How did people waste their time in the pre-Internet era?
The pre-internet era was boring. Some may say that it was just as stimulating but in different, more “vibrant, outdoorsy” ways, but they are wrong. I have lived in both and the internet definitely makes life more interesting. In fact, combining the outdoors with the internet is one of life’s greatest pleasures. Before the internet, if you were an intellectually curious introvert, books were pretty much the best you could do. Television was (as it is now), largely vapid and terrible, with the small number of high-quality shows interrupted regularly with annoying advertising. Radio was out of the question. Newspapers were like books except that you got your hands dirty reading them. Books required an extended piece of time and mental focus to get into, which is fine if you have hours to kill, but it is always hard to spend a spare 10 minutes reading a book. There was no pre-internet equivalent of 10 minutes of interesting content that you could access on your laptop or mobile phone, exce
