been thinking about all the little moments tucked away in my memories that are a world unknowable to those younger than me, so consider this an opportunity to reminisce over old times, but also to ask those about the times you did not live through.
I guess my question for those older than me is: before computers, how did you learn to do something?
Did access to knowledge change your life, was a constraint lifted when you no longer depended on having found the right books or people to learn tips on how to cook a new dish, or how to fix a plumbing problem, or how to plant a garden?
Was life more simple, did you have fewer problems to solve without technology in your life, or did technology make life easier?
As others said, tv, books and people. I learned from the newspaper too. They have a section where they talk about misc things other than news, like car, recipe, newest trends etc.
For people, there is quite a lot of misinformation, because they can’t fact check easily.
For tv, they ll have informative things sometimes, like national geographic, random documentary, random recipe etc. they ll have the schedule on the newspaper and we sit in front of tv to wait for the show. It is quite exciting. And weekends morning we ll have cartoon on tv too. It makes us wake up early.
I also like going to the local library to find books I am interested in. Because the books are limited, you can focus easier without information overload.
With the internet, knowledge is so easily available now, and causing information and sensory overload. It is a blessing and curse.
It is convenient. Too convinent.
We don’t appreciate or feel excited anymore on new information or new things, the negative news bombarded us everyday, younger people brainwashed by social media. We over consume and things are lower quality now.
ignorance is bliss.
Somedays, I would spend 4-5 hours at the library, just to figure out one thing.
Before computers I was an ignorant little shit who read fiction books and fumble-fucked around until I could figure it out. All my education came from teachers in school literally talking to me in class, me reading the textbooks, me reading sci Fi, and me running around like a little feral goblin outside.
GenX here. Before computers… that’s a lie, my father always had computers, long before computers were cool. What we didn’t have was the Internet. Before the Internet, I read books. My father had a couple encyclopedia sets. One was more for kids and had colorful bindings. The other was the Encyclopedia Brittanica. So yeah, books were our Wikipedia. (Wikipedia is based on the encyclopedia concept. It’s right in the name!)
How do you deal with the uncertainty if the money you saved for retirement will be enough for the rest of your life? What if you’re 95 and you run out of money? It’s not like you can go back to work or take out a loan etc.
This were not as big of and issue. Pensions were better. You stll had brokers but investing was more costly and fewer people did it.More use of banks. PE ratios were far lower and dividend payouts higher. It was a lower risk less volatile time. You could still reseach investments either you could go to the libraray, your broker woyld send you photo copies, and stock prices were in the paper. You could phone and mail order mutual funds and information. There were investing magazines. Geopolotics was more stable too but no less scary. Jobs were more stable too and the wealth divide less.
Also do not forget Compuserve had forms and etrade access in early 90s well before the internet explosion.
Save more than you need.
Run fiscal history simulations (several programs do this for you). If I had invested this money in 1900, how would this have fared? If I had invested this money in 1901, how would this have fared. Etc.
Accept that you can’t plan for everything except your own resilience. You may have to adjust your spend if things are looking harder than you had planned for. You’ll be fine. At least that’s what I tell myself.
My fiscal plan has me running out in 0% of historical scenarios, which is belt and braces. Still need to save a lot before I can retire according to that fiscal plan.
My retirement plan is eating bugs in the woods because it beats working until I die.
Sounds like a plan, perhaps I should plan something similar :D
In my state there’s a ton of state ran resources for seniors. It’d not perfect but its better than most. My taxes go into it and I’ve seen the end result. Very happy with paying them.
How do you deal with the uncertainty if the money you saved for retirement will be enough for the rest of your life?
I live in a country with a pension sachem and it still scares the fuck out of me
My parent’s generation all had pensions. You didn’t have to worry about it unless the accountants cooked the books and didn’t manage it honestly. I was too young to know all the details, but I gather that system got upended by two things: 1) several pension funds that went bust and 2) shift from people working at one place forever to job-swapping which made pensions basically impossible (before computers).
They converted to 401k scam
Well, in, my case first there was communism, so the state provided us with a pension regardless of who worked how much and what was happening in general.
And then there was the collapse of the USSR and in general after a while everyone realized that they would just work until death. And so it happened.
I’m not sure I’m old enough to answer this, but retirement scares me, and I basically don’t know if retirement is financially likely or reasonable. Even if you invest enough into a 401k early enough, you have a pretty good chance of having serious health problems at some point in life that will probably take most of that money.
Basically the situation is bleak, so I try to focus on doing what I can to improve my situation without dooming about what I can’t control.
What’s your favourite LP?
For album art (by H.R. Gieger), Emerson Lake and Palmer’s Brain Salad Surgery. An almost monochrome skull folded out to reveal a monochrome woman, it included notes, band pics, and even the LP label had art.
More complete details can be seen in these seller posts:
Big Star Radio City And while you’re at it listen to all their albums (there’s only 3…I don’t count the 90s album) #1 Record is superior in a lot of ways and is phenomenal in it’s own right. Third is an artistic expression that is its own animal. Beautiful and brilliant in the most unconventional ways.
