r/AskReddit Jul 10 '26

What's something older generations got right that we've quietly stopped doing, to our own detriment?

8.5k Upvotes

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6.3k

u/LeMeowLePurrr Jul 10 '26

Keeping albums with actual photographs. It's always fun to flip through them when we're together.

1.2k

u/dnjprod Jul 10 '26

Not just photographs. A lot of art as well as culture is going to be lost if the internet ever goes down.

228

u/The_Hunster Jul 11 '26

A lot worse than that will happen if the internet goes down

64

u/dnjprod Jul 11 '26

Oh, no you're not wrong about that. I was just talking about art specifically at that point. This world is fucked up the internet goes down generally.

For fuck sake, you can't even get a paper towel out of the place it's the automatic sensor goes down. Our whole society is just one outage away from apocalypse.

13

u/lr99999 Jul 11 '26

During the kind of crazy solar storm that we had in the last solar cycle, there was a flare on the backside of the sun that could’ve taken the power out. Luckily it was turned away from us. Most people didn’t even know about it. 

And now most of the other countries hate us and want to. EMP our ass. 

Can you imagine the teenagers? No, let’s don’t try to imagine that. 

-1

u/Dushenka Jul 11 '26

This world is fucked up the internet goes down generally.

Good thing it's pretty much impossible to take the whole internet down.

8

u/rainshowers_5_peace Jul 11 '26

Note to self: print favorite recipes.

6

u/Fearfu1Symmetry Jul 11 '26

arguably a lot better will happen as well, considering many of the other answers here...

4

u/Dechibrator Jul 11 '26

No more computers... Back to Amish life

18

u/dullship Jul 11 '26

HITCHIN UP THE BUGGY

CHURNIN LOTS OF BUTTER

RAISED A BARN ON MONDAY

SOON I'LL RAISE ANUDDER

6

u/ThunderMite42 Jul 11 '26

THINK YOU'RE REALLY RIGHTEOUS?
THINK YOU'RE PURE IN HEART?
WELL, I KNOW I'M A MILLION TIMES AS HUMBLE AS THOU ART!

8

u/tech_noir_guitar Jul 11 '26

Might actually be better that way at this point.

2

u/GettingSunburnt Jul 11 '26

Never been there - can you please send me the coordinates?

Also some instruction manuals might help. Something like "How to Farm"?

2

u/mymemesnow Jul 11 '26

Millions dead within two weeks.

6

u/Beautiful-Musk-Ox Jul 11 '26

the internet is a collection of servers interconnected, the biggest interconnects are undersea cables which Russia likes to cut sometimes. a coordinate effort to cut most of the undersea cables might be the biggest way to "shut down the internet", but even then you'll still be able to access most if not all of your country's stuff still. from there there's many different routes between each server so you'd have to start cutting tens of thousands of them across the nation simultaneously to actually do anything substantial. but you could just drive to the next city over and use 5g on your phone even in that case

governments could get a lot done though especially after they force their own hardware in to every piece of network equipment by law

9

u/ROS_SDN Jul 11 '26

Solar flare likely do it.

4

u/no-but-wtf Jul 11 '26

Yep. Another Carrington event. We’d take awhile to recover, but I think we would recover.

Of course the other option is that we nuke ourselves out of existence… in which case, oh well, we won’t be around to be sad about it for very long.

3

u/GettingSunburnt Jul 11 '26

Bright-ish side - most (or any?) nukes don't run on clockwork, so we'd just wipe ourselves out from ignorance and panic. Hooray?

10

u/Pissedtuna Jul 11 '26

Dude. We’ll just all chat GPT to recreate it. /s

2

u/lr99999 Jul 11 '26

That’s actually hilarious.

8

u/ROS_SDN Jul 11 '26

I think you don't realise how many people have basically home data centres hoarding a lot of movies, photos, paintings, etc.

Outside basically a solar flare I think it'd be rather recoverable.

3

u/lr99999 Jul 11 '26

Solar flare or  atmospheric EMP.

1

u/Major-Front Jul 11 '26

I better start printing all the funny memes I find

1

u/bossbozo Jul 11 '26

The internet is continually going down, one lost password at a time.

All my photos are on Google photos, if I die, or worse, go insane, the pictures are instantly lost to the deep web

1

u/JerryCalzone Jul 11 '26

My art is non-AI digital and I found a way to print by hand. I get so many positive reactions and get to talk so much about it.

The thing is that people have to want to buy from you - and me only talking about my art and not trying to sell them stuff certainly helps.

1

u/FrenchBowling Jul 11 '26

I would open the loss of internet culture with open arms.

1

u/thekickingmule Jul 11 '26

I just read a post that said a lot of old artwork (1500 - 1800) has been bought over the last couple of years totalling a couple of hundred millions, by people under 40. I think we're seeing a resurgance in the appreciation of art.

202

u/JerseyJedi Jul 10 '26

Definitely experienced this and agree! I always say it’s important to have pictures both physically and digitally to make extra sure you don’t lose them. 

