Life Without Social Media: Dating and Car Repairs

Without the internet, time felt endless: boredom was cheaper

In the late nineties, meeting up with friends didn't require any logistics; you just went out into the street. Free time wasn't organized, it was spent. Those turning forty today remember afternoons without screens, a landline as the only command center, and the certainty that nobody knew where you were until you called from a phone booth. Today, managing social life requires three thousand group messages and two weeks' notice. This isn't grandma's nostalgia: it's the trace of an infrastructure change that touched communication, consumption, work, and even how we get bored.

The landline and the art of dating without a mobile

Before mobiles, calling someone's house was a lottery. You'd reach their mother, brother, or father, and had to explain yourself before knowing if your friend was still there. If not, you tried another number. And if no one appeared, the most effective Plan B in history remained: go out and find them by sheer inertia, in the park or the square.

That lack of prior notice had a huge consequence, half economic and half sarracena: you couldn't cancel at the last minute. A given word counted. Whoever set a time, corner, and bar stuck to it. It also forced people to memorize dozens of numbers, without an agenda or reminders. Today it seems like magic; back then, it was routine.

Was life cheaper without the internet?

There is a school of thought arguing the system worked better: a civil servant earned little but lived with dignity, and those working long hours made money. No one spoke of €1,000-a-month salaries as the norm. The other side is held by those who recall that five-duro coins —the real ones— disappeared from pockets by magic.

The uncomfortable counterexample is the mechanic shop. A car repair quoted at €1,500 ended up costing €25 thanks to a tutorial and a soldering iron. Used well, the internet lowers costs; used poorly, it wipes out your wallet and your mind. The difference isn't in the network, but in who handles it.

What doesn't fit is the narrative that everything was better. Almost everything was lacking: less supply, fewer shops, fewer options on the shelf. Cultural consumption was slow and expensive, and the street, depending on who remembers it, wasn't just kids playing: there were brawls, noisy motorcycles, and fights outside the nightclub.

Why did the balcony function like a social network?

Without screens, social control was face-to-face and suffocating. Neighborhood gossip groups leaned out windows and spread news loudly before dinner. Privacy was a scarce commodity: everyone knew who you were with, what time you returned, and what you bought. The internet didn't invent gossip; it took away its voice and gave it a keyboard.

In exchange, boredom did its job. A kid with nothing else to do but stare at the ceiling ended up opening a book. Several voices agree: thanks to being bored I discovered reading. Less stimulus, more imagination. Scarce leisure was savored better, and time, they say, stretched until it seemed eternal. The paradox is that it was more boring and, at the same time, perceived as freer.

Was the internet the problem or were smartphones?

Here the disagreement is frontal. Some argue that dial-up internet was a place you enjoyed navigating, discovering, and sharing. Uploading a video meant doing painstaking work: recording it, transferring it to the computer, editing it, posting it. That effort filtered content. The disastrous part came later, with the mobile connected twenty-four hours a day.

Others see it the other way around: the entire invention was a fundamental error. And a third group adds an uncomfortable fact: now anyone can publish, and 99.99999999999999% don't generate a single new idea. The problem wasn't having a megaphone, but believing you had something to say.

Sundays with newspapers and invisible consensus

Information went to mass. Right-wing and left-wing press existed, but they shared such broad consensuses that if everyone stayed silent on the same things, there was no way to find out anything. On Sundays, the newspaper came with steroids, and El País enjoyed a prestige hard to imagine today. The difference with current affairs is scale: there are a thousand versions and a thousand ways for none to be the right one.

With such a panorama, one would expect a massive return to paper and phone booths. It doesn't happen. Nobody gives up GPS, online shopping, or solving in two minutes what used to take an afternoon. That's where the analysis gets stuck: people long for a time that won't return while using daily the tool that erased it.