When last did you leave the house without your phone and genuinely not know where anyone was or where you were going? For one generation, that was not hypothetical – it was an ordinary afternoon. Walking to a friend’s house hoping they would be home, knocking, and simply hoping. No text to check first, no little “seen” tick to tell you they had read your message and ignored it. You either found your friend, or you did not, and either way, you had worked it out for yourself by walking there.
That is the strange inheritance of the last generation to grow up before the invention of smartphones swallowed their whole childhood: old enough to remember being properly unreachable, young enough to have watched everyone younger than them grow up easy to find, watched, and online before they could vote. It is easy to romanticise that gap, but it is harder to sit with what it actually meant.
Psychologist Jean Twenge coined the term “iGen” for the generation that followed, and according to the Institute for Family Studies, her research found that teenagers who spent more time on screens reported lower wellbeing than those who spent time with friends face-to-face. Crucially, the unhappiness did not come first. The screen time did, with teens in her surveys spending an average of close to six hours a day online. It is not a stretch to see the same pattern locally, where data costs and load-shedding have not stopped the smartphone from becoming the default babysitter in homes.
Timelines of the technology itself tell a similarly abrupt story. According to ownership data collated on NowComment, the shift from the first iPhone’s release to near-universal teenage ownership happened inside less than a decade – a single generational blink in which “unreachable” quietly stopped being ordinary and became something closer to an emergency.
But statistics only get you so far into what that freedom actually felt like. On Medium, one contributor writing about a childhood before smartphones described it less as deprivation and more as a kind of muscle: the ability to sit with boredom without panicking, to be fully present because there was no second digital moment competing for attention. Friendships from that era, the piece notes, were built entirely in physical space through shared time rather than performance. Nobody curating, nobody building a personal brand, just people showing up.
That is the part worth pausing on. Not the nostalgia of “we had it harder”, which usually collapses under its own smugness the moment someone mentions dial-up. It is the quieter, more uncomfortable question underneath: was that freedom real, or was it simply the absence of a way to check? Would that same generation who were handed a smartphone at nine years old have chosen boredom over infinite scroll? Almost certainly not. The virtue was not willpower – it was the lack of an alternative. What makes this generation strange is not that they remember a different world. It is that they cannot fully explain it to anyone who did not live in it, including, oftentimes, their own kids. Try describing “getting lost at the mall on purpose” to a ten-year-old with a phone in their pocket and a location pin visible to both parents. It does not quite land. It sounds like a story about the “olden days”, because functionally, it is one.
Maybe that is the real inheritance: not the boredom itself, but the memory of what it built – patience, presence, the strange comfort of being alone with your own thoughts. Whether that is worth mourning or just worth remembering, the question this generation is still working out is one unanswered knock on the door at a time.
Visual: Mpho Makwela
