If you belong to Gen X or early Gen Y, you’re probably part of the last generation that remembers what it was like to be completely off the grid. No smartphones, no blue ticks on WhatsApp, no Grab live tracking. If you wanted to meet up with friends, you couldn’t send ten messages back and forth. You agreed on a time, picked a spot, and simply showed up.
The Discipline of Waiting
Meeting up meant waiting at an MRT station, outside your favourite shop at Wisma Atria, or by a specific stone table under a void deck. If your friend was 20 minutes late, you couldn’t scroll through social media to kill time. You waited by yourself, and maybe smsed or paged your friend, depending on whether your friend owned a mobile phone.
As you sat along, you watched people pass by, looked at the shop uncle setting up his stall, and learned to deal with being bored. Because we didn’t have a screen to stare at, we paid attention to our surroundings. We observed people and checked out the cool guys and pretty ladies walking around us. Our hangouts weren’t curated cafes with charging ports; they were void deck tables, basketball courts, or sitting at a fast-food outlet or cafe sharing a drink for three hours just talking nonsense.
Learning to Deal with People
Not having consistent notifications also meant our friendships had to be maintained face-to-face. You mingled with people as you went along. If you had a disagreement with a friend or a neighbor, there was no “block” or “mute” button. You were bound to run into them at the local neighbourhood centers or bus stop the very next day. You had to learn how to swallow your pride, patch things up, or at least figure out how to coexist.
That friction taught our generation how to handle different temperaments, quirks, and backgrounds without taking things personally.
What We Traded Away
Today’s connectivity is undeniably efficient. I can coordinate family logistics in seconds and get everything sorted without leaving the house. But sometimes I look at the younger generation glued to their screens, and I wonder what was lost. Everything today is curated, protected, and frictionless. Convenience is great, but that raw, pre-smartphone ability to wander around your estate, strike up a conversation with anyone, and just be comfortable in the real world—that’s something you can’t download from an app.