7 ms·

I was born in the 80s, but somehow my life didn't feel like much change happened, because the one constant of my life was to learn new things every few years.

by k__ 5y ago

jeffreyrogers 5y ago
The changes over the past 50 years are definitely less than in the prior 50 years (and the 50 years before that).
- contingencies 5y ago
  Strongly disagree. The internet has totally replaced most previous industries. No aspect of daily ritual, be it education, work, play, language or chore is untouched and global media has altered the status quo for culture and commerce. Most of that in the last 20 years. The farmer in this piece saw the beginnings of the industrial revolution. That had huge implications but it took a lot of time for those implications to reach the corners of the earth. These days, ideas and technology spread and compound much more rapidly. Re: Last 20 years, I used to travel in the early noughties before mobile phones were everywhere and none of them had cameras. Wikipedia had barely begun, Google Maps didn't exist, many countries were without ATMs or card connectivity, I even carried TCs once. You you had to pay internet cafes for sporadic internet access. Now I can pay cashless in most places, there's crypto, mobile signals everywhere and global roaming data is a thing. I once got lost in rural India in ~2011, pulled out a laptop with mobile data, a satellite map and a 3D digital elevation model. That's ... superhuman by 1960 standards. And then there's machine translation/video conferencing/libgen/cloud services.
  - ghaff 5y ago
    Yeah 1920-1970 saw lots of changes as well--perhaps as many net as 1970-2020. But if we talk about 20-25 years, I can guarantee you that dropping any reasonably plugged in person--of whatever age--from today into 1995 and tell them to do a job, shop for things, get information about something, etc. and it will be a pretty unsettling and frustrating experience. Certainly more so than the shift from 1970-1995.
    - DougWebb 5y ago
      A lot of us "reasonably plugged-in" people were doing those things back in 1995. It is easier today, though.
      - ghaff 5y ago
        I probably had access to the Web from a Unix workstation by then. Had BBS systems and things like FTP earlier. At that point though, none of those things had any material effect on how I lived my day to day life (other than computer hobby-related). I think when I checked a few years ago, my first order from Amazon wasn't until sometime in the late 1990s, for example. And I don't recall using the Internet for anything really work related until around that time as well. If you want to go back a few more years to 1990, I doubt I had a cell phone yet.
        u801e 5y ago
        Back in 1995, a movie called The Net was released. One scene near the beginning showed the main character ordering pizza online. I don't think any pizza chain had online ordering until later in the '90s.
        ghaff 5y ago
        Just rewatched that movie funnily enough. Yeah, most of what we think of as the Internet, or at least the Web, started to be in the consumer radar post-1995.
        randomdata 5y ago
        Pizza Hut offered online ordering in 1994.
        rsynnott 5y ago
        I believe ordering food was a thing on Minitel in the 80s, which may have been the inspiration.
    - PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
  - ghaff 5y ago
    Not sure why the downvotes. Yes, even early 2000s was a different world traveling. Print everything out. Generally work off paper maps. Even into the 2010s, ubiquitous GPS and things like restaurant search, especially internationally, weren't the seamless experience they (often) are today.
  - PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
    > The internet has totally replaced most previous industries. Maybe this is a just a trivial wording mistake, but the "replaced" here is completely inaccurate. "Changed" would be fine.
  - dragonwriter 5y ago
    > The internet has totally replaced most previous industries. Other than other media distribution and telecommunication industries, and some of retail, it hasn't replaced much. It has impacted lots, but impacting and replacing are very different.
  - Karrot_Kream 5y ago
    The internet completely changed the idea of preparing to go somewhere. As a kid, when I went somewhere, I would (with parents' help) look at the map for directions, bring my documents in a folio, and make sure I had all the documents on my way back. I have fond memories first reading maps then printing out directions to go driving. When I was going to college I spent the weekend before classes started trueing up the campus map with the reality on the ground. And of course, meeting up with people was all about setting a common time and just having faith that your friends/family would show up at that time. Oh and every time I'd take transit, I'd grab the transit route book, or stare at a wall of train lines for minutes to figure out which combination of lines I needed to go where. Now when I need to go somewhere, I open up Google Maps and tell it where I want to go and what form of transport I'm using to get there and I have a route. My documents are on my phone and now my forms of payment are as well. If I'm meeting up with someone and they're running late, they usually let me know through a messaging app. All of this really changed the pace of going places and doing things, _especially_ travel. This all feels mundane to us, but try dropping a kid who grew up in the internet age to navigate without their Maps app, and the vast majority of them (especially the ones that aren't outdoorsy) would probably have a tough time.
    - SyzygistSix 5y ago
      I still rarely use Google maps or any map program when driving and only recently got to the point where that made things harder. I love technology and the internet but do not like mediating existence through a smartphone. But doing with out a smartphone is looking more and more difficult to do now. Which means it's time to learn to install Lineage OS or something similar.
- BurningFrog 5y ago
  It would be interesting to find an objective way to measure that. Not that there is anything wrong with subjective impressions like this.
  - missedthecue 5y ago
    Yeah I think it's more true for some things than others. We went from Wright Brothers to moon landing in just 66 years time, but somehow commercial air travel today is slower than it was 50 years ago. On the other hand, the boring automobile I drive every day is practically a spaceship compared to the death traps of the 1970s. And of course probably 90% of advances in computing have occurred since the early 1970s.
- dylan604 5y ago
  Stone Age, Bronze Age, Iron Age, Industrial Age, Tecnhnology Age... what's next
  - dd36 5y ago
    Space Age
  - echelon 5y ago
    Post-Biology
- bradlys 5y ago
  Culturally, this isn’t really true. Culturally, we’re moving faster than we’ve ever moved. Trends change faster than ever before. To the point where it’s blurred because things never stick for very long like they did in the past. We move too fast now for anyone to keep up.
  - postalrat 5y ago
    Things have gotten much cheaper, small, and better but we are still driving cars, still work similar jobs, similar homes, etc. Still no flying cards, robots to do our work, AI, fusion, etc.
    - abyssin 5y ago
      Robots are doing a lot of work for us, but they don’t look humanoid.
      - postalrat 5y ago
        There were robots making things in the 80s and long before. Nothing new.
titzer 5y ago
It's mostly decor. There's so many more subdivisions and suburban areas, and the style of houses and interior spaces have really changed since the 1980s. A lot of things nowadays are made out of plastic that still would have been made out of metal in the 1980s (even more so in the 1950s). Case in point, today I went looking for a hose reel and nearly all the models were plastic pieces of crap. Plastic--a terrible material for outdoor work that will break in less than 5 years.
- buildsjets 5y ago
  You can still get nice ones but they will cost you. Still worth it. Search for the “Yard Butler” brand.
  - acheron 5y ago
    Or Eley.
- lotsofpulp 5y ago
  There have been many advancements in plastics and materials science. Metal has the problem is rust and weight, plastic has UV degradation, but I have seen situations that call for both.
  - elzbardico 5y ago
    More durable plastics are a problem, not a solution. Metal is recyclable
    - thrwyoilarticle 5y ago
      Reused beats recycled
daveslash 5y ago
I was born in the 80s, and I feel like a freaking time traveler. But then, I grew up in an extremely rural part of colonial New England, and it was quite behind the times, even for the 1980s....most locals were part of a handful of families that pre-dated the revolutionary war and had never moved out of town. Now I'm in urban Southern California as a software engineer. I've been here over a decade, but upon reflecting on my growing-up, it feels like I've been flung at least half a century forward in time, if not more.

