I get a notification saying i have two chat messages when I only have one. It makes me feel less popular than I hoped :(:(

I miss ye olden days when we still wrote real letters!

yup thats long ago, did you notice that nowadays people hardly speak?
on the street, all people are using touchscreens, using their mobile and bleep bleep

in the supermarket they get in line they get their magic tablet or phone and bleep bleep click click
at the pharmacist or drugstore (this word sounds weird) the same story get inline , take one of the chairs or sit on a bench (doctors) and get the magic screens and bleep bleep click click

Kids take their mobile/touchpad whatever when they got to sleep, they leave it standbye and get notified if a new message has been send or someone posted something.

The next days they complain they feel so tired and they cant understand why :D
Todays kids are addicted to their cellphones, tablets, most of them have a flatscreen so they can watch tv or a dvd in their bedroom, and keep complaining i feel so tired i have a headache my eyes hurt, and they have to take some things to solve their headaches.

My mobile is off when i go to sleep, nothing standbye, no screens, no dvd playing, no mp3 playing to get to sleep, just getting some good nights sleep, that phone will still be there the next day :D

You know what the icing on the cake is? Back in the day, those same so called normal people used to look at gamers and "computer freaks" with a strange mix of suspicion, wonder and alienation, saying it was antisocial and weird to be into computers and heaven forbid, know how to use them and play those silly and demonic games. Not social like they themselves were of course, social as in hanging around in groups who have nothing in common other than smoking cigarettes, an interest in "what's currently in" and other lowest common denominator topics such as gossiping about who is dating and screwing who. Having actual hobbies? No sign of it.
Nowadays, they still do the same except that they're polluting perfectly good bandwidth with their nonsense and are themselves addicted to the very technology they shunned because it wasn't considered "in". Bringing all their inane drama along which was more contained back when they had to physically meet up to hang around in groups.

People are still the exact same as they were in earlier decades, it's just that they unfortunately encroached upon us on our channels which previously were largely free of such a presence, partially thanks to the technical hurdle of getting online in the first place.
Funny thing is that me carrying a desktop PC to a friend's house for LAN battles or playing hot-seat multiplayer with up to 4 people on one PC was actually more social than what people do nowadays which is spending all week (Monday through Friday) face deep in their little smartphone screens messaging each other in a butchered form of non-language via their social apps to talk about what went down on Friday/Saturday night at the club and what they expect to go down on the next Friday/Saturday night - those couple hours of tribal rituals forming the bulk of what they call having a life.

And the cherry on the icing on the cake is that almost everyone agrees when you tell them this, virtually no one seems to feel that they are addressed by that. They'll nod and frantically agree about how society went down the drain and people are superficial etc and 5 minutes later they're back on their super social whatsapps etc taking part in the one-liner culture of communicating without saying anything, discussing so called social matters. When they realize you're talking to them about them, they'll become defensive and say "at least I am normal". But don't ever call anyone normal or worse yet average, that will immediately be taken as an insult. Because everyone wants to be part of the herd but a special snowflake at the same time. And that illusion is only possible to uphold with copious amounts of self-BS-ing.

Fortunately, there are still plenty of old people with whom one can easily strike up a non-inane conversation even if they're complete strangers. Even though people as young as in their 60s have jumped on the bury your face in smartphone train, there are still plenty of sane people left. Not all is lost. Regarding the younger generations, not all is lost either. There are still a good number of reasonable people in every generation. They're just being drowned out by the noise created by the super social masses, to a point where - just like shipwrecked sailors on the sea - they can't find each other. Which is kinda ironic considering it should be easier for like-minded people to find each other thanks to the aid of modern technology which should technically remove the perceived scarcity resulting from geographical scattering.

Practically any attempt to form a nice little community of like-minded people where one at least from time to time has the chance to talk about non-inane stuff is bound to deteriorate as soon as the group grows beyond a certain size - which it likely will because bored destructive individuals will involuntarily seek to ruin any such thing. The kind of people who cowardly wrecked your sand castles as a kid when you went on lunch break.

Even within small groups the inability of humans to truly accept horizontal hierarchies over vertical hierarchies becomes apparent, usually in a negative way. Seeing as our nature as a species has not evolved one bit in the last couple thousand years, despite the cute little efforts of philosophers, social science graduates, psychology students, social engineers and other "social" people who would arguably have gained more insight from just studying biology or better yet spending a day at the local zoo, or elementary school for that matter.

Sniff... sniff... what's this smell? It's like mold and mothballs...

PS - Before someone starts punching me, it's a tongue-in-cheek comment.

Verily, and forsooth! Mine own quill and ink-pot do believe that I hath forsaken them.

I have on the forum two non-existant notifications...

I totally agree! I didn't even need a smartphone to successfully ignore just about everybody I ever met during my life! In fact, I still don't need a smartphone to do that! I have perfected the art of being anti-social to the point of not needing a screen for achieving it. Oh sure, I've had to turn off the anti-social brain bits when I was looking for a girl, but all's good now and I can remain anti-social for the rest of my days.

Yes! I think awareness of this being how things are is a huge step to them not being like this. People are lost and distracted by the system that they don't even realize. Keep it up!!!

