Life Before the 'Net: We Were Fine, We Were Lied To
Alright, settle down, because we need to talk about the Before Times. Yeah, you heard me. B.T. – Before Internet. A dark age, my friends, a time of utter, soul-crushing boredom and ignorance, brought to you by the fine folks who invented dial-up but somehow forgot to invent, like, everything else.
You hear the kids today—and, let's be honest, those overly nostalgic Millennials—talking about how "simple" life was. They wax poetic about disconnection. They lie. We were fine, sure, like a three-legged dog is "fine." But mostly, we were slow, clueless, and inconvenienced.
The Terrible Truth About Not Knowing Anything
Let’s start with the total lack of knowledge. You want to know the population of Estonia? You want to settle a bet about who played the bass in the B-52s? You want to know the difference between a weasel and a stoat?
Forget it. You didn't know. Nobody knew.
You had to wait. You had to wait until you could get to a library. Then you had to find the right volume of the Encyclopedia Britannica, which was probably missing the letter 'E' because Kevin from high school ripped it out in 1987.
The only search engine was your parent's memory. And their memory was based on things they saw on the evening news in 1978. Good luck.
Music was a mystery. If you heard a song on the radio, you either had to record the DJ's rambling introduction over the start of your cassette (fail), or you had to drive down to the record store and ask some sneering dude in a leather jacket if he knew the "song that goes, 'Doo-doo-doo-doo-doo, ah-ah-ah-ah...'" The answer was always "No."
We were intellectual savages, wandering around in a fog of educated guesses and urban legends.
Everything Took Forever
Forget instant gratification. That wasn't just a mood, it was a way of life—a slow, agonizing way of life.
Communication: Sending a letter took a week. Need an RSVP? Budget two weeks minimum. Want to call someone and they're on the phone? That’s it. The line is tied up. You have to hang up and try again later. Just staring at the receiver, waiting for the person you were already trying to talk to to finish their conversation with someone else.
Shopping: Remember wandering around a strip mall, looking for a very specific type of electrical tape, only to find the store closed? Now you have to get in your car again and drive across town. No checking inventory online. No reviews. Just blind, agonizing hope.
Entertainment: Remember those days where you had to dedicate an hour of your life to browsing the aisles of a video rental store, only to discover that the one movie you wanted was always taken? Always. Then you had to settle for something awful, watch it, and then drive back the next day and pay a late fee. That fluorescent yellow light from the video store is the color of regret and wasted time.
We had all this free time everyone keeps talking about, and what did we do with it? We spent it waiting for things to happen. We were the original beta testers for "buffering," except it was our lives, not a video stream.
Directions? Good Luck, Comrade.
The maps. Oh, God, the maps. Trying to find an address—which you got written on a napkin—was an exercise in existential dread.
You had to use a physical map, a giant sheet of paper that, once unfolded in the driver's seat, completely blocked out the sun and the steering wheel.
If you missed a turn, your navigational device (the person in the passenger seat) would calmly say, "Well, you should have turned left at the Chevron," forcing you to find the nearest U-turn spot (usually three miles down a one-way street), then try to re-fold the map, which was impossible.
"Rerouting" meant pulling into a gas station and asking a bored minimum-wage worker for help.
Now, I look at my phone and get turn-by-turn navigation in a calm, slightly condescending voice, and I think: How did we not crash our cars more often?
The Verdict
So yeah, the Internet might have turned us all into jittery, over-caffeinated info-fiends who can’t sit still for more than 45 seconds, but at least we're informed jittery, over-caffeinated info-fiends who can order a pizza without having to make a phone call.
I'll take the constant, low-grade anxiety of the digital age over the soul-crushing, time-wasting, ignorance-is-bliss stupidity of the Before Times.
Now if you'll excuse me, I need to look up a 1989 B-side track on YouTube and buy that specific electrical tape before I forget what I'm doing. It's the least I can do to honor the sacrifice of our lost productivity.