I was born in the 80s, but somehow my life didn't feel like much change happened, because the one constant of my life was to learn new things every few years.

by k__ 5y ago

I was born in the 80s, but somehow my life didn't feel like much change happened, because the one constant of my life was to learn new things every few years.

jeffreyrogers 5y ago

The changes over the past 50 years are definitely less than in the prior 50 years (and the 50 years before that).

contingencies 5y ago
Strongly disagree. The internet has totally replaced most previous industries. No aspect of daily ritual, be it education, work, play, language or chore is untouched and global media has altered the status quo for culture and commerce. Most of that in the last 20 years. The farmer in this piece saw the beginnings of the industrial revolution. That had huge implications but it took a lot of time for those implications to reach the corners of the earth. These days, ideas and technology spread and compound much more rapidly. Re: Last 20 years, I used to travel in the early noughties before mobile phones were everywhere and none of them had cameras. Wikipedia had barely begun, Google Maps didn't exist, many countries were without ATMs or card connectivity, I even carried TCs once. You you had to pay internet cafes for sporadic internet access. Now I can pay cashless in most places, there's crypto, mobile signals everywhere and global roaming data is a thing. I once got lost in rural India in ~2011, pulled out a laptop with mobile data, a satellite map and a 3D digital elevation model. That's ... superhuman by 1960 standards. And then there's machine translation/video conferencing/libgen/cloud services.
- ghaff 5y ago
  Yeah 1920-1970 saw lots of changes as well--perhaps as many net as 1970-2020. But if we talk about 20-25 years, I can guarantee you that dropping any reasonably plugged in person--of whatever age--from today into 1995 and tell them to do a job, shop for things, get information about something, etc. and it will be a pretty unsettling and frustrating experience. Certainly more so than the shift from 1970-1995.
  - DougWebb 5y ago
    A lot of us "reasonably plugged-in" people were doing those things back in 1995. It is easier today, though.
    - ghaff 5y ago
      I probably had access to the Web from a Unix workstation by then. Had BBS systems and things like FTP earlier. At that point though, none of those things had any material effect on how I lived my day to day life (other than computer hobby-related). I think when I checked a few years ago, my first order from Amazon wasn't until sometime in the late 1990s, for example. And I don't recall using the Internet for anything really work related until around that time as well. If you want to go back a few more years to 1990, I doubt I had a cell phone yet.
      - u801e 5y ago
        Back in 1995, a movie called The Net was released. One scene near the beginning showed the main character ordering pizza online. I don't think any pizza chain had online ordering until later in the '90s.
        ghaff 5y ago
        Just rewatched that movie funnily enough. Yeah, most of what we think of as the Internet, or at least the Web, started to be in the consumer radar post-1995.
        randomdata 5y ago
        Pizza Hut offered online ordering in 1994.
        rsynnott 5y ago
        I believe ordering food was a thing on Minitel in the 80s, which may have been the inspiration.
  - PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
- ghaff 5y ago
  Not sure why the downvotes. Yes, even early 2000s was a different world traveling. Print everything out. Generally work off paper maps. Even into the 2010s, ubiquitous GPS and things like restaurant search, especially internationally, weren't the seamless experience they (often) are today.
- PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
  > The internet has totally replaced most previous industries. Maybe this is a just a trivial wording mistake, but the "replaced" here is completely inaccurate. "Changed" would be fine.
- dragonwriter 5y ago
  > The internet has totally replaced most previous industries. Other than other media distribution and telecommunication industries, and some of retail, it hasn't replaced much. It has impacted lots, but impacting and replacing are very different.
- Karrot_Kream 5y ago