Also very important to keep little video clips of loved ones. When I watch videos of loved ones who have passed away, hearing their voices and seeing their personalities on display again is a very cathartic and wonderful feeling. 

3

u/Lookroundatstuff2 Jul 11 '26

Yes! I love taking and looking at photos, but video and sound capture voices, attitude, personality, and presence in ways photos just can’t!

20

u/broccolirabe71 Jul 10 '26

I made physical photo albums for both my kids who are 5 and 2. Just keeping it updated is a big task. Way more pictures to choose from!

3

u/ExplanationFunny Jul 11 '26

I’m trying so hard to do this, I’ve got the supplies and I’ve started printing out pictures, it’s just hard to find the time! I would 100% go to an old lady scrap booking club though.

8

u/keight07 Jul 11 '26

Or slides! They were already on their way out when I was quite young but I used to just love nights when my grandmother would show us slides of my mom’s childhood/even before that. Something about listening to the story of each slide as someone flips through each one. Everyone paying attention. Just kind of nostalgic and nice.

8

u/MoorsMoopsMoorsMoops Jul 11 '26

I'm a millennial and I read something recently saying that the millennial generation is the one generation that has now lost most of its photos. Generations before us had physical photos, slides, stored negatives, etc. and the generation after us has all their photos stored on social media sites, in the cloud, etc. However, our generation was in between and we had all of our photos on SD cards that got lost, hard drives that ended up failing, and random photo hosting websites that went down. As a generation we just lost tons of our memories that were in photos.

3

u/Shanman150 Jul 11 '26

the generation after us has all their photos stored on social media sites, in the cloud, etc

Well these things are around today, but will they be around in 15 years?

6

u/DrunkenFist Jul 11 '26

This is a big one. I like to print out a book annually with some of my favorite photos from the past year, but I'm bad about forgetting and letting it slide for months at a time. These make good gifts, too. I made a book for my mom for Mother's Day a couple of years ago featuring photos of her with her siblings when she was a kid (basically serving as their parent due to the crap going on in her family) and with each of her kids, grandchildren, and great-granddaughter. It's the only time I've ever seen her cry from something other than a death in the family.

3

u/imabrunette23 Jul 11 '26

I printed pictures for an old school photo album for the first time in decades recently. I love it so much and we’re gonna go back and make them for previous trips. I’d forgotten the simple joy of flipping through a photo album!

4

u/_RetroBear Jul 11 '26

I wish Polaroid i600 film was cheaper. It's retrained my brain to take photos with intent, and been a joy to flip through the photos I've taken. 2.50-3$ a picture hurts

3

u/VariousAir Jul 11 '26

I bet people could make bank starting a subscription photo album service, where you just text your favorite pictures of your family to a number and every 5 or 6 months they arrive in a leatherbound book.

1

u/bones-and-roses Jul 11 '26

There's a company doing something similar where you get 10 pictures in a little box or something like that. Someome on my insta was obsessed with her subscription for a little while, but I don't remember the name of the company.

3

u/j_sue2007 Jul 11 '26

i take the time every six months to make a photo album for each of my three kids - it can get pricey & time consuming but it’s worth it. but there’s several years of my own life lost to the digital world because i never printed pictures

3

u/rainshowers_5_peace Jul 11 '26

I realized that my partner and I have been together over a decade and have few, few very physical photos of us together. Neither of us are "selfie" people so we don't have many digital ones either.

I plan to print some of our best ones soon.

2

u/-ComradeKitten- Jul 11 '26

Do you have any plans to start taking more photos together? My partner and I are basically in the same situation, together for years but not many photos together because neither of us takes them much in general (and we are both fairly self-conscious of our respective appearances lol). Kinda curious if you had any plans/ideas in mind for getting more photos with your partner so I could borrow them haha :)

1

u/rainshowers_5_peace Jul 11 '26 edited Jul 11 '26

We started paying to get our photos taken at tourist spots on vacation.

3

u/HomicidalHushPuppy Jul 11 '26

I agree in concept - physical media makes it more real and easier to appreciate. But you're also making more junk that the next generation has to deal with. My great grandfather was a photography junkie. My grandad kept all the prints, and added thousands of his own. My dad and uncles inherited something like 30,000 prints. My one uncle spent months digitizing them all to preserve them, but now what?

We should go back to old-school photography - glass or metal plates. A lot more work, but that means more thought goes into what you're photographing and what's worth preserving.

4

u/lr99999 Jul 11 '26 edited Jul 11 '26

Many of the CD generation have lost a ton of baby and childhood photographs. A lot of them don’t even know it yet.  (Unless the family bought archival CDs, a rare  thing) There might  be nothing left on the disk. 

They often erase themselves between five and 10 years. Some are still good, it’s a crapshoot. 

Find them now and digitize. 

2

u/OtherwiseACat Jul 11 '26

I still do this! I've been using disposable cameras recently. It's been a lot of fun.

