I grew up running around outside, exploring the woods, reading, or making up stories with toys.
Same here. Except for exploring the woods. I wasn't allowed to do that, since the area where our acreage was had enough wilderness left that anyone wandering in the woods might have encountered a bobcat or coyote.
It's a human need to feel useful & as people see themselves as less useful & they become less useful.
I'm nearly 45 and when I go online & see so, so much content, so much better than I can ever make, by people much more talented, who put in much more effort that I could be bothered to muster, it's hard to think I can compete with that. I can't imagine how someone who's grown up in that would feel.
Globalization has destroyed so many small businesses now AI is coming to replace even very skilled workers. What is even the point of humans anymore? Do we even like each other?
When I was a kid if you'd rather spend time on a computer or reading books you were considered a nerd. It's bullying, it's ignorant, but it's also understandable, the nerd looks outside himself @ his peers and says to himself "meh, I can do better than you lot", and he's probably right of course.
But now we're all nerds, we all stare at computers all day, the nerd sought out better peers in the authors he choose when the others chatted with each other, told rumors, played handball, now everyone listens to people "better" than their peers and types gossip about people they don't even know & never will. We have the option to check out from day to day reality and we take it (even our conversation here is an example of that).
And we wonder why kids today are so anxious. Humans have always wondered, "what is my purpose?" but then they had to get on with things, they hunted, gathered, farmed, built stuff or bartered for it. Before you had the time to worry about being useful someone would ask for your help or give you tasks. Now it's a legit question. "What am I good for?" and they're having trouble with coming up with proper answers. This is painful of course and thus they dive deeper into the sea of distractions.
I've concluded that part of my purpose has been to give cats a good life that they wouldn't have otherwise had (most were strays, one was feral). I also joined a FB group dedicated to writing fanfiction, and my role there seems to be encouraging the others, when they get discouraged or if they have questions like "Is it weird if I have my characters do ______?". I also advocate for disabled voters' rights, because an awful lot of people don't think we have any, or they never consider the possible barriers (literal in some cases, when a polling station is located on the second floor and the elevator doesn't work).
there's a gap between who I am and who I wish to be
This is true of most people, I think. If I were who I wished to be, I'd be quite different in some ways (still a cat lady and penguin enthusiast, though).
We had sone gold mine gane and where in the world is Carmen San Diego
My first introduction to Carmen Sandiego was the kids' geography game show on PBS. I was absolutely addicted to that in the '90s. If I didn't have typing to do, my afternoon would consist of watching my soap (
One Life to Live, in those days) and Carmen Sandiego, where I'd wonder what shenanigans Rockapella would come up with in that day's episode (30 years later, Scott Leonard is
still with Rockapella).
So the concept of fourth-graders having smartphones is foreign to me. We went to school, learned, and walked to and from school (which was not in fact uphill both ways, it was pretty flat in reality). The library had encyclopedias, card files, and lots of books. Phone books were practical tools, as were address books. Not that I made much use of the latter two, but I saw my parents doing so.
I miss phone books. I especially miss them when I've forgotten the phone number for the store where I take my computer when it's not working and I can't look it up in a phone book because there's no phone book and I can't look it up online because I can't get online. So I'd phone someone and ask them to look up the number for me, a favor that they regard as really bizarre.
The internet without social media would have probably been nicer, but given who we are, unlikely.
You don't need social media to be rude. Back in pre-FB days, there was one really rude woman on the first gaming forum I was on, I called her on it, and she smirked, "Isn't being rude what the internet is all about?"
That said, FB has let me keep in touch with two of the four people from that first forum that I'm still on good terms with. Way back when MySpace was actually useful, I had a conversation with Kevin J. Anderson about his awful books. He had the idea that it was acceptable to scamper around referring to us as "Talifans" for not liking his books. I told him that all he was accomplishing was to alienate the people who disliked them for very legitimate reasons and were
not the same people who regularly attacked him on social media (even to bringing his family into it, which definitely crosses a line). The conversation ended amicably. He offered me a free copy of one of his other books, I said thank you, and never took him up on that offer. But at least he knows that there's at least one of the founding members of the Orthodox Herbertarians who isn't as nasty as the rest of them.
My pre-internet time was also pre-TV time because of the sect I was raised in -- holiness Pentecostalism that barred TV and 'worldy entertainment' like movie-going -- so I like to joke I was the last child of the sixties. I grew up running around outside, exploring the woods, reading, or making up stories with toys.