I don't even have a smartphone! But this is the same for me, I'm extremely anti-social and only was social to meet women and now that I'm with the right one, we're completely anti-social together! We stay away from everyone: watching TV, movies, playing games, coloring, playing with our animals, making food, gardening, what else do we need other people for? Actually, we hung out with someone once this week, our first time "hanging out" in a long time, it was nice, but definitely not something we like to do very often.

[emphasis added]

I wonder why that may even be the case. Since this is supposed to be still a work in progress, I would expect that they be preserve their old databases until they make sure everything works as should.

I interestingly made the very same experience, no one in my class had any interest in gaming and the only one who did at least try things out would too quickly throw in the towel especially in multiplayer.

The guys from the class below were almost all gamers, either PC or console and I mostly spent time with those people if I wasn't busy with singleplayer games. And in the class above there were quite a bunch of gamers as well. People you could play Age of Empires 2 battles with for 4 hours without a break or spend an entire day in Duke 3D deathmatch. For Worms 2 multiplayer sessions, I predominantly played that game with guys from 4 classes below because they were really motivated and didn't just give up soon as the first little worm goes belly up.

I did know about every person who had any remote interest in games at my school because games were so expensive that you had to go and trade games with others if you wanted to play many titles, and the internet was still slow and uncommon. As for demographics, there were no female gamers at my school except for one who wanted to become an IT engineer but she didn't play games that much.

@Fenixp and dreamler7, you guys are very fortunate! It's as if you flew through outer space and found another inhabited planet. A true rarity.

I don't really like the word antisocial because it sounds like it's a bad character trait to have when imho it just means you're an introvert who gets energized from doing purposeful things alone or with one person or a very small group of people and loses energy when being around crowds. Extroverts operate the other way around, they get energy -from- other people, including crowds.

I'm most clearly introverted but not afraid of crowds or individuals and not shy - otherwise painting outside in the middle of cities etc with crowds all around would be quite impossible - but I do spend 88% of my waking hours by myself (not counting work). The other 12% are spent doing contact sports which I obviously need people for and without those activities I'd probably win any "antisocial competition". It's not that I don't like people, it just drains my energy being around them so I try to only be around people when I can do something purposeful. An event like an open air concert, loud parties, clubbing? Thanks but no thanks. I don't even like to go to art receptions, including my own ones. When colleagues go out for a round of drinks I most often pass. I don't mind meeting up with people (only one or max two people at a time please) if I haven't seen them in a while ( a long while).

If it's an interesting activity like indoor climbing or something like that, I'm generally up for checking out stuff like that (unless it's too expensive which in Switzerland includes almost everything), always interested in trying something new but it's the activity that attracts me, not the fact that you're going to be around people. I don't mind going somewhere entirely by myself, that's one advantage of being an introvert. You're comfortable enough by yourself so when you join a group e.g. for foraging mushrooms in the forest or whatever, not knowing anyone isn't a big deal. In general, introverts are at a major disadvantage in society at large which is very clearly more designed around extraversion. But we do have our little advantages as well.

I had a phantom galaxy notification for awhile that didnt go away no matter what I did. It didnt show up in regular gog. It did go away when I logged off completely from both and rebooted the pc. at least I think thats what did it. could have been a coinkadink. lol

Oh I don't have one either, every time my wife starts toying around with hers I pull out my ancient Nokia and say "THE BATTERY LASTS FOR A WEEK! A WEEEK!" Somehow I'm getting a feeling she's getting slightly irritated by now.

Pfff, the best thing about being antisocial is that you don't have to care about social connotations of words like antisocial :-P

I don't know. I'd say that, in the end, there are jobs and problems that introverts are better for (and, funnily enough, part of that seems to be a teamwork as a bunch of introverts tend to end up getting quite tight when they get to know each other), so you end up in a situation where you should use the right tool for the right job. And I'm a massive tool, lieutenant Asshole.

Those old Nokia phones are the best. Until recently I was still using my Nokia 8210 with black & white screen, the battery argument was very strong with that one. Now I have a slightly less ancient Nokia 2330 which has one of them modern color screens :O
The battery lasts much longer than a smartphone but decidedly less long than the old black & white Nokia. I would still use the old one but the battery needed to be replaced and I got the color screen phone for free (as a gift).

You do if you're in a job interview or a situation like that. Not sure how it is in your language but in German, the word antisocial is most often used as a synonym for bums, beggars, drug addicts, selfish people etc - in short, people whom society regards as undesirables so even if I don't see the word as a negative, the environment surely does. Therefor, I'd never describe myself as antisocial in an official setting. In everyday situations, I do use the word all the time and I regularly explain to people in RL what antisocial means and how it isn't a negative character trait. I'm patiently educating the uninitiated in favor of our caste of antisocials. I know how to sell it as something cool, and soon enough it's going to be the next thing that's "in", just wait and see! Of course, once it's socially acceptable we'll probably have to find another term to describe ourselves :)

Yes, there are many jobs that are better for introverts. I once worked as a nightwatchman and had to patrol a large industrial site by myself for 12 hours at night. A typical extrovert would have gone cuckoo within days.
On the other hand, typical extrovert jobs tend to tire me very much. I can do it but in the evening I'm toast and need to recharge way longer than natural extroverts.

In some ways, simple everyday stiff like shopping for groceries, making phone calls, going out etc are all things that are easier for extroverts because it doesn't cost them as much energy to be out in public.