Sometimes I wonder how today’s snowflakes would survive in the days when we were growing up. I don’t mean war, famine or anything of the sort, but the perfectly ordinary 1980s and 1990s. The years we grew up in. Yes, I’m a boomer, and I look back on those times nostalgically. When you had a thousand tolars in your pocket, got into a Fičko, filled up with fuel and headed for the coast. No Euro NCAP stars, FSD, blind-spot monitoring or heated steering wheel. No air conditioning. If it was hot, you opened the window, and if you got lost, you asked someone by the roadside. Navigation meant a map, which was folded in such a way that you could never get it back into its original shape.
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Arranging to meet was pretty simple too. You said: eight o’clock, and that was that. There was no WhatsApp group, no fifty messages, no location sharing, and no questions about who was coming, who might come, and who would message five minutes before the meeting to say they were still in the shower. If you were late, you were late, and there was a fairly good chance everyone else would leave without you. And you’d miss the best party! Incredible, isn’t it? Yet people still managed to find each other.
The landline was a life lesson in itself. If you wanted to call a girl, you didn’t spend three hours composing a message. You dialled the number and hoped she’d answer. Of course, her dad often picked up, and then you actually had to talk to him. If someone wasn’t at home, you couldn’t reach them, and that was the end of it. No where are you, no blue ticks, and no analysing why someone hadn’t replied for fifteen minutes.
There was real boredom back then too. You waited for the bus, your friends or a film to start, and you didn’t have a device in your pocket that could instantly offer you news, Instagram, TikTok, the weather, email and ten other ways of ensuring you never had to spend even a minute alone with your thoughts. Photographs had a certain weight too. You had a roll of film with 24 or 36 shots, so you didn’t take fifty nearly identical photos of a plate of food. You pressed the shutter and, a few days later, discovered that half the people had their eyes closed and that your finger was covering the lens in the best photo.
Attitudes to alcohol were different, and I’m certainly not claiming they were better. A lot of things were far more stupid, dangerous and socially acceptable than they should have been. But the next morning, you didn’t need a smartwatch to tell you that you’d overdone it. There was no sleep score, Body Battery or warnings that your HRV was catastrophic. Your body made it quite clear what you’d done.
Perhaps the biggest difference is that today we expect everything to be instant, comfortable and working. If an app lags, we get irritated. If someone doesn’t reply, we’re offended. If we have to wait ten minutes, we feel as though someone has stolen part of our life. Of course, I wouldn’t swap today’s world for that one, because modern cars are safer, communication is easier and access to information is incomparable. Still, I feel that with all this comfort, we’ve lost some of our ability to put up with perfectly ordinary inconveniences.
It would be interesting to give today’s snowflakes a Fičko, a paper map, some cash and a friend’s phone number written on a slip of paper. The phone would stay at home, the internet wouldn’t exist, and the only plan for the evening would be to meet at eight. I think the first day would be quite difficult. After a few days, though, they might realise that it is possible to live without having the whole world within reach all the time.
p.s. No, we didn’t have to walk to school for two hours every morning through a metre and a half of snow, in case anyone was wondering.
