I remember a one-man-show of 1998 where the comic pretends he “succeeded to start cigarette” and how stylish he became. In the middle of the scene he says: “Bef

I remember a one-man-show of 1998 where the comic pretends he “succeeded to start cigarette” and how stylish he became. In the middle of the scene he says: “Before starting? I used to go to dates, and when the person was late, I was waiting like this, on the street, arms pending, didn’t know what to do with my hands. NOW I SMOKE!” Joke aside, it highlights that people used to wait a lot. “Meet me at 6 at the library” meant that you might be on the wrong side of the library, you’ll try the other entrance and the person does the opposite, using another path, so you don’t meet, and you don’t know whether they had to cancel. We did far fewer things because anything took a lot of time. Movies were much slower too. Watch Gremlins again, an action movie: It’s so slow! (Counter example: Die Hard is correctly fast-paced for an action movie). To summarize, qualities you’d require would be reliability in appointments and being able to wait a lot without getting bored. We could even make the case that it is now possible to fill loneliness with a mobile phone, whereas it drove more than one into dementia pre-iPhone.