it reminds me of this:

No don’t you dare stop the circlejerk! /s

But seriously phone numbers were broken into chunks of three to four digits to even make them something we could remember. Is it so terrible my brain has more space to remember other things instead of strings of numbers?

I mean, if no one has a cell phone almost everyone in your daily life only required 4 digits to remember. The first 6 numbers was the same for the whole town.

“Area codes” were a big deal, even Ludacris made a song about being so famous, he knew women from multiple geographic locations.

Maps were there in case of emergencies, nowadays people gps to the same office they’ve been driving to for a decade. But that’s more about random traffic conditions.

Los Angeles Thomas Guide anyone?

Wait, people copied birthdays over each year? We just had one normal yearly calendar and one special birthday calendar that could be used for multiple years. I still use the birthday calendar which has accumulated more names of people I don’t speak to anymore or have died than actual living friends and relatives.

The Rolodex was only for less common phone numbers and most people had 10+ phone numbers memorized

You can use the map as a reference but people didn’t use it for drives around town as it is much harder to constantly being referencing a map compared to a gps. Even when people did use Mapquest they would do things like read 2.8 miles make a right on X St and then make a left in 0.2 miles on Y st and look at their odometer and hold the thought in their head that they are looking for X st

And while people did put birthdays on a calendar it meant that they had a paper calendar that they were regularly checking to see what is happening in the future instead of relying on constantly being told that something is happening which while that may sound trivial is a huge distinction in terms of mental processing.

Memory is a very important thing and as time has progressed we have added more and more crutches which help prevent people from forgetting, help the differently abled, and expand our capacity by orders of magnitude but that comes at the expense of a lack of using one’s memory and critical thinking.

What the long term consequences of that are is still up in the air. some preliminary studies have shown “brain rot” but they have had pretty terrible methods and nothing that I would treat as any sort of fact. I however don’t personally see a scenario where it’s positive in anyway and countless studies with the elderly have shown that having a less active mind leads to mental degradation

You are old school. As am I

This is one thing I tell people about math. Like, yes, we have amazing calculators in our pockets everywhere we go, and in the real world we will likely never need to do more complex math than, like, seventh grade algebra, and even that would be a rarity.

But that brain-crushing, painful learning of the process of math and how to compute is like power-lifting for your brain.

If you can power through that and train your brain to learn something as obstrusly taught as modern mathematics, then that will make all of the other learning things that you have to do in your life 100 times easier.

I’m not gonna argue with Socrates :)

Been a bit guess it’s time for that series again.

The Dark Tower by Stephen King for those that aren’t familiar with it. It’s a lot more ‘weird’ than say what you’d expect from his horror novels. I think it’s probably closer to the old strange stories from magazines way back in the day. I think that’s a major reason I like it. Oh not to spoil much (it’s like 7 books this comes out in the 2nd or so so by page count the intro) Evidently I f’ed up the tags so didn’t work as a spoiler I’ll add spaces just in case.

::: small spoiler here

It’s a multiverse story which is way better than you may think, if you like that thing, I do and wish I realized a decade or two sooner

:::

Thank you for this. Now I’m going to be thinking of this now :)

I miss writing good. /s

Grammify was the icing.

I remember like 8 numbers, I only use one, my original home phone.

I know the IT Crowd emergency services phone number because it had a jingle.

0118 999 88199 9119 725… 3

Counterpoint: The internet makes us smart because we can learn how to do anything we need to do when we need to do it. We still need experts for a lot of things, but simple home repairs? Plant care? How to properly separate a wash? et cetera. In fact I’d argue the things that we do regularly we do remember because we do them regularly. Just like we used to memorize phone numbers because calling them was something we did regularly we have different things we can do regularly now and get adept at instead of remembering numbers. The access to information has cut out the middle-man so to speak. I spent half my life not knowing how to properly separate laundry, or how to cook certain meals, because I didn’t have anyone available to teach me. I was able to self-teach through the internet. Why is looking it up so bad if you grew up with dipshit parents who didn’t know how to do anything or teach you anything before the internet was around? Hell, the internet has even taught me what the right tools are for the job I’m trying to do which is a huge aspect of any type of DIY.

It takes me a few beers to get it right…

In the Year 2000