9 things that are better now than in the ’70s and ’80s, Pt. 2

Welcome to Part 2 of this list. If you haven’t yet read Part 1, go read it first. Really! Don’t go any further because there’s a monster at the end of this sentence!

Oh, never mind, that’s just me.

Anyway, go read Part 1. I’ll wait.

(Twiddling thumbs, whistling a song that isn’t really a song…)

OK, done? Good. Continue, please.

4. Driving to an unknown location

Traveling somewhere you weren’t familiar with was a process up until around the mid-2000s. Almost always, it began with a phone call to that place.

YOU: Hi, it’s me. I need directions to your place.
OTHER PERSON: Sure, where are you coming from?
YOU: Twenty miles west of Lizard Lick.
OTHER PERSON: Gotcha. OK, got something to write on?
YOU: Yep, I’m ready.
OTHER PERSON: Good. So, you’re gonna get on 40, go roughly 200 miles west, get off at Exit 310, turn right, go 12 miles until you see the old train overpass. Go under that and take your first left at the rooster mailbox. Then go another two miles until you see a rusted out ’69 Nova out in a cow pasture. Turn there and we’re the third house on the left. If you come up on a water tank painted with a graffiti smiley face smoking a joint, you’ve gone too far. Turn around immediately and go back. The road dead-ends near that tank, and the people who painted the smiley face live under it. If you pull up, there could be an incident.
YOU: Maybe you should just meet me at the interstate.

As a traveling musician in the ’90s, I often used a World Atlas map book to find my way to the town, then pull over, call the venue where I was playing that night from a roadside pay phone, and get directions. Getting mugged, stabbed, or shot was often a possibility during these phone calls, which should tell you something about the types of places I booked.

The bottom line is that pre-smartphones, paper was always involved in going somewhere. If you were lucky, there was someone else in the car who could read off the turns, effectively acting as what would later become Siri or Alexa or some other disembodied AI voice. If you weren’t lucky, you had to deal with loose-leaf pages of directions flying around the cabin of your crappy car because it had no A/C and you had to drive with the windows down during the South Texas, Tennessee, and North Carolina summers lest you suffocate.

Again, oddly specific details. I’m not bitter, though.

Today? Any doofus can enter an address into Apple Maps and simply follow the pleasant voice to nearly anywhere in the world. No maps, no scraps of handwritten directions on paper flying about the (probably) air-conditioned cabin. The downside? We now have an entire generation of people who have zero sense of direction, don’t commit landmarks to memory, and — God forbid their phone dies — will never be able to find their way back home and are doomed to meet some unspeakable fate underneath a water tank decorated with a smiley face smoking a joint.

3. Knowing where people are

Again, this is about technology — or the lack thereof in the 1970s and ’80s. Then, we simply didn’t know where anybody was unless we were physically with them. As a kid, that didn’t matter anyway. Who cared where anybody else was? This only mattered if you were waiting for your best friend to be dropped off at your house on a Saturday morning.

Parents, though, were built differently. Because “tracking” your kid on a phone hadn’t even been imagined yet, it wasn’t something that our parents considered as an option. They had two choices: 1) Keep your kid within sight all day long; or 2) Trust that you would reunite with your child later that day, having no idea what was happening during those 8–12 hours.

Most parents just shrugged and chose #2.

If you lived in the suburbs, your Mom might receive a phone call from a neighbor.

NEIGHBOR: Hey, just so you know, Jacob is over here with my kids. They just had peanut butter and marshmallow spread sandwiches, and now they’re out in the driveway jumping their bikes over cardboard boxes and empty Coke bottles.
JACOB’S MOM: Is anyone actively bleeding out?
NEIGHBOR: Not that I know of.
JACOB’S MOM: OK, thanks!

If you lived in the country, your parents simply turned you outside like a dog, hoping you’d return by dinner with mostly all of your limbs. No call from a neighbor because there was no neighbor.

If you were of driving age, you made plans to meet up with your buddy. “Meet me at the Sunoco at 9.” Then, you got there at 8:45 and stared obsessively at the highway, anticipating the appearance of a green, 1978 Ford Pinto. While waiting, you entertained yourself with the radio, a cassette tape, or an old, crumpled Archie comic book you found between the back seats of your parents’ station wagon, which you were shamefully driving.

