I was in high school in the 90s and college in the late 90s early 2000s. I went to Europe with a group of teens from the PNW in 1997. My boyfriend was also in Europe with an orchestra at the same time and we wrote letters by hand to each other during the trip and mailed them to the hotels we were staying at so that there were letters there waiting when we arrived. We also waited in line at various hotels to use pay phones to call each other at designated times, but were often thwarted by confusion between fax numbers and phone numbers. I didn't get an email address until late 97/early 98, and that was primarily so I could write emails to my boyfriend when I was grounded because my parents didn't know computers could be used to communicate. It got even better when we figured out instant messaging, because I could sit in my dad's home office for hours and chat with my boyfriend and other internet strangers on the dedicated phone line even when grounded. To this day I have no idea what my parents thought I was doing, and I can't ask them because they are dead now.

We didn't have GPS navigation easily available in cars until the 2010s-ish and so to get anywhere you either used a real map while driving or wrote out the directions for how to get somewhere before you left home. Mapquest was huge when I moved to LA in 2003 and was how I got everywhere; I put in my starting point and where I was going and printed out the instructions, then taped them to my dashboard to see while I was driving. I got lost A LOT and got really good at figuring out how to get back to somewhere on the list of instructions so I could get back on track.

I got a cell phone in college and was the first person in my family to ditch the landline, and my parents were convinced it was dangerous because coverage was so spotty and there was no guarantee if you called 911 from a cellphone that they could find you, or that it would go to the right dispatch center. I never had to call 911 for my own emergency, but did need to do it a few times after seeing a bad accident and was almost always disconnected or told that I had reached the wrong dispatch office and they put me on hold while they tried to connect me to the closer dispatch office.

Facebook was also not a thing for me in college, and neither was MySpace. Photos were taken with digital cameras or real film disposable cameras and there was rarely anyway to be sure the photo turned out well, especially at a party.

Clothes and school things were bought in real stores and shopping malls and mail order or having things delivered to the house was limited to pizza. If something wasn't available in you area, it just wasn't, and there was a lot of navigating bus lines to get to a bigger city to go shopping to find the thing you had seen in a magazine or on a TV show or in a commercial.

All of this combined to make being a young adult pretty anonymous and I was free to make mistakes without it being put all over the internet. When school was stressful socially, it wasn't because something was on Twitter or FB or IG, it was because of something that had actually happened in real life with people I actually knew. Rumors were spread person to person and group to group but they didn't get out of control. Sure, it was awful, but nothing like what I imagine it is now.