My grandparents grew up on the depression. They had a very simple life. They had a tv on wheels that lived in the closet and only came out once a month or so to watch a football game. They had a radio they turned on to listen to classical music while working. And they had a newspaper and magazine subscription.

They woke up early, tended to there chores and to the garden. Then they would eat a leasurly breakfast with lots of little plates and saucers (egg cups, juice, coffee and water glasses, etc), basically it was an activity that took an hour. Then more chores.

My grandma always had a project going, making cookies for a neighbor, helping someone find a job. My grandpa would spend most of the day in his workshop repairing lawnmowers or building fun inventions (solar ovens, bird houses, etc).

Lunch and dinner were also big presentations that took an hour. It was not always a lot of food, but they took a lot of time with it. After diner they would sit in two chairs side by side reading books or more often than not just sitting quietly. Neither talked much, they were just content to be.

They ran some errands occasionally, but there only big event for the week was going to church. I don’t remember them ever going out to dinner or even to a friends house, though they did have friends who stopped by.

Mostly they were content to do very little. They were never bored, or at least they were content to be bored. I think the one big negative all technology has brought us is that we’re restless if we can’t find something to do. We don’t enjoy just sitting and listening to life.

No one can remember.

Sad reality of a person with very small and very young friend circle.

👍

We used pagers to tell people to call us back on payphones, possibly using collect call service. Music was listened to on Sony Walkmans, maybe a boombox if you wanted to be obnoxious about it. Newspapers were sold at every street corner to provide reading material.

I wouldn’t say it was so different before smartphones. Everyone on the train was browsing the news using the copy of the local paper instead of a cell-phone connected to some news network.

Oh wow. Sometimes I can’t believe there are people that don’t know a world without smartphones and the internet. Then I read this and realize that there are more of them now and less of us.

If you were meeting up somewhere you’d arrange to have someone who was at home (and thus by a phone) to orchestrate any last minute changes of plan or notifications of late arrivals (via payphones, which were a thing, once).

You’d go into town regularly to pick up the new bus timetable.

You’d have a huge pile of maps in the back of the car, or one very big map book, often both. If you drove somewhere once, you’d remember the route the next time.

There was a set of encyclopedias at home to look up facts.

And a calendar on the wall. (That’s probably still a thing?)

There were a lot more newspapers and magazines around.

Everyone had a little notebook with all their important phone numbers in it. Filofax was revolutionary.

And we still remember the most important phone numbers from that little notebook because we had to dial them so very often.

We played eye spy a lot.