Life before the scroll
Sometimes I wonder what it would be like to grow up in a time like the 80s, when cell phones weren’t such a big part of everyday life.
Life looked a lot different when people couldn’t immediately reach their friends or scroll through Instagram Reels. People found other ways to entertain themselves, spent time with one another and didn’t have another world sitting in their pocket waiting for them.
If you wanted to talk to a friend, you called their house and hoped they were home. If you were bored and wanted something to do, you went outside, visited someone or figured it out. There was no endless supply of entertainment.
In the 80s, everyday activities were what it meant to have fun. Having fun meant going roller skating, watching movies at the drive-in, listening to rock music and actually spending time outside driving around.
I wonder if people appreciated the little things more because they weren’t constantly distracted by everything else. This generation lacks those niche experiences because we all live through a screen. Now, the second we have nothing to do, we reach for our phones.
Back then, everyday entertainment looked different. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, only 20.9% of American households owned a VCR in 1985. By 1989 that number had increased to 64.6%. People had fewer options for watching movies at home and often had to plan around television schedules or make a trip to the video store. Entertainment wasn’t constantly accessible in the way it is today, where people can launch a streaming service and watch almost anything they want in a matter of seconds.
Communication has changed just as much. In the past, people used to call each other’s home phones and hope the person they wanted to speak to was available. A phone call had more value to it because people gave each other their undivided attention. Now, with smartphones, we can call practically anyone by typing their number or swiping on their contact card. When we leave the house, we aren’t unreachable anymore; our lives revolve around the phone.
While that convenience is great, it also means we rarely have to wait for anything anymore. There’s no waiting by the phone for a friend to call with news, or growing excited to talk to someone because you only have a small window where you can call. Now, we multitask by scrolling or texting while we wait for a call back.
I think we have lost something in the process of quiet time or uninterrupted boredom. We have become so accustomed to having entertainment and communication at our fingertips that we rarely allow ourselves to be bored. Waiting in line, sitting in class or eating alone no longer has to involve our own thoughts because there’s always something to scroll through.
Boredom is essential to creativity because it forces us to create our own fun, develop our own ideas and sit with our thoughts. As author Neil Gaiman once said, “You get ideas from daydreaming. You get ideas from being bored. You get ideas all the time. The only difference between writers and other people is we notice when we're doing it.” This quote captures the importance of boredom for creativity. Maybe those quiet moments in the 80s were more valuable than people realized. But we’ve lost that art over time.
I think about how often we sit with friends or family, only to see everyone looking down at their screens. We are together, physically, without actually being present. Even when something exciting happens, our first instinct is to take a picture or record a video. Everything has to be on record now or it didn’t happen. Instead of enjoying the moment, we’re thinking about how to capture it and share it as proof that we’re having fun.
I’m not saying we should get rid of our phones or pretend everything was better in the 80s. Technology has made many parts of life easier, and I wouldn’t want to give up all its benefits. But I do think we could learn something from a time when people weren’t expected to be available every second of the day.
Maybe the problem isn’t that we have phones but that we let them take up so much of our lives and forget to enjoy what’s happening right in front of us. We have more ways than ever to connect with the world, but that doesn’t necessarily mean we’re experiencing it more fully.
