35 Obsolete Technology Things To Prove How Much The World Has Moved On And Changed

The ‘Retro Tech Dreams’ Twitter page posts nostalgic and vintage photos of old tech every single day. The account is fairly fresh, created just over half a year ago, in June 2022. However, in just a few months, it’s already managed to garner a following of over 82.6k social media users.

That just goes to show how powerful nostalgia is: pics of things that used to surround you every single day grab your attention and force you to compare your current life with how you lived back then. Odds are that many of you reading this miss the past quite a bit, and would love to travel back in time to experience it all over again.

Sure, there’s an argument to be made that tech products and entertainment ‘aren’t made as well as they used to be’ now, in 2023. However, what we miss the most might not actually be the aesthetics of the tech or the actual video games and programs we used, but the sense of happiness and freedom that we had when we were younger.

The tech that we used might have been cool, but it wasn’t ‘the point.’ It just happened to be what surrounded us while we had fun with our family and friends. All of the music, video games, TV shows, and other forms of entertainment were ways to connect to each other and have communal experiences. What also helped was that your friends were often physically present, instead of interacting over the internet. LAN parties, anyone?

Now compare that to what we have now. The technology we have is far more advanced, powerful, and convenient, but it’s arguably also made us feel a bit more isolated. This will vary from person to person and from Panda to Panda.

Try to compare the amount of time that you spend messaging your friends on social media versus how much time you spend with them in person. It’s far easier to meet up with your friends while you’re still at school or university because you’re all spending tons of time together, in more or less the same physical space.

Fast-forward to when you have a full-time job and tons of responsibilities. Not only are many of your friends most likely living far away, you might feel utterly exhausted after a long day at work. Sending someone a meme while watching Netflix on the couch might be all the energy that you can muster.

It seems hard to fathom that somebody will ever feel nostalgic for much of the tech we have now, which feels quite impersonal: though it allows for instantaneous long-distance communication, the emotional impact is less than what the tech of the ‘80s, ‘90s, and 2000s likely provided. However, most likely, we'll still have people in the future who look back at this point in time and see it through rose-colored glasses.

Previously, Bored Panda had reached out to child and adolescent therapist Kemi Omijeh, a member of the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy from London, with a few questions about nostalgia.

"Many psychologists, myself included, believe our childhood is the foundation to who we are as adults. It explains why we frequently revisit our childhood as it influences our present," she told us during an interview earlier.

The therapist explained that people feel nostalgic for their childhoods if they were loved and nurtured when they were young. However, if that wasn’t the case, they likely won’t have a smidgen of nostalgia for that time period.

"If we’ve had a difficult childhood, it can be hard to feel nostalgic, instead it will feel like something we need to get over in order to move on," the expert told Bored Panda.

The therapist noted that nostalgia is essentially our brains reliving the happy and fun times that we had in the past. That’s healthy and can be a good coping strategy when your mood is low or your life is full of challenges. However, there’s a limit to the benefits that nostalgia provides. In some cases, it can actually be detrimental to our mental health.

"If we end up comparing it to our experiences today and feeling like nothing is as good as it was, then this will inevitably affect our mood and our ability to do what we need to do. We can become stuck in our nostalgia; in which case it might be best to seek help from a counseling professional to help you process your past in order to enjoy your present,” she suggested.

At the same time, we have to keep in mind that our memories of the past might not be entirely accurate. We’re reliving our memories by viewing them through a filter. Details might differ from how others remember trends and events.

Some people might end up daydreaming a lot about the past or the future, at the expense of opportunities in the present. Therapist Omijeh, from the BACP, previously told Bored Panda that if you want to change how much time you spend daydreaming, you have to start off by identifying your patterns.

“Think about the times you usually daydream, is there something about that situation or those times that mean you’re daydreaming? Do something about it if that is the case. Set a time limit, use a timer if it ensures you stop. Write down the biggest thought or feeling as a result of the daydream. That way you’re not just stopping daydreaming. You are doing something positive as a nice transition from stopping daydreaming to doing something,” she said.

"Finally, turn your daydream into a visualization or goal exercise. Your daydreams could be a communication about your innermost desires. Could you begin to plan how to achieve those desires?" 

Which of these pics made you feel the most nostalgic for the past, dear Pandas? What do you miss most, technology-wise? Are you satisfied with how tech has progressed in recent years? Share your thoughts in the comments!

When you're done enjoying this list, check out Bored Panda's previous features about nostalgic pics here, here, and here.