It’s not true. People used to get up in the middle of the night and have social time (2 hours or s called “the watch”), but the industrial revolution happened and everyone had to go on that factory schedule.
We used to hang out with extended family, but the “economy gods” have taken away our time to do this.
People feel isolated because everything is so far away, because the oil industry wants money and gas is heavily taxed … so money.
Our socialization has been stripped away by design. Human beings are meant to live in small communities.
And honestly, for a brief time the internet allowed people to connect in a way they couldn’t before.
At least until companies realized they could milk our eyeballs for ad money and algorithm everything.
This just isn’t true. This was not the way of it before the Internet.
While I agree that this is largely untrue, I will say that there were quite a few people, especially old retired people, that would just sit and watch TV for hours and hours on end every day while drifting in and out of sleep. Usually news channels, sports, or infomercials.
Those people are still around, but they existed before too.
OP is a terminally online cope
idk personally I was just re-reading lord of the rings for the nth time
Before the internet my home was where I usually started and ended my day, if I made it home that is, rest of the time I was outside doing, well, something or anything. Hanging out downtown, walking around exploring the areas around the rivers, partying. Never a dull moment. Now I only really leave the house for work or to pick up necessities
How much of that is due to getting older, though?
I started not going out much around 1999, spent untold hours on irc and playing with linux and apache, was around 25 or so. little older now and, well, yeah, now its due to age hehe
Yes, but I disagree that it’s somehow not different. Back when we only had TV, CDs, radio, or embroidery, you still only had one option when you wanted to socialize, and that was in-person.
Lol embroidery.
No there was more community. Quit trying to rationalize the inhuman situation we are in now.
There were more noisy neighbors and gossip, wouldn’t call that community though.
Gossip means there’s strong social bonds.
No, it means there was more judgement from cliques
I believe that there was more community during times of crisis. Don’t have enough to drink and eat? Ok I’ll talk to the neighbors
Oh for sure. In extreme situations communities really come together. We’re social animals.
You ever have a huge party in the park at night with a ton of your friends? You ever do that every weekend?
Things are very different now.
No, not ever, and I’m seriously old. Pre-computers old. The park was where dead bodies would turn up in the morning, nobody went there at night who wanted to live.
I hope the parks are better for you these days
Not just every weekend. On the weekends there were more people, people stayed out later, and some may have had beers.
But even without any of that, we’d hang out outside.
There was a route you’d drive/cycle through to see the main 3-4 spots people would hang in.
No. We had to be home for dinner by 7 so bath at 8 and bed at 9. When you hit 14 you got a simple job. Then a longer one at 16.
Me too, but we snuck out at night until our parents gave up on locking us in.
Also why churches and workplaces were so tightly knit in the 19th and 20th centuries. If your primary point of interaction with other people outside of your family is restricted to those, you naturally become closer to them.
That being said, extroverts (a curse upon their names!) always seem to find ways to socialize outside of the norms of society.
People hate us until they’re in a rut
Fr though yeah I need social interaction or I go crazy, and when I’m too close to someone they move into a different category of social interaction that takes less energy and still matters but doesn’t scratch the itch. So im off finding new people again and again, and chatting with strangers at bars.
My friends joke that if I died suddenly one day, no one would know for several weeks, because everyone would assume I was just craving solitude for a time.
so like, in high school i dropped out in the middle of the year because i was really sick. came back, and apparently i had dropped out so suddenly rumor was i had died. like, i even had a yearbook in memoriam page and everything. i wasn’t thinking because i wasn’t going to get a copy of the yearbook that year like duh but we had to figure out a way to get me a copy. i just went down and told them i was alive. so they got me a copy and took out the in memoriam page. shoulda done it when the teacher wasn’t there.
If I die on a Sunday, depending on the week, I might not have anything planned for a few weeks when I’m not gigging. So work would just think I abandoned them. Friends would think I was off in the woods. Neighbors would wonder why I wasn’t cooking outside if the weather is good, but otherwise wouldn’t notice. Mom would assume I was working too much.
Hell, on the wrong week the first person to notice might actually be @fartographer@lemmy.world.
