What We Used To Do Before Everything Was Available 24/7

There was a time when you couldn’t get everything whenever you wanted it. Shops closed. Banks closed. Takeaways stopped delivering. The last bus went home. Television programmes finished for the night. If you wanted something and it wasn’t available, you simply had to wait.

For Gen X, that wasn’t particularly unusual. It was just life.

We grew up in a world of opening hours, closing times and the occasional handwritten sign in a shop window telling you that the owner had popped out for ten minutes. If you missed the last episode of something, you missed it. If the shop had sold out, you came back another day. If you forgot to buy milk before the shops closed, you either went without or started searching the kitchen cupboards for something else to drink.

Today, we live in a very different world. Supermarkets open late, many services operate around the clock and the internet means that almost anything can be ordered, watched, downloaded or delivered at any time of day or night.

Convenience is brilliant. But it has also changed our relationship with waiting.

The shops actually closed

One of the biggest differences was the simple fact that shops had opening hours. If you finished work at 5pm and needed something at 6pm, you couldn’t necessarily just pop to the supermarket.

Saturday shopping was a proper event for many families. You planned what you needed, went into town and got it done. If you forgot something, you had a decision to make. Was it important enough to go back out? Could you manage without it? Could you wait until Monday?

There was no opening an app and checking whether a supermarket would deliver it within the next 30 minutes.

The closing time mattered because once the shutters came down, that was it.

Sunday was different

For many people growing up in the 1970s, 1980s and early 1990s, Sunday had a completely different rhythm. Shops were generally much quieter, and traditional Sunday trading restrictions meant that the idea of going shopping whenever you fancied it simply didn’t exist in the way it does now.

Sunday was more obviously a day apart from the rest of the week. There might be a roast dinner, the Sunday papers, television, a visit to relatives or perhaps a walk if the weather was decent.

There was also a certain finality about Sunday evening. You knew Monday was coming, and there wasn’t much you could do about it.

The weekend was ending whether you were ready or not.

If you missed it on television, you missed it

Perhaps the biggest difference Gen X remembers is television.

Today, you can watch an enormous amount of television whenever you want. You can pause it, rewind it, watch the next episode immediately and catch up on an entire series in a weekend.

Back then, you had a much more complicated relationship with television. Programmes were on at particular times, on particular days. If you wanted to watch something, you needed to be there.

If you missed an episode, you could hope somebody had recorded it on VHS. Otherwise, you simply didn’t see it.

There was something strangely exciting about knowing that your favourite programme was coming on at 8pm. You arranged your evening around it. You made sure the television was available. You might even tell people, “Don’t phone me at eight, I’m watching…”

There was no pause button and no streaming service waiting patiently afterwards.

You waited for films

Going to the cinema was one option, but watching a film at home was a different experience.

You might wait months for a film to arrive on television. Before that, you might see the trailer and then spend weeks wondering when it would eventually appear.

Video rental changed everything. Suddenly you could walk into a video shop, browse the shelves and choose something to watch that evening.

But even then, there were limits.

Someone else might have hired the film you wanted. There might be only one copy. You might arrive too late and discover that the shelves were full of films nobody wanted.

And then there was the pressure of returning it on time.

Today, if you want to watch a film at 11.30pm, you can probably find one within seconds. There is no need to check whether the video shop is still open.

Music required a little more patience

Music was also something you had to wait for.

If you wanted a particular album, you might have to go into a record shop and buy it. If it wasn’t in stock, you ordered it and waited.

Singles were bought in physical form. Albums were listened to from beginning to end because skipping tracks meant getting up and lifting the needle, or later pressing a button on the CD player.

If you wanted a song recorded from the radio, you had to wait for it to be played. You sat next to the cassette recorder, ready to press record, hoping the DJ wouldn’t talk over the introduction.

There was no search box where you could type the name of a song and hear it immediately.

The waiting was part of the experience.

You couldn’t order something at midnight

Online shopping has completely changed our expectations.

If you decide at midnight that you need a new pair of trainers, a phone charger, a birthday present or something for the kitchen, you can probably order it without leaving the sofa.

Gen X grew up with catalogues, high street shops and mail order. If you wanted something, you had to find it first.

That might mean travelling into town, looking around several shops and discovering that nobody had the exact thing you wanted.

Sometimes you bought something else.

Sometimes you went home empty-handed.

There was no digital equivalent of standing in a shop saying, “Surely someone sells these?”

Takeaways had a closing time

The modern world has also changed the way we think about food.

