Comment by godshatter

I'm in my mid-fifties, and I am still working on programming projects, finding new games to play, learning new things and just screwing around with tech as much as I used to.

Things have definitely changed, I'm no longer staying up all night trying to beat a particular game or doing absolutely nothing for an entire weekend but adding a new feature to a hobby program. Now I just spend most of a weekend doing that.

I think one thing about people who were into tech before the internet that makes us somewhat different is that computers didn't start out as a device for consuming things for us; it was a device to learn and to see what we could make it do. Even games, which were the most consumption-oriented things I used them for, were interactive.

Of course I do consume some content. I'll fall down a youtube rabbit hole on something trivial and I read a lot of tech news on sites where you can discuss things with others if I'm feeling so inclined. I have no interest in reading news on webpages that have no discussion mechanic, though. I think I fall down youtube rabbit holes because I still have that sense of wonder that you can now learn all about anything you really want to as deeply as you want to that the pre-internet me would have killed for.

I abhor most social media mainly because every thing I looked at early on felt toxic to me, so I never got involved enough to get addicted to it. I ditched cable TV a decade or two ago after I spent one weekend mindlessly flipping through channels feeling like a vampire had just taken a huge bite from me. That was a weekend I could have spent sniping people on Quake servers or trying out a new idea for compressing images I had the other day or whatever.

I totally agree about the lack of control. Starting out programming on a Tandy Color Computer where you could change the screen resolution by filling a few memory addresses with data and the OS was a BASIC prompt leaves you feeling a bit helpless in today's computing world. I mitigate that by using linux at home, like others here have mentioned.

I wouldn't want to go back to the old days, though. Pre-internet would kill me knowing what I have access to now.