We don’t hate you, we just wish you’d leave us alone and not ask why we’re being so quiet 😂
But no, as an introvert who likes hanging with familiar people (extroverts included!), but dreads the idea of meeting new people, what you’re describing legit sounds like some kind of super power to me.
Especially when you don’t have a lot of disposable income.
Hell, people were watching the same shows on the same day at the same time, then talking about it at work the next day, and so on.
I’m quite old now and I had parents who were really old when I was born. I remember asking my Mum what kids did all day before TV, and she said they were mostly just bored all the time.
Nowadays I think the internet actually helps me get outside and do more. It’s so much easier to find places to go, such as going for a walk or a bike ride, now that I can just quickly open an app on my phone. Mostly though it helps me find hobbies I wouldn’t have had before, and it helps me get on with them and learn.
I worked on vehicles before I had the internet but I had no idea what I was doing. I went on bike rides but I just went the same route each time and it wasn’t as fun as going to all the places I go now. I’d heard about homebrewing beer but I’d never have started if I couldn’t find all the help I need online, I’ve got a few litres of cider going in my cupboard that I just made from apples in the garden last night. If I didn’t have internet I’d have probably spent last night watching telly, instead I’m out in the garden picking apples.
It probably partly depends on the rural/urban divide. My grandparents, who grew up primarily in rural areas, did a lot of exploring and fishing. My mother, who grew up in an urban area with limited TV access, remembers mostly petty theft, vandalism, fights, drugs, and gossip (all of which she indulged in as well, because what else was there to do?).
As long as there have been buildings
Grog no leave cave. Other cave people out there. Grog scared.
We have to go all the way back to hunter-gatherer societies, where you can’t just stay indoors because there are no indoors and you can’t just ignore people because maybe they are trying to warn you about sabretooth attacks.
I’m sure we have many ancestors that died with “Fuck it, this is still better than dealing with Thag’s bullshit today” on their lips.
Been messing online since the 80s and being the same pain in the ass since forever, also been exploring the woods and abandoned buildings. We never had flashlights. I carried a 35 mil SLR camera, no flash. Abandoned mines are the most scary, which is why I’m glad we didn’t bring light, we might have made even worse decisions. So, I object.
“Online” was different before 1997. BBS and AOL were novelties. Messing around was as serious as it got.
shitposting was more involved back then I guess, modems and baud rates n’at
exploring abandoned buildings
Ah ha, so you WERE staying inside!
There was an old industrial building of some sort me and my friends in college used to frequent, because it was fascinating. We never did figure out what it was decisively, but sewage treatment was our best guess (it certainly no longer smelled). Place was falling apart. There was a bit where the metal stairs had rotted away, and there was a ~10 foot drop into a basement filled with water. We loved looking at that. On the stairs.
It’s a miracle none of us died.
We were heartbroken when we came back one day, after months of enjoying it, to find it being demolished for something or other. RIP.
You get it. One time several stories up an abandoned building in West Virginia, accidentally almost stepped on a sleeping guy and we found some “walk in coolers” - where the light dies.
Oh man. So I do a fair bit of adventurous shit. Been rock climbing for over a decade now - had a few close calls. Lots of experience caving and canyoneering. Almost got murdered hitchhiking once. I’ve had friends die in the mountains, and saved friends from dying in the mountains.
Mines scare the shit out of me. Far less geologically stable than caves, and with much higher potential for poisonous gasses. Every time I see a mine entrance, I want to explore it - then remember the risks and nope the fuck out of there.
You ain’t wrong friend. Honestly I made the right decision for silly reasons when I never went into a mine.
Not my experience, at least. All the parents in my neighborhood wouldn’t let kids in unless they had to use the bathroom, or it was time to eat.
I partially agree. There are just more reasons to stay home, more reasons to remain distracted, and more addictive things online that didn’t exist (social media being the easiest to list). All these tend to stack up and make it harder to make connections, but you still can if you look in the right places.
Don’t forget the professional hermits, anchoresses and vow-of-silence folks
There are newspaper articles about how bad it is that everyone on the bus/subway is reading the newspaper instead of “living in the moment”
