If this prompt is all about the absence of smartphones in this era and not completely the absence of phones, then here we go...
Sometimes, I used to credit the eras of the 80s and 90s as the best eras humans have ever experienced due to how the world was still intact with regards to the absence of one of the most distracting things in the world currently, which is smartphones. But the truth remains that each era has its differences and its good and bad influences on the lives of people.
No matter how distracting we want to tag smartphones in this era, we can't ignore the fact that these phones have been very helpful and are doing unimaginable things we never thought possible in the past years before now.
Would the world have been better if smartphones never existed?
Throat cleared...
The truth is, if smartphones never existed, we wouldn't have known anything like smartphones and we would still have been using the “Chinese phones” (as we commonly called them), Java phones, Symbian phones, and others. We wouldn't have known what the phones of these days can do and we wouldn't have been bothered about it too. But another truth is that even when those old types of phones were in existence, we were very much addicted to our phones, although not as compared to how it is now.
I remember the days when we felt like we were traveling around the world chatting on the 2go app. Most of us had sleepless nights just to stay in contact with people we didn't even know. So you see, the attachment to phones didn't start today.
Should we talk about gaming? Oh yeah, the games on phones in those days can't be compared to what we have now, but most of us who were into games had sleepless nights just to conquer stages in those games.
So, if we had continued with the phones we had back then till this age, the same way smartphones have taken us away from the “natural and simple” lifestyle our forefathers enjoyed, that's the same thing we would still have been experiencing by now.
I don't know about you, but I was among those who used Java phones during those days, and I was really addicted, just like my friends were.
Thanks for reading.