What Did People Do Before Smartphones?

My grandparents grew up on the depression. They had a very simple life. They had a tv on wheels that lived in the closet and only came out once a month or so to watch a football game. They had a radio they turned on to listen to classical music while working. And they had a newspaper and magazine subscription.

They woke up early, tended to there chores and to the garden. Then they would eat a leasurly breakfast with lots of little plates and saucers (egg cups, juice, coffee and water glasses, etc), basically it was an activity that took an hour. Then more chores.

My grandma always had a project going, making cookies for a neighbor, helping someone find a job. My grandpa would spend most of the day in his workshop repairing lawnmowers or building fun inventions (solar ovens, bird houses, etc).

Lunch and dinner were also big presentations that took an hour. It was not always a lot of food, but they took a lot of time with it. After diner they would sit in two chairs side by side reading books or more often than not just sitting quietly. Neither talked much, they were just content to be.

They ran some errands occasionally, but there only big event for the week was going to church. I don’t remember them ever going out to dinner or even to a friends house, though they did have friends who stopped by.

Mostly they were content to do very little. They were never bored, or at least they were content to be bored. I think the one big negative all technology has brought us is that we’re restless if we can’t find something to do. We don’t enjoy just sitting and listening to life.

No one can remember.

Sad reality of a person with very small and very young friend circle.

👍

We used pagers to tell people to call us back on payphones, possibly using collect call service. Music was listened to on Sony Walkmans, maybe a boombox if you wanted to be obnoxious about it. Newspapers were sold at every street corner to provide reading material.

I wouldn't say it was so different before smartphones. Everyone on the train was browsing the news using the copy of the local paper instead of a cell-phone connected to some news network.

If you were meeting up somewhere you'd arrange to have someone who was at home (and thus by a phone) to orchestrate any last minute changes of plan or notifications of late arrivals (via payphones, which were a thing, once).

You'd go into town regularly to pick up the new bus timetable.

You'd have a huge pile of maps in the back of the car, or one very big map book, often both. If you drove somewhere once, you'd remember the route the next time.

There was a set of encyclopedias at home to look up facts.

And a calendar on the wall. (That's probably still a thing?)

There were a lot more newspapers and magazines around.

Everyone had a little notebook with all their important phone numbers in it. Filofax was revolutionary.

And we still remember the most important phone numbers from that little notebook because we had to dial them so very often.

We played eye spy a lot.

Oh wow. Sometimes I can’t believe there are people that don’t know a world without smartphones and the internet. Then I read this and realize that there are more of them now and less of us.

Books, newspapers, video game consoles, broadcast television.

Because of the lack of communication you wasted a whole lot of time trying to see who was around and who wanted to do things. You'd buy 10 minutes over to Jimmy's house see he's not there bike 10 minutes back like 5 minutes the other direction then Gerald's house.

Movie theaters and concessions used to be a lot less expensive even considering inflation.

There were malls and arcades. Department stores with cheap cafeterias.

As others have said standing in line was the worst. The best you could hope for was that you'd be able to do some people watching or maybe you got a book with you if you're the type to read.

Get past the pay wall with this link

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Paywalls are a scourge on the modern Internet...

I have been thinking of switching to a dumbphone and a standalone Spotify player lately. I still have my old Garmin GPS, but don't know if it still works. The idea of abandoning the smartphone is more daunting than I want to admit, but technology burnout is real.

We can waste many hours in our smart phones because our lives today are too comfortable. So comfortable that people don't even realise that.

Doing dishes without a dish washer takes at least one hour every day. Doing laundry without a washing machine takes a day. Do you know how much time it takes to bath two kids in a house without hot water supply? I can go on.

Shopping, cleaning, washing, going to work, traveling anywhere for any reason - every bloody action took A LOT OF TIME. You give smartphones to people 50-100 years ago and they won't have time to use them.

The poorest people in advanced countries today literally live like kings of the olden days.

You can see they (we) enjoyed it more lol

Limit your screen time to an hour a day and you'll figure it out

Same shit but more of it. Life was less efficient but we didn't know.

Read the back of schampoo bottles while on the toilet.
No podcast while doing chores so radio on constantly instead
Newspapers or books on trains and buses to pass the time
Queues were death

depending on the context the answer can vary a lot. some times its make small talk. sometimes its do dumb shit. sometimes its fucking. sometimes its just stuff tech nas made obsolete like a lot of adjustments on vehicles or machines.

I was a heck of a lot more bored on the toilet, so….

Paywall free link: https://archive.is/pUmLx

We would run down the street with a stick and we'd stick in the fence while running so it would make a noise. Or we'd stick a playing card into the spoke of our bike so it would make a noise. We were entertained by noises. And rewinding VHS tapes.

As late Gen X I grew up without internet, and my parents both grew up on rural farms and were quite frugal, so we didn't have cable TV, air conditioning, or much of anything else.

I spent a lot of time reading (fiction and encyclopedias), bicycling, building tree forts in the woods, snow forts, swimming (city pool or nearby creek that was probably full of mildly toxic runoff), building stuff (lots of Lego creations), etc. There were arcades, but it took like two hours on the bus to get there and then you need money to play, so that kind of sucked. We almost never had any money, so we very rarely did anything that wasn't free. Spent a lot of time at the local library in the summer (probably read half of the scifi/fantasy section by the time I got out of high school).

About once a month on a Friday night we'd go to the local video rental store and rent a couple of VHS movies and a VCR so we could watch a movie. Eventually they also offered rentals of a NES machine, so we could play a video game at home.

We always had a home computer though, so sometimes I'd play simple games on the computer. Then when I got bored with the games (which didn't take very long since they were all free stuff from the early days of computers) I'd go through the source code for them to learn to make my own. From about middle school on I spent a lot of time programming (with a few sample programs and lots of time as my only resources).

We were painfully, PAINFULLY bored.

Lines waiting for anything were agony, but we learned to tolerate them. There were less people so often the lines weren't as bad but still.

Boredom is something we're more sensitive now because we can be, much like hunter-gatherers were probably less sensitive to hunger and cold than we are.

Gameboys, iPods, calculator games, and pdas lol

https://archive.is/pUmLx