Not a LP per sé, but
Killer Moses – Unseen EP
V-3’s “Hit Dead Center With My Disease”, which is actually a trilogy. It was released only 3 years ago, but the music is mostly from the late 80s or so.
On top of that, I have a Live LP by Nirvana, I quite like it, too.
From back then? The Lonesome Jubilee by John Cougar Mellencamp.
These days I just use Apple Music. Costs less than Spotify, pays artists more, and doesn’t finance the alt right. (Well except for that dumb participation trophy Tim Cook gave Trump.) Anyway, I pay for music because I love music, and I neither smoke nor drink, so it’s like, my vice, I suppose. That and coffee.
Anyway, I have access to all the music I had back then and since on the
handheld Macphone I carry in my pocket.
How do you live with pain related to aging?
Ibuprofen.
Or did you think people were just like, “Well, my knees were kinda sore going up the stairs today. Guess I’ll go slash my wrists?”
I’d ask if things get better, but I don’t know if I want to know the answer.
It really depends, but they really did get better for me. I think if you continually and persistently invest in your needs, eventually you make progress. Learning to have a regular sleep schedule, a healthy diet, regular exercise, and developing a career that gives you enough financial security that you have at least more than your basic needs - securing these things can allow you to start to work on higher order problems. It took me decades to get to that point, and I basically still struggle with the fundamentals - but it really can get better. I often look back at my younger self who desperately wondered if it was worth being alive then for a future that may or may not be worth living, and while I’m not sure I would choose the suffering again and I sympathize with the pain I experienced, I do affirm my life today and it is practically heaven compared to how I lived before.
Yes they do. Not sure if 48 counts as older than you, but I’ve definitely seen economic cycles and peace/war cycles come and go. This too shall pass.
I guess my question for those older than me is: before computers, how did you learn to do something?
Books, radio, and TV. Also, learning from others.
Before the Internet (because computers didn’t really replace any other information mechanisms before the Internet), if you wanted to learn something you might start by talking to someone more knowledgeable than yourself.
If there wasn’t someone who knew more than you, or you needed to learn more than the people around you knew, then you’d go to the library or the bookstore. Where other teenage guys would fumble around in sex unable to find the clitoris, I’m enough of a nerd that I went to the library and found a book that gave me the info I needed.
There were also TV shows that would actually impart knowledge. Before the rise of cable channels in the U.S., Public Broadcasting would have shows that shared knowledge. News and history, of course. Science too. Back then, broadcasters took their responsibility to educate the public much more seriously.
I probably learned more about math and grammar from School House Rock during Saturday morning cartoons in the 70’s than I was learning from school (Interjections [hey!] show excitement [yow!] or emotion [ouch!]. They are generally set aside from a sentence by an exclamation point or by a comma if the feeling’s not as strong… Conjunction Junction… Number Nine… Three Is a Magic Number…)
On TV you had shows like Nova which would report on science topics. There were, of course, cooking shows where the host would make recipes, not to win a contest, but to show the audience how to cook them.
I learned an enormous amount of what I know about home repairs from obsessively watching shows like This Old House and Home Time, and I picked up a lot about woodworking from a show called The Woodwright’s Shop. I also watched [Nahm!] The New Yankee workshop.
I watched a lot of the original version of This Old House where they would spend a season renovating and rehabilitating one house. It’s probably a big reason why my wife and I bought an old Victorian house.
Where other teenage guys would fumble around in sex unable to find the clitoris, I’m enough of a nerd that I went to the library and found a book that gave me the info I needed.
I guess we’ll have to go back to this, when sex education will be banned from the internet.
my wife
And it seems that the books worked lol
And it seems that the books worked lol
Well, I’d defer to her judgement, but it seemed to.
Is mid-forties old enough?
I had a computer, just no internet.how did you learn to do something?
You didn’t.
It was trial and error, ending up with a half-baked solution
and then thinking this was the best solution
or just giving up and no longer bothering.
I can see in older people’s other answers
some romanticized version of their past,
but this was the reality.Sure, there were books in libraries,
but how many books would cover the exact thing that you were looking for of your particular situation?
Very little.Did access to knowledge change your life, was a constraint lifted when you no longer depended on having found the right books or people to learn tips on how to cook a new dish, or how to fix a plumbing problem, or how to plant a garden?
The big constraint that has been lifted is when you asked a semi-stranger for help,
who were the only ones with that knowledge, you had a 5% chance that
they either thought it was hilarious to just lie to you and keep feeding you with new lies
when you came back and asked why it wasn’t working,
and a 50% chance they would just flat out refuse to tell you,
because “not caring is not sharing”.Was life more simple, did you have fewer problems to solve without technology in your life, or did technology make life easier?
Yes. And it has forced people to be more honest to me and everyone else.
Or you did find a book on a subject and it was 10 years old with pages ripped out.
