Times are constantly changing. I am technically part of Gen Z, but I feel like a dinosaur when I speak to tween Zoomers. Technological advancements have caused our world to evolve rapidly, and suddenly, things that were everyday occurrences 15 years ago have become extremely foreign to the youngest generations.
Redditors have recently been discussing some of the things that have become outdated in the last decade and a half, so we’ve gathered their most spot-on replies below. Enjoy scrolling through this list that might make you miss the early days of iPhones and hearing Justin Bieber’s “Baby” everywhere you went, and be sure to upvote the insights you agree with!
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Punctuation and grammar.
Seriously, it feels like even the basics have eluded a lot of folks today. I don't claim to be perfect, but I've struggled trying to translate what should be basic sentences lately.
I think this is correlated with the shortening of attention spans. People want to be able to type faster, and so punctuation is obsolete. I’m unlike most people my age in the way that I take the effort to use proper punctuation and grammar
I think I’m just becoming a grumpy old woman but social awareness. Like blocking the whole sidewalk, speakerphones in public, that kind of thing. It’s always been a problem but I feel like the pandemic stunted an entire generations social growth and they’re just oblivious to their effect on others in any given space. It’s stunningly annoying tbh.
Walk into them and then yell at them for not watching where they were going - problem solved.
If someone doesn't get back to you right away, it's OK, they're not home.
Sometimes people would lose their cool in public, we just never knew about it because not everyone had a smartphone in their hands at all times. Now, one person's bad day can become a public spectacle that follows them for the rest of their lives.
One bad mistake can haunt you for the rest of your life. That’s what I don’t like about cancel culture. People aren’t static characters.
Remembering phone number of friends and families. Even to this day I can still remember some of my friends number from over 15 years ago.
Paper maps and how to use them.
When I was a kid I had an unnatural fear of getting lost when I got older and could drive anywhere I wanted to go, so I learned how to read maps (and fold them!) so I always knew how to find my way back home or whatever I my destination was. I'm 41 now and it's not really an often necessary skill but I'll always have it in case I'm somewhere that GPS isn't really available 🤷♂️
I'm a teacher and the kids think it is some mythological world where children leave the house, go on adventures, and return home before the streetlights go up.
How to hold a phone up to your ear and mouth rather than holding it in front of you to shout into the mic at the bottom, apparently.
The relationship between a cassette tape and a pencil ✏️.
That is the wrong kind of pencil. You need a six-sided pencil, not a round one.
Cash... We were away for the weekend last year. Had an all day drinking session and at around 9pm went to a chippy.
I was served by a young lass, maybe 17 years old.
My order came to £13.40. To avoid a pocket full of change I gave the girl £23.40 to get a £10 note in return.
Well, it was like I had completely fried her brain. She just stood there staring at the money in her open hands for far too long.
I said "I just need a tenner change". Nope, it didn't help.
She just couldn't fathom what the hell was going on.
Eventually a her greasy gaffer reached over her shoulder, pressed the button on the till and pulled a tenner out.
This happens so much. Cashiers not understanding why you would give them say, $22 for a $12 purchase. They always want to hand the $2 back. No thank you. I'd like a $10 or (2) $5's. Sometimes they look completely befuddled but then decide to take a chance and put the numbers in the register. And then, a miracle happens! They get to see why I paid that way. I'm always mildly shocked. And then resigned to this is the way it is now.
Why the save button icon is a floppy disk
Edit since of people aren’t understanding my point: I didn’t say people were still using floppy disks 15 years ago, I meant that most people at least knew WHY the save icon was represented by a floppy disk. Many Gen Alpha kids seem to have no idea, which a what OP asked.
Yes “diskettes” came after but 1. They were still called floppy disks (I only ever heard people trying to sell them call them diskettes) and 2. They still had a floppy disk inside the hard cover.
You shouldn't bring your parents to a job interview.
Their parents should know better, even if they don't. There's absolutely no excuse for this. Even if a parent needs to drive them to the interview for whatever reason, the parent should know to wait in the car or at a nearby cafe or something. I flat-out blame this on the helicopter parent.
That being constantly tracked, surveyed, and recorded isn’t good.
Needing to ring the doorbell at your friends’ houses to see if they’re home and if they wanna play outside.
Remember having to develop film rolls at a photo lab. Instant photos are so convenient now!
Thinking. The ability to be bored. Context.
