Before the internet - I’m old enough to remember those days - we hung out more. People conversed and engaged in banter and whatnot. You could hang out for hours with friends. Kids especially were outside a lot more than now. As a kid we found ways to amuse ourselves. You’d spontaneously go to someone’s house and if they were there then hangout. If not you’d walk or bike around until you found some kids to play with. We played kickball in the streets. I never see kids playing in the streets in the U.S. (I grew up in the Canal Zone.).

No one I know shows up to a friends house on a whim or unannounced. It’s all planned activities and the art of conversation has died in the U.S. We are social creatures and the solitary nature of being online has an unhealthy, anti-social side effect.

i dont know about you but we mostly did this because we were bored as fuck.

plus dangerous behaviours like drinking, smoking, fighting with other kids, setting trash on fire, destroying property, stealing, an generally being a menace to society.

i think playing a bit of vidya is a god alternative outlet, and it can be just as social.

but i always admired the culture in the us where random ppl would strike up a conversation with you. if someone did that over here i would expect to get scammed, robbed or both.

The boredom caused us to be more social and to actively seek out people with whom to engage with. The isolation that the internet and the lack of walkability that is caused by a car centric culture are not good for us as a species.

I didn’t have a cell phone until 2015. One time while teaching class at a community college my students found out that I didn’t have a cell phone. They asked me what I would do if my car broke down since I couldn’t call anyone. I told them I would walk to the nearest house and ask to use their phone. One student said, “I never would have thought of that.”. Another asked if I would be afraid of getting shot. American society has become anti-social and its very unhealthy that this is so.

> and it can be just as social.

I would argue it cannot be as social, even if you're talking to people. You won't ever get half the social cues that come from actual social interaction, nor the firing of mirror neurons that comes when people talk face-to-face, etc.

In fact, Turkle makes a good argument that online communication is destroying empathy among a whole generation of kids, and they don't even know how to really communicate in person with another human being anymore, nor any idea of social manners, etc. Having taught secondary school for five years, I can't agree more with her conclusions.

In recent years I've been slowly reverting to 80s me, where as you say, we just hung out. (Mid 90s was when the idea of keeping in touch with friends online instead of in person started creeping in for me, initially via ICQ and AIM.)

It's just better. 1980s mode (having a couple of good friends I spend a lot of time in person with) is better than 2020s mode (having hundreds or thousands of online "friends" who I'm not really that close to). I just find it more fulfilling to interact with people in meatspace.

> No one I know shows up to a friends house on a whim or unannounced. It’s all planned activities and the art of conversation has died in the U.S. We are social creatures and the solitary nature of being online has an unhealthy, anti-social side effect.

100% agreed. I think it's actually the true underlying cause of the political fracturing we've seen in America (and are starting to see elsewhere as it filters out).

It's also the biggest difference I've noticed since moving to Ireland. People still sometimes show up unannounced, just to see if you're home and want to chat, especially in more rural areas; plus, you have the pub culture where people go and just have a drink and a chat. It's not great, because drinking is expected (though thankfully alcohol free options have come a long way) but it's much better than what exists in America.

I actually worry messenger apps like Discord make this worse, because you can just get a facsimile of human interaction online, and it's nowhere near the real thing; in fact, it can't be, because it won't trigger our brain the same way as seeing facial expressions, etc., does. Even more, I worry that as chatbots get better, we're going to see this trend get even worse as people turn to chatbots (and/or companies start shoving them in front of us). I can't see things getting better with the current state of the internet.

We hung out more, too, but that's because we were young and had fewer responsibilities. Now we're old and a bunch of us have kids or parents to take care of, jobs with varying hours, and we often had to move for our or our spouses' jobs.

We can bemoan these facts but I don't think it's accurate to blame screens or the internet. If anything the internet has made it easier to stay in touch despite the aforementioned life changes.

There used to be Elk’s clubs and other organization. We had municipal pools and rec centers. My parents hung out a lot with people their age. Desegregation plays a huge role in the dismantling of these things but now we live in a society where loneliness, lack of face-to-face friends and whatnot are commonplace. Whatever the causes it is unhealthy.

Yeah, we hung out more...if we had people to hang out with and got along.

I was from the rural edges of a metro area in the 90s. My main interests at 6 years old were programming, astronomy (particularly star classification systems), video games, and child development. There were no people like me around; the internet made me more social (and more socially adept) than I otherwise would have been. My parents are socially stunted because they spent 40+ years of their lives being unable to be themselves with anyone other than their spouse, siblings, my dad's parents and their children because they were routinely mocked.