During my musician days, my poor parents wouldn’t hear from me for days on end, until I either stopped at another roadside pay phone or could call from my luxurious Motel 6. (These were always collect calls, of course.) To someone of 40 or younger, this sounds unthinkable and cruel, but again, you must think of this in the context of the times. To Baby Boomer parents, this was simply how life was. Once your children were out of sight, they became wards of the Good Lord, and who better to watch over them? They trusted the system.

Today? Naw. That ain’t happening. Yes, we trust the Good Lord, but we’re also addicted to the conveniences provided by our phones. Life360 or something similar allows us to keep eyes on our kids all day, every day, in some cases after they become adults (unless they have the good sense to insist on disconnecting themselves). Teenagers and young adults always seem to know where their friends are via Snapchat or some other social platform probably invented by George Jetson.

Even having grown up the way I did, I freely admit that I’m as guilty as anyone in adopting and using this black magic, although I’m not particularly good at it. It just goes to illustrate how whenever a clear technological advancement appears in the world, humanity will accept it — sometimes immediately and sometimes gradually — but accept it, they will. And life as we know it changes. It becomes life after the appearance of that thing versus life before, but life nonetheless marches on.

2. Long car trips

This one has improved dramatically. Speaking as a kid of the ’70s, we packed for a long car trip as if we were preparing for the Lewis and Clark expedition. A gear list was required lest you forget something, and it looked something like this:

• Pillow
• Blanket that could also be used, along with the pillow, to create a “fort” in your assigned area of the station wagon
• Comic books (Archie, Batman, Superman)
• Hardy Boys books
• Huge bag of candy and snacks, most of which would be consumed by Mile 20 of a 400-mile trip
• Handheld water-ring-toss game
• Handheld Mattel football game (late ’70s)
• Playing cards for Go Fish
• Frisbee for rest-area stops
• Coloring books and crayons
• Hot Wheels car collection in plastic carrier
• Barbie doll/horse collection if you were my sister
• Walkman (later ’80s)

Even with all this paraphernalia, the trip became unbearable after around Hour 3, which, by kid time, was approximately 11 hours. Tempers flared. Threats were made. Your parents tried to resolve this by suggesting a game of road alphabet, where you tried to call out a word on a road sign or billboard starting with whatever letter of the alphabet you were on before the other person. This worked for a while, but before long, violent skirmishes broke out over who yelled out “Quincy, Illinois” or “Xenia, Ohio” first.

For brief and illogical moments of excitement, we tried to induce passing truckers to honk their horns by doing the universal “honk-your-horn” arm motion while displaying huge, toothy grins. It worked for about one out of every 5 drivers. If the trucker was in a sour mood, you might get another gesture in return.

At some point, somebody in the car passed junk-food gas, resulting in the quick downing of all windows and a stern rebuke from Dad, who was most likely the secret offender. Eventually people began willing themselves asleep purely as a survival mechanism, usually with their noses beside cracked windows, just in case.

When the destination was finally reached at 2 am, everyone in the vehicle felt the same sense of accomplishment and exhaustion as I imagine Mt. Everest climbers feel as they stumble back into Base Camp.

Today? Long car trips are infinitely improved for both parents and children. Here’s the entire kid gear list:

• Pillow
• Snacks
• Phone
• Phone charger
• AirPods

That’s it. Children are entirely self-contained. Parents can go for eight hours of listening to an audiobook or chatting, sometimes forgetting that they even have kids.

It’s a wonderful eight hours.

And the No. 1 thing that is better now than when I was a kid?

1. Obtaining information

There’s a famous line of dialogue from “Seinfeld” when Newman, a mailman, utters the following with a combination of utter happiness and abject evilness:

“When you control the mail, you control … information.”

The control of information has, in fact, become difficult — almost impossible, I’d say. If you own a phone (and you do), you have free and instant access to practically all human knowledge, unless you live in, say, Iran or North Korea (which you don’t, because how would you be reading this) and have little to no access to much of anything. Short of those unfortunate places, nobody is controlling information — not even Newman.

In the 1970s, though, information was doled out carefully, like that time you didn’t buy enough Halloween candy, and, for the first two hours, each kid got a single Tootsie Roll. For all practical purposes, ’70s kids in elementary or middle school received information through one of only four means:

1. Parents — who did the best they could and faked the rest
2. Teachers — who were working with textbooks published in 1942
3. The school library, which mainly contained old dusty board games and those skinny, hardback children’s books, or
4. The CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite.