Now this one I agree with for Gen Alpha. My sister always complains so much when she’s bored, and expects us to always be able to entertain her. She’ll ask questions during shows or movies that could be answered by context or by waiting a few seconds to let the character explain themselves.
Downloading music off dodgy websites just so you could have a "cool" phone ringtone. Or burning CDs...
Millennials seem to really know this well, but kinda lost in Gen Z and younger: Troubleshooting your own computer. They don't even know how powerful the Task Manager is.
It may seem paradoxical but it actually makes sense that the younger generations can't trouble shoot computers. For us oldies, we had no choice, that was how we learnt and we shared that info - the younguns are taught 'do abc to get xyz' so that's what they do, they have no need/incentive to go and explore a programme or system
What the sound of a busy signal means.
Looking at a TV guide. I remember getting out of the news paper every Sunday. Then searching through it to see what horror movies were playing on late night cable.
Remember when each programme had a number printed alongside it which you could type into a VCR to record it.
Telling time on an analog clock, apparently.
Admittedly I had this problem, but since I noticed it, I’ve had my Apple Watch face to an analog one to force myself to relearn how to read it lol
Privacy
Not posting every thought that comes into your head
Responsibility
Consequences for your actions
Dignity and self-respect
Community service
Respect and care for your neighbors.
consequences for your actions is a very big one. Kids bring guns to school: they should be charged and their parents charged for making the gun available to the kid. They've started charging the parents, but the kids don't realize that handcuffs and an escort by police are just the start of the consequences.
Handing in a paper in university on paper. I talk to university students now all they hand in all their papers online. Back when I was going in the mid 2000s everything was handed in on paper.
OMG, I have a story. Back in the 90s, I had a paper due. I was up all night (literally) finishing my reading. I finished the paper and tried to print it. I had one of those old X-pin printers. Wouldn't print. I called my Dad and somehow sent the paper to him to print. He printed it on his printer (with the paper with the feed holes on the sides that had to be ripped off). He printed it and ripped the edges off. He was retired by then. I drive up. He's waiting outside! I roll down my window and he throws the paper at me and I rush off. I get to the University and deposit the paper, JUST IN TIME. My Dad will always be my hero (for this and a thousand other reasons).
Pay phones AND having money for a call AND either knowing the number or having a little black book.
Similar: calling collect and blurting out “momcomepickmeup” instead of shelling out money for the call.
Pay phones still exist in some places in the US. They are especially common in areas with a population of Amish and/or old order Mennonites. Most of those groups don't have phones in their house of use cell phones. I have also seen pay phones in a few other places.
Putting on your damn headphones.
Again, in my experience this is more common in older people
Sorry but having empathy.
A lot of us are depressed with the current state of the world and just don’t care anymore.
File systems.
A lot of college grads or college interns apparently have no idea how a file system works.
Having a dedicated device for listening to music (e.g. iPod, Walkman etc.).
That it wasn't even all that long ago when the vast majority of people just didn't have the internet or had really bad internet. My brother is old enough to remember when we had something like DSL but too young to know a time when we just didn't have internet at all and I don't think it computes at all in his brain lol.
Writing cursive (24 states still require it taught in school, though).
I went to a Montessori elementary school and they drilled into us from Pre-K that we only could write in cursive and you would get a trivial punishment if you wrote in print. Well, now my everyday hand-writing is cursive, and most people just think I'm some pretentious teen and I have to explain to them that I've just been doing this my whole life and writing in print is just slower and more inconvenient for me.
15 years ago is 2009, folks. Floppy drives and cassettes were already a decade out of date.
But people who lived in 2009 knew what floppy drives and cassettes were.
Counting change.
It's both hilarious AND frustrating watching my new hires struggle to count a $200 cash drawer.
They do okay with the bills, but when they get to the coins. . .
Computer literacy.
IT field, young employees are as bad as the older employees now.
Using a landline phone without getting weird looks. Kids today probably think it’s some ancient artifact.
I was at The International Spy Museum in DC (definitely go, if you can!) and in a room that was set up as a military office either during WWII or during the Cold War (I can't remember which), I saw a man explaining to his kids (under 10yrs old) how the rotary phone on the desk worked ("You put your finger into the hole for the number you want to dial, and spin the plastic ring around until your finger hits the metal piece, then remove your finger and let the dial spin back around; you do that for each digit in the phone number.")...they did not believe him.
