Google launched in September 1998. That means older millennials (like me) spent the first decade or more of their lives in a world where questions could simply not be answered on demand. You asked, and sometimes you got an answer, and sometimes you didn’t, and you had to make peace with not knowing.
This sounds like a deprivation. I don’t think it was.
We grew up having to just… not know things. Someone would make a claim at lunch and you’d argue about it for the rest of the day with zero resolution. You’d go home still not knowing. Maybe bring it up again tomorrow. Maybe forget about it entirely. The question would just live in a state of suspension, unresolved, until someone happened to mention it to someone who happened to know, or until you stumbled across the answer in a book, a magazine, or a TV show.
The confidence required to be wrong for 48 hours straight while fully committed to your position builds a certain kind of character. We don’t talk about this enough! So I’m sharing my thoughts on growing up without Google, and what we gained (and lost).
Before Google, information had friction. Getting an answer required effort that was proportional to the obscurity of the question. Common knowledge was accessible — you could ask a parent, a teacher, or an encyclopedia. More specific questions required more work. You might have to go to the library. You might have to call someone who knows. You might have to wait until the right book shows up at a garage sale.
This friction wasn’t just an inconvenience. It was, accidentally, a sorting mechanism. Questions that mattered enough to pursue through difficulty got pursued. Questions that didn’t matter quite enough got dropped. The effort required to answer a question was part of how you figured out whether the question was worth answering.
Today, every question, no matter how trivial, gets the same answer speed. The interesting and the important and the utterly inconsequential all receive an instantaneous response. This is extraordinary, and it has also subtly eroded something about the relationship between effort and value.
GROWING UP WITHOUT GOOGLE
What We Had Instead
The Encyclopedia
If you grew up in a house with an encyclopedia set — the World Book, the Britannica, the Encyclopaedia Americana — you know the specific experience of looking something up and finding three related things you didn’t intend to look up. You went in for volcanoes and came out knowing about the Ring of Fire and plate tectonics, and Indonesia. The physical structure of the encyclopedia, the way one article was adjacent to another, created serendipitous learning that an algorithm cannot replicate.
The search algorithm gives you exactly what you asked for. The encyclopedia gave you that and something adjacent to it and something else entirely, and all of it was interesting. The distinction matters more than it seems.
The Library
Millennials are, arguably, the last generation for whom the public library was a primary research resource. Not a backup or a quaint option, but the actual first-choice destination for information on subjects that mattered. This meant knowing how a library worked. Understanding the Dewey Decimal System not as an abstract curiosity but as a practical navigation tool. Learning to use reference materials, cross-reference, understand the date of a source, and why it mattered.
These are information literacy skills that are now taught specifically because they’re no longer acquired organically. The library, as a mandatory part of how you found things out, produced a generation of people who understood the structure of knowledge and the difference between a primary and secondary source long before anyone used those terms in a classroom.
GROWING UP WITHOUT GOOGLE
The Arguments That Never Resolved
Here is a phenomenon that has completely ceased to exist and that I miss in a strange, specific way: the unresolved argument. You and your friends disagree about something: a sports statistic, a song lyric, a historical date, or which actor was in that movie. In 2026, this argument lasts approximately 8 seconds before someone pulls out a phone. Resolved. Over. Next topic. In 1994, this argument might last three days until you could source the answer.
Now I’m not arguing that unresolved arguments are better than resolved ones. I’m saying there was something in this experience and the collective uncertainty that has been completely eliminated by the speed of the answer.
GROWING UP WITHOUT GOOGLE
What We Gained
This is not a ‘things were better before’ argument. Things were not categorically better before Google. The democratization of information is one of the genuinely transformative things that has happened in human history. The ability to verify claims, access primary sources, translate languages, understand medical conditions, learn anything, anywhere, from anyone who has chosen to share their knowledge — this is not a small thing. This is extraordinary.
What we gained is access. What we lost is the specific experience of not having access and building a self that could function without it. The patience for uncertainty. The tolerance for not knowing. The confidence to hold a position even while acknowledging you might be wrong.
These are not skills that are automatically built in a world where every question has an immediate answer. They have to be sought out. The retreat from constant information. The intentional disconnection. The chosen experience of not knowing and not immediately reaching for the phone.
Those of us who grew up before Google had this experience by default. For everyone who came after, it has to be built intentionally. It’s worth building. The confidence required to be wrong for 48 hours while fully committed to your position, well, that turns out to be useful for the rest of your life.