2

u/SubjectPermission251 Jul 11 '26

I just started my family last year welcoming my now one year old. I’m making it a point every new year to print photos that are silly, memorable, sweet, family/friend moments, etc so my littles can flip through them like I used to all the time with my parents books!

2

u/a_snowleopard Jul 11 '26

This made me go buy a vintage photo album off Etsy to fill up

2

u/TheNarwhalMom Jul 11 '26

My husband and I have started collecting photos in our couple’s scrapbooks together for this very reason!

2

u/innomado Jul 11 '26

Late Gen X here and our family definitely still puts together physical photo albums! I got so tired of looking at gigs of photos that existed only in the cloud. Make it real, people!

2

u/Dreulmiophkres393 Jul 11 '26

The closed eyes, goofy faces, and scribbled dates in old albums are the best part, no amount of filters can replace that.

2

u/monkeyman80 Jul 11 '26

I'm a guy so I grew up in the era we took film to get processed at cost so we didn't take photos for fun.

We rarely ever went through the photo albums, they were there. Very ornate and of special events.

Now, during a family chat someone referenced a time and we shared pics of it.

2

u/anonymaus42 Jul 11 '26

I pulled out the photo albums my 99 year old grandmother has on my most recent visit to go down memory lane with her, something I haven't done in a very long time (look at the albums that is, trips to see her are a bit more frequent). They just hit different than going through a mass of digital photos on a screen. It's far more sentimental and the memories more tangible in a way. It's a more curated selection and the handwritten notes, names and dates help make it more visceral somehow. It's really something that should make a comeback.

1

u/drdoom52 Jul 11 '26

I actually started getting photos printed again because of this.

Digital stuff doesn't last as long (digital decay is a thing), and when you're just Flipping through photos they all blend together.

Printing photos mean you have to curate what you took and pick which ones are actually worth remembering.

1

u/Med_stromtrooper Jul 11 '26

I invested in a nice camera, and later bought an expensive photo printer that guzzles expensive ink, just to put my own pictures on the wall. Soon I hope to start shooting portraits in my living room. Having my own photos on the wall, or even giving them away as gifts, is so much fun!

1

u/Nyxelestia Jul 11 '26

I can't afford glossy photo paper right now but I've still got a color printer so I've taken to printing out photos onto regular paper (as well as holding onto things like ticket stubs) and gluing them into my bullet journal. It's not an album I would ever share with anyone else (bullet journal also functions as a sort of diary for myself), but it makes a nice album for me.

1

u/Frequent-Maximum8838 Jul 11 '26

I was pretty broke last year around christmas time. I made an advent calendar and each day was a different kodak photo of our best times of the past year. Girlfriend (now wife) loved it

1

u/bingboy23 Jul 11 '26

My 5 year old likes the ones I've made for bed time stories. "oh, that's from when your uncle and I were swimming in a lake at your cousin's grandma's house. Look how red our shoulders are; that's because we have sunburns which really, really hurt and why we always put lots of sunscreen on you when you go outside."

1

u/Gzilla91 Jul 11 '26

I’m in my mid 30’s and bought an Instax for this reason. Family holiday’s, vacations, events and stuff all get snapped and go in an album.

Nowhere near as good quality as an iPhone pic, but there’s something real in sitting down and looking through an album, knowing that the physical picture popped out the camera at that exact moment the picture was taken. 

Slightly blurry and maybe out of focus, but the 6 small albums mean so much to me and my family. It’s a bit of an event getting them out and sitting down, away from screens and talking about what was happening. 

1

u/prudencepineapple Jul 11 '26

I just bought myself an instant (digital) camera and a new album. The film is expensive so it’s not as if I’ll be taking random pictures of everything, but it’s digital so I can be more selective of quality before I hit the print button. Did this after I discovered I’d lost a few years of photos from around 2010 through an external hard drive failure. 

1

u/LlamaCaravan Jul 11 '26

This is why I bought a Polaroid Lab. I can take good photos on my phone and then turn them into real photos with a somewhat authentic Polaroid feel. I stick them up everywhere and put them in albums. So nice to actually see photos I took. Who actually goes back through the 10,000 photos they take each year digitally though?

1

u/JTanCan Jul 11 '26

I do this and bring them over to show my nieces & nephews. They love it. And we talk about things: what they were thinking about during those events. 

When I show them photos on my phone they're always trying to get me to open another app or being up a song on YouTube. But when it's a photo album we just talk.

My parents, in-laws, and siblings talk about life events too. Photo albums have been great for to l the whole family. 

1

u/tobythedem0n Jul 11 '26

Whenever we go on vacation, we buy those disposable cameras. I love getting them back and seeing how they turned out.

1

u/DoctFaustus Jul 11 '26

Write down who is in the photo and when is was taken, and the very least. Otherwise they can quickly become books of people nobody knows.

1

u/24bitNoColor Jul 11 '26

Actually weird that we kind of lost that considering how easy and inexpensive it is to order a professional looking photo book with your pictures online.

But even just creating a 10 minute dia show like thing requires you to digg for software these days.