my now brother-in-law’s father put it in high school you can get a job or play a sport but I don’t want to home after 6 am or before 6 pm.

12

I did four of those things as a child this century, so…

In the MySpace days, middle school for me, we would still play baseball, playing cards, board games, legos, build forts, go camping, &etc.

And today, kids on my street are outside every day. They play basketball on the street, ride bikes,
play with sticks (don’t think that’s allowed but they do it anyways), go fishing on the broken docks behind our houses, even do chores. A parent will hang out on the front porch or sometimes talk with neighbors. The kids have free reign within two blocks of home and stick together.

~Max

13

Well people were more social and you where more liekly to make frends or fine a date. And girls would love to hang out back in those days than today.

It you wanted a computer game you gone to the store to get it. And if you wanted a movie you will go to video store and rent it.

And you would talk to people at the store and they would get to know you because you would go every week to the store to rent movies or buy games at the computer store.

You would hang out with your friends at the mall and city park and now we talk to friends on Facebook and Twitter and text message than meeting in person.

We don’t even talk to people on the phone unless you a boomer.

People know how computers work and could fix computer problems and now days you lucky to have laptop and probably never seen desktop tower computer.

Now days if you not boomer you probably never open file manager be it windows or Linux and back up your data as all your data now and all your back ups are using likes of google drive and one drive or Dropbox.And if you have problem you call tech support.

In that time you had map when driving no GPS and when you get to new town or city you would drive to that gas station and get map there for that area.

If you got lost or had no map you would ask people for directions.

Now days we use the GPS.

14

This is just not true IME. And GameStop is still a thing even if it is doomed to go the way of Blockbuster.

~Max

15

Well console games are last ones showing what it was like in the 90s but even them probably all gone by time next PlayStation or XBox is updated in 5 or 6 years from now.

And some elites are pushing cloud gaming and we will have to see if that takes of with subscription for this and subscription for that so on culture.

16

I had forgotten what it was like to travel without GPS! Another thing we totally take for granted now. Man.

17

Huh. I still do all these things (well, not the coal or the paper route, I never did those). We have a motorized lawn mower now, due to the size of the lawns. I don’t see the point of pulling out a machine to do a small job just as easily done by hand.

I hired a local high school boy to stack some firewood for me and it was the worst job of firewood stacking I have ever seen. I paid him just to go away.

18

And, ironically, my kids complain about being bored way more than I ever did.

I like what a comedian (can’t remember the name) said about pre-search-engine life. “Man, I can’t believe for basically my entire life I didn’t do any research about anything!”

And I can’t believe I survived driving anywhere more than 10 miles from my house before MapQuest/GPS.

I do remember shifting slowly from “Why would I ever text anyone? That’s stupid. Just call me!” to “Why are you calling me? That’s stupid. Just text me!” I HATE getting phone calls anymore. Just dread it.

19

My dog Duke is sitting in his crate right now. The door’s not locked, he can come and go as he pleases, but a lot of the time he wants to be in his crate where he feels safe. He can bide his time there, he’ll be ready to go if necessary to repel the attacks deliverymen launch on our house. Most dogs are like that really. They might appear like they’d want to be free to run around and frolic all day long, but actually they have stressful enough lives having to worry about guarding life and treasure, marking their territory to put the fear of dog into evil critters of the wrong species. Then on top of that they have to worry about the odd habits of their family that often seem to disregard a dog’s needs altogether. I think life is turning out the way most people really want it to be. Predictable and secure. But they can still run around the house panting and whining when things don’t work out as planned.

20

I was four years old when I learned to read. I was 23 years old when I first used a search engine. I did a metric ton of research in-between, about everything. Just like everybody who had an interest in finding out about stuff.