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Yeah I remember waiting for people - I got a smartphone at 16, in 2004, something like that, so it's hard to really imagine how it was for adults... My parents
by xwolfi 5y ago
Yeah I remember waiting for people - I got a smartphone at 16, in 2004, something like that, so it's hard to really imagine how it was for adults...
My parents told me they spend evenings at the phone booth talking to each other - but even that is ultra convenient compared to my grandparents sending letters :D
But I think it's better anyway - we sample mating candidates more, we cycle through faster, we can stop and try anew nearly any time until 50, and with some difficulty above.
I mean my aunt had a crushing divorce when she had 3 young children and stayed alone working with all 3 until the internet arrived and she could find a partner much faster...
- noisy_boy 5y ago> My parents told me they spend evenings at the phone booth talking to each other - but even that is ultra convenient compared to my grandparents sending letters :D No need to get to the grandparents' generation, I was the letter writer of my family :) I wrote letters to uncles/aunts/grandpa - mostly at the command of my mum or grandma and sometimes for myself. I remember rushing to the window when the postman yelled and dropped letters through the grill - sometimes there would be more than one! The excitement was palpable - now we sigh with annoyance at the barrage of nonsense and spam that flows into our inbox. Truly a case of quantity over quality.
- tomjen3 5y agoI remember feeling that way when I got an email back in the day, because it was a pretty rare event. These days, I feel like that when I get a physical letter that isn't sent by a machine.
- coldtea 5y ago>But I think it's better anyway - we sample mating candidates more, we cycle through faster, we can stop and try anew nearly any time until 50, and with some difficulty above. On the other side, we self report more isolated, depressed, friendless and dissatisfied than ever in the past decades, have record levels of depression prescriptions and opioids, and people get discovered dead after a month or so when somebody complains about the smell...
- paulryanrogers 5y agoHow reliable are self reported results across years or even generations of confounding changes?
- coldtea 5y agoCombined with empirical observation, what we've used to call "having a look for yourself", they're quite potent. That said it's not like hard numbers like prescriptions and case stats haven't got up, including numbers of people living alone, etc.
- Broken_Hippo 5y agoBefore opiods, we had cocaine, valium, morphine, and so on... We just didn't keep so many records back then, especially during the times they were legal. With Valium, folks got it from their doctor. Did we track depression before like we do now? Were folks comfortable talking about it or would they lie when they self report? I'm pretty sure that in the past, folks got discovered dead because of the smell.
- Werewolf255 5y agoIs it worse or are we just getting better data on it? It seems just as likely that these states simply went unreported due to having nobody who was interested in listening. Might be that the quiet desperation has always been there, but now it gets voiced to a receptive audience.