[silisili]

It's weird I just had this conversation last night. My wife asked if I could be 17 again, would I want to go back in time or be 17 now. I immediately blurted out back in time, and reminisced about how everything seemed simpler. No smartphones, no social media, no constant fear and hate mongering. Made me really sad for some reason. But part of that could just be getting old and resistant to change, as people are known to do.

[hh3k0]

Getting bullied in school was hard enough… I'd rather not go through that again with after-school bullying via social media on top of that. I'm glad I grew up without Facebook and the likes.

[Johnny555]

But if I could go back with the same knowledge I have now, the bullying becomes more tolerable when I know that one of the biggest bullies in high school will have ended up in and out of jail before finally dying of a drug overdose (he had a hard home life which led to his bullying and post high school problems), and that the high school jock that was the most popular guy in school ended up overweight and working in a car dealership... he turned out to be a nice guy though.

It's hard to understand in high school that the class structure in high school completely falls apart at graduation. But the class structure in college is more permanent.

[emerged]

I often think about what it would be like to live childhood and teenage years again with all you know now. I think in most cases I’d be able to ultimately befriend the bully and be a positive influence on them. I now also understand things like fitness and work ethic, discipline.

That train of thought then makes me realize people who grew up with really good parental influences basically had those sorts of powers on their first go because they were taught.

I got bloody noses and migraines constantly while growing up because nobody ever told me to drink water. That tidbit alone would be life changing.

[addingnumbers]

If you go back in time to age 17 and continue attending public school, I think you're doing it wrong.

[kongin]

That's because you were young and had no idea what was going on.

A hilariously depressing exercise is just reading old news paper headlines from whatever decade you want to pick and seeing what the world was like then.

I've yet to see a decade where the average person wasn't a hairs breadth away from dying in various unpleasant ways, some musical accompaniment: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eFTLKWw542g

[silisili]

Well sure, that's part of the point. There didn't exist a concept of constant access to news and happenings at every point of your day. Couldn't just pull out your phone and check Fox/CNN, or get updates via social media.

It's like we have access to everything one could want now, which is awesome, but that feels like it's bad for us, collectively, since we have no self control.

[kongin]

>Well sure, that's part of the point. There didn't exist a concept of constant access to news and happenings at every point of your day. Couldn't just pull out your phone and check Fox/CNN, or get updates via social media.

The 24 hour news cycle has been a thing since at least 1991: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CNN#Gulf_War which incidentally are some of my first memories.

In the 90s you might not have had a mobile phone, but every place you went had a TV with one of the news channels on, and you'd be bombarded with what was happening on CNN, or Fox, or if you were in a really highbrow place the BBC, every 15 minutes. I'd say I'm less exposed to news today because I have earbuds that isolate me much better than anything I could plug into a walkman in the 90s.

[silisili]

Your 90s experience doesn't match my own. I'm not saying your version is wrong, just speaking from my experience, in the south USA. NY or some other metropolis could be miles different I'd imagine.

At one point I had two part time jobs and took night classes. At none of those places were a TV.

In fact, the only places I distinctly remember with TVs were airports and bars/restaurants, and those were hit/miss with having news playing.