Its a slow trend but keyboard and mouse.
Kids these days growing up with touchscreens from the beginning, its ancient to them that we still use keyboard and mouse when the screen is right there infront of us.
My laptop has a touch screen, and touch pad. I use neither. I use a regular, good old mouse.
File structures.
Because of cloud storage kids in high school have no idea how file organisation/folders/naming work, which leads to issue with searching what you need specifically on a computer (phones/tablets just throw file at you).
We had specific folders for GCSE coursework for them and would spend ages on explaining how to save in particular spot and a term later would hear MISS MY WORK DISAPPEARED to find it in their personal docs.
Part of this is tech related as well. NoSQL and other such technologies aggressively push non-hierarchical storage, to our great detriment.
My kids are very confused about the order in which different technologies appeared. They don’t really understand that computers came long before the internet, and that forms of the internet came long before people think it did (like dial up AOL in 1989).
Edit: I kinda didn’t see the 15 year thing, sorry.
How to take a screenshot, instead of taking a photo of your screen with your phone.
I remember back in the olden days when you got your film camera out to take a screenshot! Taking a screenshot on Windows is easy, but saving it is not. I still get people sending me Word documents with screenshots in as that is all they can manage to "paste" them into.
Load More Replies...Depending on the computer that can be a whole lot more work, especially if it's of a video game, so if you don't need great quality a phone photo is better.
I still have the video of my son attempting to open a CD case. It took him about 45 seconds before he pried it open by pulling up the little tabs that are actually the hinges. He's pretty bright, but he was completely blown away by it.
Carrying around a flip phone and a digital camera to take pictures.
Streaming Netflix was still novel rather than DVD's via mail. Also, TiVo was a big thing for DVR.
I remember as a kid being excited to get the dvd’s in the mail in those red envelopes
Apparently none of these young people know how to date.
This quickly turned into a 'the young people of today' article. I'm old enough to remember when most of the OPs WERE the young people of today and people my age said all the same stuff about them. I'm afraid the truth is that the young people of today are more tolerant, less biased, more educated but just as decent as any generation before them. Look how they stepped up during COVID..
So the people whining about yOuNG pEoPLe not being able to do anything... Are the same people who should've taught those young people to do those things? Great job, parents. Give yourselves a lil pat on the back. You've earned it. Lmao.
Agreed. Even back in my day when I was starting out (got my first apartment at 19 in 1980), my parents said the same things about my mistakes budgeting and paying bills. They hated hearing me tell them how many times I asked them to show me how to set a budget, make a grocery list, make sure I pay bills on time, etc, etc, etc, and they would just brush me off and say they’d show me later. Then never did, even when I announced I was moving out and would need those skills. Basically, I learned on my own, by trial and error—-meaning more error than anything else. Harder lessons than they had to be too. Needless to say, I eventually went NC with my parents, who also weren’t going to help me go to college like they helped my brothers, even though out of their five kids, I was the only one with the GPA to go to any college I wanted to. So instead I found a job, saved my money, and moved out. Went to college too, later in life and paying for it myself. Didn’t need their help with that, though I had to delay doing it a bit.
Load More Replies...Is any of this stuff really necessary? Who cares if a person doesn't know how to open a CD or use a landline. This stuff is extinct.
Once had someone get annoyed that I didn't know how to use a typewriter
Load More Replies...Another thing is people thinking they can just choose which generation they're in. The generation refers to the range of years within which you were born and the general experiences you would have had growing up. A Millennial can't just decide to be Gen X because they don't want to have been born in the 80s or 90s.
Thinking that a 15 to 20-year range can be used to describe everyone born in that range. You can't even do that for a one-hour range.
Load More Replies...I feel like half the people who said these things need to be reminded that 15 years ago was 2009, and lots of this is before then
I'm surprised food delivery wasn't on the list. Young people today probably don't realize that just a few decades ago, the only food you could get delivered to your house was pizza or Chinese food.
Most of this list was just older generations dumping on Gen Z, which was frankly disappointing.
I can play games on my state of the art PC while spinning records. Best inter-generation ever.
Telephone directories. If you didn't know somebody's telephone number you looked it up in the telephone directory.