Since we had no interest in watching the news, No. 4 hardly counts.

It was not much different in high school. In most cases, you went to the library and found encyclopedias or other books on important subjects. Y’know, things like:

• Where do crocodiles live?
• Where does Bigfoot live?
• Where does Lynda Carter live?

But today? In the same way that easy access to music has devalued music itself in the 2020s, at-your-fingertips information has made knowledge somewhat disposable. If a teenaged boy in the ’70s made the effort to go to the library, flip through the card catalog, locate the appropriate book, and somehow find Lynda Carter’s street address, he would probably retain it forever, even after his release from prison.

These days, though, we are sandblasted with information all day, every day, and it’s unlikely that much of it will stick. A resident of 2026 must sort through a haystack of digital junk to extract a single needle of useful content, whereas, in the ’70s, the stuff we were told was the stuff we actually needed to know.

Walter Cronkite was only on the air for 22 minutes per day. That means he only told us about the things of immediate importance on a national or global scale — wars, natural disasters, presidential elections, and the like. Essentially, Cronkite gave us stuff on a “need to know” basis, like if a nuclear warhead was heading our way and we should take the appropriate steps to not get blown into smithereens.

(By the way, the word “smithereens” is another thing from the ’70s that hasn’t been improved upon.)

Today? In addition to the obvious news, we are given:

• Details about the sensational murder trial that is happening six states away and has nothing to do with us.
• Details about the mostly peaceful street riot in the city 800 miles away that we’ve never visited and will probably never visit and has nothing to do with us, unless our second cousin owned the convenience store that was mostly peacefully burned down.
• Details about some controversy involving Sydney Sweeney or (what used to be) Madonna or a WNBA basketball player, none of whom has anything to do with us.
• Details about Johnny Depp’s “dramatic Scrooge transformation” and I’m not even kidding.
• Details about a new Bigfoot sighting which is probably AI-generated, definitely not authentic, has nothing to do with us, but we secretly really enjoy and hope is real so we can finally tell everybody “I told you so.”

Is any of this actual news, aside from the Bigfoot stuff? Interesting, maybe, but news?

I’m thinking no.

Today, because channels like Fox News and CNN are broadcasting 24 hours a day rather than Cronkite’s 22 minutes, producers are looking for any meaningless drivel they can spin into a 10-minute segment, regurgitate on every subsequent show throughout the day, and hopefully drag out over the following two weeks. When actual news occurs, like a natural disaster, these folks are practically giddy; their show will write itself for the foreseeable future.

(Ever noticed how all other news magically ceases during a natural disaster?)

Having all human knowledge in our hands has changed our daily living in myriad ways, and some of these are good. For example, I think it has made us more curious as a species. In the ’70s, we didn’t watch movies and TV shows and wonder where that random supporting actor was raised and went to school, whom he married, and what nonsensical name he and his wife assigned to their unfortunate first child. We didn’t wonder these things because why would we? There was no reasonable way to find out, aside maybe from People Magazine if they just happened to feature that particular actor in this month’s issue. Not much chance of that.

So, we just sat there in our mall-carpeted stadium seats, munched our popcorn, and enjoyed the movie, secure in the knowledge that we didn’t have to rob Fort Knox to pay for the outing.

But that’s a different blog.

Today, every movie-watching experience becomes a combination of cinematic entertainment and a research project — for me, at least. At home, this is happening during the movie. The phone is out, poised to launch the IMDb pages of each actor and dig up production notes and trivia. If the movie is based on a true story, you’d better believe that I’ll root out the differences between what’s on the screen and what actually happened.

And then, report every detail to my long-suffering wife.

It’s a sickness, I know, and results in an instant sugar high of knowledge that, by tomorrow morning, will be mostly dissipated into useless, sputtering synapses and of no help to anyone.

STRANGER ON THE STREET THE NEXT DAY: Excuse me, sir, but could you tell me where Ryan Gosling went to elementary school?
ME: Sure, I can! He went to … umm … oh, hang on, I know this … crap!
STRANGER: Thanks for nothing.

So yes, access to information is most definitely better today than when I was growing up.

The real question is: Do we really need it?