TL;DR (by GPT-4 🤖):
- The author reminisces about life before the ubiquity of cellphones and the internet, particularly focusing on the after-work hours.
- The concept of being unreachable after work hours is alien to younger generations who are constantly connected and expected to be available at all times.
- The author and his peers recall the days when work emails didn’t exist, and work communication was restricted to work hours only.
- The article highlights how the growth of remote work and the pandemic have blurred the boundaries between work and personal time, with a survey suggesting that U.S. workers were logged into their employers’ networks 11 hours a day in 2021, up from 8 hours pre-pandemic.
- The author interviews people of his age group about their experiences around 2002, when they were about 27 years old. They recall waking up just in time for work, commuting with newspapers or books, and using work phones for personal calls.
- After work, they would engage in activities like swing dancing, improv classes, or simply visiting friends. Plans were made over the phone or via work email, and people were less likely to flake as there was no option to send a last-minute text.
- They recall the days of watching whatever was on TV, renting movies from Blockbuster, and playing games on their desktop computers.
- The article concludes with a reflection on how different life was before the internet and cellphones became a constant presence in our lives.
Watching TV and playing video games hasn’t changed that much. Except that people rarely play video games together in person now sadly.
Not only that, but matchmaking being an “required” part of every remotely-competitive online game has destroyed any sense of community that can be built within the game.
Before matchmaking took over everything you’d have dedicated servers run by groups of users who actively fostered a community. They would manage admin/mod duties on their server and so you could find a server with a like-minded user base.
It actually has interesting parallels to the enshittification of sites like Reddit. Before there was more of a focus on small groups and communities that self-regulated (dedicated servers / subreddits) and over time it has shifted to an algo-driven feed of content (feed of default subs / matchmaking).
I’ve been a single player JRPG dude since the NES days. I had never been a social gamer.
I have a friend who tried to get me to join him and his online buddies on every new big multiplayer game. Out of the literally dozens he recommended to me, I bought maybe two, and those two have a great single player campaign.
I’ve always preferred single player games, and I feel like I don’t waste money like I would on whatever the current hot MMO is. MMOs go stale or the community changes, and then you will probably never play it again. Single player games just largely don’t go that way and are repayable.
Local coop was so nice