  The internet completely changed the idea of preparing to go somewhere. As a kid, when I went somewhere, I would (with parents' help) look at the map for directions, bring my documents in a folio, and make sure I had all the documents on my way back. I have fond memories first reading maps then printing out directions to go driving. When I was going to college I spent the weekend before classes started trueing up the campus map with the reality on the ground. And of course, meeting up with people was all about setting a common time and just having faith that your friends/family would show up at that time. Oh and every time I'd take transit, I'd grab the transit route book, or stare at a wall of train lines for minutes to figure out which combination of lines I needed to go where. Now when I need to go somewhere, I open up Google Maps and tell it where I want to go and what form of transport I'm using to get there and I have a route. My documents are on my phone and now my forms of payment are as well. If I'm meeting up with someone and they're running late, they usually let me know through a messaging app. All of this really changed the pace of going places and doing things, _especially_ travel. This all feels mundane to us, but try dropping a kid who grew up in the internet age to navigate without their Maps app, and the vast majority of them (especially the ones that aren't outdoorsy) would probably have a tough time.
  - SyzygistSix 5y ago
    I still rarely use Google maps or any map program when driving and only recently got to the point where that made things harder. I love technology and the internet but do not like mediating existence through a smartphone. But doing with out a smartphone is looking more and more difficult to do now. Which means it's time to learn to install Lineage OS or something similar.
BurningFrog 5y ago
It would be interesting to find an objective way to measure that. Not that there is anything wrong with subjective impressions like this.
- missedthecue 5y ago
  Yeah I think it's more true for some things than others. We went from Wright Brothers to moon landing in just 66 years time, but somehow commercial air travel today is slower than it was 50 years ago. On the other hand, the boring automobile I drive every day is practically a spaceship compared to the death traps of the 1970s. And of course probably 90% of advances in computing have occurred since the early 1970s.
dylan604 5y ago
Stone Age, Bronze Age, Iron Age, Industrial Age, Tecnhnology Age... what's next
- dd36 5y ago
  Space Age
- echelon 5y ago
  Post-Biology
bradlys 5y ago
Culturally, this isn’t really true. Culturally, we’re moving faster than we’ve ever moved. Trends change faster than ever before. To the point where it’s blurred because things never stick for very long like they did in the past. We move too fast now for anyone to keep up.
- postalrat 5y ago
  Things have gotten much cheaper, small, and better but we are still driving cars, still work similar jobs, similar homes, etc. Still no flying cards, robots to do our work, AI, fusion, etc.
  - abyssin 5y ago
    Robots are doing a lot of work for us, but they don’t look humanoid.
    - postalrat 5y ago
      There were robots making things in the 80s and long before. Nothing new.

titzer 5y ago

It's mostly decor. There's so many more subdivisions and suburban areas, and the style of houses and interior spaces have really changed since the 1980s. A lot of things nowadays are made out of plastic that still would have been made out of metal in the 1980s (even more so in the 1950s). Case in point, today I went looking for a hose reel and nearly all the models were plastic pieces of crap. Plastic--a terrible material for outdoor work that will break in less than 5 years.

buildsjets 5y ago
You can still get nice ones but they will cost you. Still worth it. Search for the “Yard Butler” brand.
- acheron 5y ago
  Or Eley.
lotsofpulp 5y ago
There have been many advancements in plastics and materials science. Metal has the problem is rust and weight, plastic has UV degradation, but I have seen situations that call for both.
- elzbardico 5y ago
  More durable plastics are a problem, not a solution. Metal is recyclable
  - thrwyoilarticle 5y ago
    Reused beats recycled

daveslash 5y ago

I was born in the 80s, and I feel like a freaking time traveler. But then, I grew up in an extremely rural part of colonial New England, and it was quite behind the times, even for the 1980s....most locals were part of a handful of families that pre-dated the revolutionary war and had never moved out of town. Now I'm in urban Southern California as a software engineer. I've been here over a decade, but upon reflecting on my growing-up, it feels like I've been flung at least half a century forward in time, if not more.