We need to be careful not to be blinded by nostalgia glasses. There were some benefits to the old way of doing things, but there were substantial drawbacks as well, particularly for those who were out of step with their local community.

Ideally you would produce something instead of consuming it. Maybe music, woodworking, painting, writing, etc... Easier said than done, after having that insight years ago it has been on my to-do list permanently and yet here I am on the screen... After producing for 8 hours at work it is pretty hard to muster up the energy to produce things for myself in the evenings.

That's another aspect of the screen time shaming mentioned above, a lot of those production hobbies use screens! If you want to record and share music with your friends, you'll be looking at a screen for quite some time. Are these people harming themselves by producing and recording music? Of course not nobody would suggest so, but that's the outcome when people eagerly suggest near zero screen time.

Also there's the other factor where we have this insane obsession with producing at all times. Producing for work. Producing for multiple side hustles. Producing with our hobbies. It's as if they're trying to speedrun a complete burnout, not just with work but with relationships and life itself. Some people really do need a reminder that it's ok to relax, to consume, to observe, to waste time with people you love.

Basically what I'm saying is more people should find the balance that works for them and question whether their current general routine makes them happy. I reckon for a lot of people, the difference doesn't really come down to screen time or production vs consumption, but an active choice to be doing whatever it is they are planning to do.

> Ideally you would produce something instead of consuming it.

Why? I'm already "producing" a big part of my day. This "always be producing" mentality is more harmful than making time to relax, enjoy yourself in non-productive ways.

You're right, there's a place for both active leisure and passive leisure. The problem I have is that our jobs rob us of the energy we need for active leisure, so we just end up doing passive leisure 100% of the time which I think is way out of balance.

> The problem I have is that our jobs rob us of the energy we need for active leisure, so we just end up doing passive leisure 100% of the time which I think is way out of balance.

I don't know what the ratio is between active and passive leisure. Nor do I know for sure that people generally have more leisure time now than ever before, but I do suspect that is the case.

But I do know that there are many companies that one might consider to be in the "active leisure industry" and that are profitable.

It's false that people now have more leisure time, in fact we have less than ever before.

For most of human history we were hunter gatherers. We know from the field of anthropology that people in hunter gatherer tribes "work" about 30 hours a week - but their work consists of things we consider leisure like hunting, fishing, hiking, and building things with friends (ever spend a weekend helping a buddy build a deck?).

Hell, even medieval surfs had more free time than us. Planting and harvesting seasons certainly had some full workdays but other than that... lots of time off. You know all those feasts in the Catholic church? Yeah, they got all those off. Kind of like how government workers get all the extra holidays off like MLK and Columbus day. A medieval surf's PTO puts an average American's PTO (0 days by law!) to shame.

If you compare our current amount of free time to the free time of a Dickensian orphan working in a factory at the turn of the 20th century then yes, it seems like we have it pretty good. But compared to 95% percent of human history, we work way more time at our stupid jobs than any other humans in history.

> It's false that people now have more leisure time, in fact we have less than ever before.

This chart and supporting material argue that over the last 150 years annual working hours per worker drastically declining. That lets me believe that leisure time is increasing. https://ourworldindata.org/working-more-than-ever

Where do you think they're wrong?

I am not comparing our current leisure time to the time we had at the beginning of the industrial revolution and onward. We probably do have more free time than we did 150 years ago. I'm comparing our leisure time to the leisure time we had before agriculture was invented - that's why studying hunter gatherer tribes is so interesting. These also happens to be the conditions we evolved for.

>and still have hours of time left over

Oh, how I wish this were true, lol.

I am always out of time by the end of the day.

Go outside and touch grass.

When we was kids we would stay in and smoke grass. Never did us any 'arm.

> Yeah I don't understand what am I supposed to do the rest of my time.

That’s a question you have to answer for yourself, but on its face it sounds like a good one.

I mean if you read books, cook, and exercise, you're ahead of the game so perhaps the "spend less time online" advice doesn't apply to you. The average American doesn't do any of those things very often. They are however increasingly online all the time.

Personally I don't think online time is something that needs to be limited but social media and news consumption, absolutely.

I also think socializing online is a poor substitute for doing it face-to-face.