Microblog Memes

Hanging out with my friends in deep parts of forest near the small town we all grew up in

We would bike out past the highway with backpacks, and make little shelters and a fire ....and just be lads...throw stuff, sometimes at each other, see who could lift the biggest rock, or jump the widest part of the stream, fish, make a lean-to...we made a neat little spot over a few years

we experienced being totally and completely lost once then, which was a very humbling and powerful experience I can still remember the realization of total silence and total loss of sense of direction....but, we didnt panic, stayed together found our way home

We also played a ton of baseball w tennis balls during the summer in a park that was kinda in between everyone's homes - tennis balls were fun cause they didnt hurt you if you got beaned , or break peoples wnidows around the park, and also dont travel very far, so make for some fun pop-up fly balls

good times

Wasn't much different for me. I usually walked around reading a mass market paperback book instead of a cell phone just took up more pocket space. I grew up in the 90's so I still had portable gaming like the Gameboy advance too. Thr one I had before that, the nomad was... let's just say NOT as portable. Oh. And my Walkman CD player. Nowadays I just have it all on one device.... my legion go. I use my cell phone exclusively for social media which I had ro go to my computer for, use slow as he'll 56k dial up internet, and browse all message boards and chat rooms for that online social aspect.

Young person here: I feel a lot of these things that you miss are just you missing childhood altogether, although I'm sure there are plenty of real things to miss from the era but I also miss being 10 and relate to plenty of these things despite growing up in the 2010s.

The quiet

The creativity that came with being bored. Without being able to entertain yourself with a phone at every moment, there were plenty of times when we'd hang out with nothing to do and end up having a blast after figuring out stuff to do. It's so easy now to just sit and pass hours surfing the phone, and I think it's taken the drive for that creativity away.

Also, the acceptance of being bored. We could be content for long periods of time just in our own thoughts. We didn't have other people's thoughts to consume all the time. Sometimes I miss my own thoughts, I don't think I give them enough attention nowadays. Back then we didn't have to work at it, oftentimes it was our thoughts or silence.

I just miss being able to focus on what I was currently doing. Even if that thing was boring, at least I was there, at that moment, experiencing boredom.

My entire existence now seems to be in 300 character blurbs. Even real life stuff. If I'm bored for more than 30 seconds I pull out my phone and start consuming more blurbs from around the world. Watching an entire movie feels like too much of a commitment...

Chiming in again to say physical tickets to shows. I miss them. I still have a lot of the old ones I collected, too.

Being young.

I miss that feeling of going to school on Monday and hearing all the shit that went down on the weekend that I wasn’t there for. I lived far from town with no phone 90% of the time (dad worked nights so it had to be off the hook a lot) so I was always last to know anything. It was freeing. I didn’t care that I had to wait to talk to my friends in person about everything.

I miss phone screening. I wish I could just let all calls go to my answering machine and if the caller is leaving a legit message about something I could pick up, or if the caller was a telemarketer or someone I didn't want to talk to, let them think I wasn't home. Now, if someone calls and I don't pick up, I have to explain that the phone was in another room and I didn't hear it even though everyone knows I'm on Lemmy 24/7.

my mum. definitely my mum

I miss being left in the middle of nowhere after the bus left without me and not being able to walk home. Or call for that matter.

I had no idea what the number was, didn't have money for a payphone, and didn't have a convenient device that saves the number, is prepaid for the call, and oh yeah, allows you to make the fucking call itself.

I mean, my childhood was pretty recent, but I was phone free until 16 and only had a sim in that phone when I was 17.

Childhood was strange, because I was seemingly one of the only ones without a phone , as well as how the ones with phones had worse attention spans, less will to organise themselves, and more distracted, despite the fact that I was one of the neurodivergent ones.

Being a teen was also strange, since my friends would send me something on instagram or Snapchat, then for the millionth time realise I don’t actually have a phone, until of course a friend gave me a semi old flagship phone for free.

being able to walk to your friends house?

Speculation as a topic of conversation. You see a weird object somewhere or you wonder about some random trivia. You don't have Google to immediately look it up so you guess. It become a game with your companions. "Who do you think...?" Then you try to reason out an answer. It's a fun mental exercise. It still possible of course but most people wouldn't think to do it.