Somehow, I occupied myself just fine, was meeting friends regularly and did activities regularly. There was no societally wide lack of entertainment.
Frankly, it is super weird that you see doing fun stuff as some kind of virtue.
you're romanticizing the past
*Or rampant or whatever other word you feel fits the current state of social media.
Because there was no faster way to do it, it was okay to wait for someone to send you those photos via email. If you were late for a meetup somewhere new, that was okay because people knew you might have missed the street a few times stopped for directions etc.
We have more convenient things, sure. But they come with increased and rather frenzied expectations.
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/03/03/going-analog-gen-z-desire-to...
Convenience is the glue that got all the frogs stuck to their boiling pots.
> the technology we have now has saved hundreds of millions
Oh wow, are you sure it's not billions?
It's not a requirement or law of nature that every technology sold must be used against the customer, we just haven't reached a point where we say enough is enough and outlaw such consumer hostile practices. Instead we've been allowing the corporations who seek to screw us over at every opportunity to gain more and more influence over the governments that could constrain them making it harder for us to fight back against the abuses we're subjected to.
The Internet of the 90s and early 2000s was amazing. The Internet today is a dumpster fire of attention hoarding, regurgitated content and, now, slop.
Society as a whole may be better off without a lot of the convenience features we have, but I also don't agree that it's all or nothing. We could have an amazing tech relationship today. But a select few wanted to monetize it for themselves. Here we are, welcome to the free market.