I’m Only 27, but the World I Grew Up in Is Already Gone

The first phone I got as my own phone was, I think, in 3rd grade: my mom’s Nokia 6300. Very weak machine. I had City Bloxx and 3D Soccer installed. I would mostly use it to call or text my parents.

All the young kids now think they are texting fast. You guys don’t know what texting fast means. You should have seen me at 8 years old using an 8-number pad with 26 letters distributed across it, trying to find the letter Z.

To find the letter Z, you had to press number 9 four times. If you were in the flow, you could accidentally miss the letter, so sometimes just to type Z, it would take you 8 presses.

My first actual machine that was able to do something substantive, we also got when I was 9. It was a Pentium 4.

Back then, computer viruses were really widespread over the internet, so one common question you would ask another fellow computer owner was, “What antivirus do you have installed?”

There were two famous antivirus systems: Avast and NOD32. But NOD32 was kind of the big boss.

My computer came with Avast installed, and my smart self thought that if I installed two antivirus systems instead of one, my computer would be more protected. I installed NOD32 myself.

The computer completely crashed.

For three months, I had to wait for some random guy who specialized in Windows resets to get the computer functioning again.

My first mouse had an actual ball inside. Sometimes this ball would get stuck. All this time, the most tempting childhood intrusive thought was to open up the mouse and get that ball out. But I did not want to damage it because then I would not have a mouse.

Once we got a new laser mouse, of course, the first thing I did was get that ball out.

I had really high expectations of that ball. I thought it would at least bounce.

I got really disappointed. Completely useless outside of the mouse.

It was pretty frequent that the lights would go off back then in my country, so what we had was a UPS system connected. If the electricity went off or there was some short circuit, in order not to damage the computer, the UPS system was the first line of defence.

If the electricity went off, you had like 10 extra minutes to play because of the UPS. It would start to beep really loudly, though, but the 10 extra minutes were worth it.

Even though Google was already famous, for me it came pretty late because Google developed pretty fast as an information source in English. If you were not an English speaker, it lagged really behind, especially if you were from a small-language country.

Until my English skills got up to speed, I actually had to learn English with an actual dictionary book. Every time I needed to translate something, I had to go look through a 1,000-page book to find one word just to know what it meant.

Mathematics also completely changed. I had to calculate most of the time in my head. If it was big numbers, then I would have to sit down and do long multiplication.

I did not really carry calculators as a kid, and it would have been weird. And btw, the phone as well. It was not a device you carried everywhere all day as a kid.

Oh, and traveling was absolutely different.

As a kid, I actually could tell a taxi driver how to drive me back home from everywhere. I would tell them the street I lived on. Of course, they would not know it. I would explain the approximate area, and from that area, I would guide them through to take me in front of my home.

Also, on the first foreign trip we did as a family, we went there with an actual map.

Our survival kit consisted of an actual map and my 9-year-old sister’s English.

Btw, I am also only 27. It’s just that the speed of development is so fast.

Even I am now completely reliant on Google Maps, calculators, AI, Google, and YouTube. I was born in 1999, so I lived a good 7 months in the 20th century.

Generation change is measured every 15 years or so, but even somebody who was born 3 or 4 years after me, even though we are the same generation, would have had a completely different development path.

I can’t even imagine kids who are in school now. Every 6 months, a new AI frontier drops. It almost feels like we have a generation change every 6 months.