The ability to problem solve/figure it the f*ck out, feels like that completely left the planet in the past 15yrs. Example: at 5 Guys burger place, they always squash the burger down when they wrap it and turn it to mush. I ask them to take my burger, not wrap it in foil, put it in one of the little cardboard boxes they have, place that in a paper bag and hand it to me. I watched 2 floor staff and the manager stand around my burger scratching their heads for 15 solid minutes trying to figure out how to give me the burger without wrapping and squashing it in the foil wrapper, even though I already told them how. 3 grown men, 2 in their 20's and one in his 30's, just couldn't figure out how to divert from standard procedure. They ended up wrapping it in foil, squashed it, put it in the cardboard box, then in a paper bag and handed to me, burger still turned to mush. I don't understand what's going on, that was about 13yrs ago.
Ha! good to see millennials/gen x etc joining ranks with boomers on the "kids these days are clueless" shtick :P
Yeah, I don't understand the thing about not being able to read an analogue clock or read cursive - so, you didn't teach your kid how to do this and now you belittle them for it?
Load More Replies...Change this to any other generation. There'd be a RIOT not people agreeing
This quickly turned into a 'the young people of today' article. I'm old enough to remember when most of the OPs WERE the young people of today and people my age said all the same stuff about them. I'm afraid the truth is that the young people of today are more tolerant, less biased, more educated but just as decent as any generation before them. Look how they stepped up during COVID..
So the people whining about yOuNG pEoPLe not being able to do anything... Are the same people who should've taught those young people to do those things? Great job, parents. Give yourselves a lil pat on the back. You've earned it. Lmao.
Agreed. Even back in my day when I was starting out (got my first apartment at 19 in 1980), my parents said the same things about my mistakes budgeting and paying bills. They hated hearing me tell them how many times I asked them to show me how to set a budget, make a grocery list, make sure I pay bills on time, etc, etc, etc, and they would just brush me off and say they’d show me later. Then never did, even when I announced I was moving out and would need those skills. Basically, I learned on my own, by trial and error—-meaning more error than anything else. Harder lessons than they had to be too. Needless to say, I eventually went NC with my parents, who also weren’t going to help me go to college like they helped my brothers, even though out of their five kids, I was the only one with the GPA to go to any college I wanted to. So instead I found a job, saved my money, and moved out. Went to college too, later in life and paying for it myself. Didn’t need their help with that, though I had to delay doing it a bit.
Load More Replies...Is any of this stuff really necessary? Who cares if a person doesn't know how to open a CD or use a landline. This stuff is extinct.
Once had someone get annoyed that I didn't know how to use a typewriter
Load More Replies...Another thing is people thinking they can just choose which generation they're in. The generation refers to the range of years within which you were born and the general experiences you would have had growing up. A Millennial can't just decide to be Gen X because they don't want to have been born in the 80s or 90s.
Thinking that a 15 to 20-year range can be used to describe everyone born in that range. You can't even do that for a one-hour range.
Load More Replies...I feel like half the people who said these things need to be reminded that 15 years ago was 2009, and lots of this is before then
I'm surprised food delivery wasn't on the list. Young people today probably don't realize that just a few decades ago, the only food you could get delivered to your house was pizza or Chinese food.
Most of this list was just older generations dumping on Gen Z, which was frankly disappointing.
I can play games on my state of the art PC while spinning records. Best inter-generation ever.
Telephone directories. If you didn't know somebody's telephone number you looked it up in the telephone directory.
The ability to problem solve/figure it the f*ck out, feels like that completely left the planet in the past 15yrs. Example: at 5 Guys burger place, they always squash the burger down when they wrap it and turn it to mush. I ask them to take my burger, not wrap it in foil, put it in one of the little cardboard boxes they have, place that in a paper bag and hand it to me. I watched 2 floor staff and the manager stand around my burger scratching their heads for 15 solid minutes trying to figure out how to give me the burger without wrapping and squashing it in the foil wrapper, even though I already told them how. 3 grown men, 2 in their 20's and one in his 30's, just couldn't figure out how to divert from standard procedure. They ended up wrapping it in foil, squashed it, put it in the cardboard box, then in a paper bag and handed to me, burger still turned to mush. I don't understand what's going on, that was about 13yrs ago.
Ha! good to see millennials/gen x etc joining ranks with boomers on the "kids these days are clueless" shtick :P
Yeah, I don't understand the thing about not being able to read an analogue clock or read cursive - so, you didn't teach your kid how to do this and now you belittle them for it?
Load More Replies...Change this to any other generation. There'd be a RIOT not people agreeing