I think this isn't something specific to the internet and smart phones, it's just the sheer ubiquity and convenience make existing without them unfathomable despite plenty of people in the world living without it, like electricity or running water.
There's a difference between the convenience of a 2014 smartphone and a 2023 one
the former actually improves on convenience by having GPS directions, a camera, and everything else
the latter is like the former but runs 10x hotter and with 10x the eyestrain and you can't change the battery so it's actually significantly less convenient
I once met a friend coming from another direction at a radiohead concert by bringing a mylar balloon.
In another incident, friends got married at City Hall and invited a crew to celebrate afterwards, but I flubbed the directions to the initial meet-up point and then missed all the festivities.
On an unrelated note, there were so many more excuses to get out of things
In this thread: Self described leftists do “iPhone bad” unironically
Good struggle session 
partly might be because nobody entered the 2020-internet all at once, and 2000s "internet era" was sort of similar to 90s "non-internet era"
1998 was roughly the year that average Americans started getting internet
I remember that era and it was basically the same as before for any elementary school kid, except in addition to going outside and playing gameboy, you'd also play some games on web browsers
research without google: My first report using google was in elementary school in 1999, and it was just a "supplement" to the already-available physical books we had. This pattern continued well into the 2000s, with the internet only becoming the main source of information (at least in schools) near the late 2000s.
aspects of the internet gradually became more like today--RAM got cheaper, HDD capacities increased, dial-up gave way to DSL/cable etc, and this took several years. As all of these things happened, software became more and more bloated to take advantage of the extra resources
I remember getting lost all the time and spending long hours asleep on the subway
the internet has been an unambiguously bad development in human history
Death to America
This was my “stand around and nod my head to music only I can hear while staring into the middle distance” era
I spent a lot more time playing with school supplies
On the road to fully automated luxury gay space communism.
Spreading Linux propaganda since 2020
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