Today, there are takeaway apps, late-night delivery services and restaurants operating into the early hours. If you’re hungry, there is usually somebody prepared to bring food to your door.

That wasn’t always the case.

If you wanted a takeaway, you needed to know when the local Chinese, Indian, pizza shop or chip shop closed. If you left it too late, you were eating whatever was in the kitchen.

This created an important skill: knowing when to stop thinking about whether you wanted food and actually order it.

There was no scrolling through 14 different menus at 11.45pm while debating between pizza and curry.

You had limited choices.

Sometimes that made the decision much easier.

You had to remember things

Before smartphones, there was no digital assistant ready to remind you about everything.

You remembered birthdays. You wrote down appointments. You kept telephone numbers in an address book. You wrote shopping lists on paper.

If you needed directions, you looked at a map or asked somebody.

If you were meeting someone, you agreed where and when you would meet. If you were late, you couldn’t simply send a message explaining where you were.

This sounds inconvenient now, but it also meant that people developed systems for remembering things.

Parents had calendars. People kept diaries. Important telephone numbers were memorised.

And somehow, most of us survived.

You couldn’t look everything up

One of the biggest changes is the sheer amount of information available instantly.

If you wanted to know something when Gen X was growing up, you might have had to find a book, look through an encyclopaedia or ask somebody who knew.

There was no immediately checking a fact on your phone.

There was no searching for the answer while sitting at the dinner table. If an argument started about a football statistic, a film actor or whether a particular band had released a certain song, somebody might simply say, “We’ll have to look it up.”

And then the argument would continue for the next half hour.

Today, someone reaches for their phone and settles it in ten seconds.

Perhaps we’ve gained accuracy.

We’ve definitely lost some arguments.

You had to wait for photographs

Photography was another example of delayed gratification.

You took photographs on film, which meant you couldn’t see them immediately. You finished the roll, took it to be developed and waited to find out whether the photographs were any good.

There was always a little uncertainty.

Someone might have blinked. The photograph might have been blurred. Half the group might have been looking somewhere else.

But the photograph was physical. You could hold it, put it in an album and come across it years later.

Today, we can take hundreds of photographs without thinking about it. We can immediately check them, delete them and take another one.

Convenient? Absolutely.

Quite as exciting as opening a packet of developed photographs?

Probably not.

Being unavailable was normal

Perhaps the biggest difference wasn’t about shopping, television or food. It was about people.

You could be unavailable.

If you went out, people couldn’t necessarily contact you. If you were visiting somebody, you stayed there. If you went for a walk, nobody expected you to answer your phone.

There was no constant stream of messages asking where you were, what you were doing or whether you’d seen something online.

Being unreachable didn’t mean you were ignoring people. It simply meant you were somewhere else.

That seems almost revolutionary now.

We had to make our own entertainment

When everything isn’t available instantly, you become better at making your own entertainment.

A rainy afternoon could involve board games, cards, books, magazines, television or simply sitting around talking.

A long car journey meant looking out of the window, playing travel games, listening to the radio or arguing with your brother or sister.

Waiting for a friend meant waiting.

There wasn’t always something to fill the silence.

Sometimes boredom was simply boredom.

And surprisingly often, boredom led to something else.

You went outside. You made something. You invented a game. You explored somewhere. You found an old record and played it. You phoned somebody and had a conversation.

The lack of options could actually create options.

Perhaps waiting wasn’t so bad

The modern world has made life extraordinarily convenient. We can order food, stream television, listen to almost any song, shop at any hour and find an answer to almost any question within seconds.

There is no reason to pretend that isn’t useful.

But Gen X also remembers something that can be easy to forget: waiting wasn’t necessarily a problem.

Waiting gave things a sense of anticipation. You looked forward to Friday night television. You waited for an album to come out. You saved up for something before buying it. You waited for your holiday. You waited for photographs to be developed.

And when the thing finally arrived, it sometimes felt more important because you had waited for it.

Perhaps that is what has changed most.

We haven’t just made things faster. We’ve changed our expectations. We now live in a world where “I’ll have to wait” can feel like an inconvenience rather than a normal part of life.

Maybe every now and then, it wouldn’t hurt to remember how to wait.

Not because the old days were automatically better. They weren’t.

But because there was something quite satisfying about knowing that some things couldn’t happen immediately.

The shops closed. The programme ended. The takeaway stopped delivering. The phone wasn’t in your pocket. The answer could wait until tomorrow.

And somehow, we all managed.

What is something you remember having to wait for that would seem almost impossible to wait for today?