You over estimate the importance of computers. Computers primarily resulted in editable documents, and provides for faster less error prone and more precise computation. It meant these thing now take less manpower and are less costly. Not so much else.
Internet and telecom. This is separate. Communiction has gotten faster and cheaper. The mail service less used and less reliable though express services like Fedex faster. Frankly these changes are a mixed bag.
Do not forget too that compuserve, bullitin boards, usenet, and forums go much further back then most people think. Think 80s and some sruff before that. Computers go further back. I used them in the 70s and my dad in the 60s though the costs were a lot higher. Electronic computers go back to the 40s and before that there were mechanical computers and relay logic too.
What did it feel like before security cameras and personal surveillance became affordable and ubiquitous? Nowadays, I have to internally accept that a majority of my life will be recorded, auto-labeled, and probably marked in a digital vault for sale or future use by some organization. There’s very few ways for my generation to reclaim our privacy - everyone born after the 2000s is basically hosed.
Was it better back then? Did people actually trust one another?
We didn’t think about the absence of things we’re didn’t have. It’s easy to look back and say “I could have gotten away with so much” but we didn’t think about it.
Your whole life being recorded was a thing for my generation (X)… if you were rich. Rich families had video cameras and they did record all kinds of things. Birthday parties, holidays, vacations, and so on. We saw cameras. We either tried to avoid them, or tried to flip them off — so the cameras avoided us. They didn’t wanna see the poors anyway. And for the most part, they were, and mostly did their filming, in places you couldn’t go if you/your parents worked for a living.
In my experience people didn’t trust each other more, but it did feel like you had more autonomy. Cell phones are what really changed everything, for better and worse. I think the dumb phone era was the best because you were no longer in a position to need to walk miles in the countryside due to a breakdown, but also they weren’t ubiquitous enough that everyone demanded constant contact (old rules of phone etiquette were still in force). Also no algorithms. Brain rot was confined to TV, magazines, and radio.
Before security cameras were everywhere, things felt ‘normal’. There have been security cameras in store for a looong time before everyone had them – so common even the culture touchstone movie Terminator (1984) showed their use and they were common well before that.
Unlike most folks, it took me over a decade to come to grips with the loss of anonymity. Once the internet existed, I never entered my actual name into anything online, wouldn’t join facebook, and wouldn’t let anyone take my picture lest they attach my name to it. Eventually, I realized that even if I didn’t put my name online, everyone with my phone number put me in THEIR address books and anonymity was simply a lost cause.
At the same time, I’ve noticed that news/tv no longer show faces in their generic street-scene footage about anything that might be damaging (like ‘How fat is our town?’) and instead just show people waist-down, blurred, or very distant. That also happens a lot for less embarrassing content, and there’s generally less footage of generic local people.
That said, I’m really glad everyone has a cell phone with camera to catch bad police behavior. Lots of people used to dismiss such reports as people with a grudge making stuff up, but now there’s too much evidence to hide it.
I was so naive with regard to police body cameras. When they started being used, I actually thought “well now we can see what a good job the police are doing.” Boy was I fucking wrong. I’ve learned a lot since then about corruption, systematic racism, planted evidence, and abuse of power in general. They have really changed my views to see the real police.
This question kinda of erks me, cuz this a geographical specific question. Most of the world technological progress was slower than the US and adjacent countries, especially in developing countries, so by the time everyone their internet, we still had those old CRT TV and flat screen were for the ultra rich.
About the looking about stuff, even tho I was born in 2000s, we didn’t have internet/a home PC until 2013, before then you would either ask a teacher or a family member who specialise in that field, if its not your parent first. Contrary to popular, library are not that common outside the US and mainly in Universities. Really, this how most ppl are the world looked up stuff, just us around.
How did you learn to do something? Books, a teacher, and hands on trial and error. I think most people learned most things from somebody who taught them.
When something interested you, you’d go read about it. Learn more, see all the “documentation”. You’d also just do it and see what happens.
The easy access to knowledge today is great, and learning is easier. Its night and day to be able to look up information quickly.
The one benefit beforehand was that information was hard to produce. You couldn’t just record a video in 5 min and upload it to YouTube. You couldn’t just write a book in google docs then upload it to be sold as an eBook. Things took time and money. So if that much investment was needed, it weeded out a lot of bad information. Today, just because it’s online or in print doesn’t make it any more reliable.
Technology has definitely made life easier and more fun. But it’s also a tether people rely on. Maybe even a noose around their neck. I think the fact that people are glued to their phones all the time is very reminiscent of the humans in WallE. It’s sad.
I take the stance that I lived in a time where you couldn’t be reached 24/7 and weren’t expected to always be available. It was okay then so it should be okay now. My phone isn’t always on even though I carry it with me everywhere. If I’m hanging out with you I talk to you, and don’t need to be interrupted by messages or doom scrolling whatever app people like. My time is valuable, as is yours, and I give it the respect it deserves.
From a teacher. You learned UNIX from the person sitting next to you.
