Title. It's pretty common on this forum and other incel spaces to bemoan how absolutely clueless boomers, Gen Xers, and even millenials, at least the older ones, are about how much online dating and internet in general had transformed dating and society, and looking at a bunch of data, this realization just struck me. They don't know not because they are purposefully trying not to see it or because they already "got theirs" and so ignore the younger generations' voices, but they genuinely just haven't had much contact with the internet so far.
According to official Eurostat data, as late as 2017, only 70% of EU's population used the internet daily:
ec.europa.eu
That figure was already clearly boosted by so many young people using it, so, when you substract the young people, it probably falls into the 55-60% range for all the remaining age groups, and since the upper boundary for "young people" was 29, that would include people in their 30s
. Just based off of this graph, there's no way even half of people in the EU who were 40+-years-old in 2017 have been using the internet daily.
For the US, I found this graph, which is about just using the internet in general, but it's still only about 15 percentage points higher than the EU, and it's probably much closer to 10 percentage points or so if we talk about using it daily:
www.oberlo.com
That then would fit with this worldwide graph from OurWorldInData, showing the percentage of people who used the internet at least once in the last three months, which seems to correlate pretty heavily with using it daily.
ourworldindata.org
Yes. As crazy as it can seem to us, given that the vast majority of the people on this forum belong to the generations that pretty much grew up on the internet, as late as 2017, not even 10 years ago, there seems to have been no place in the world, with the possible exception of North America, where most people older than 40 used the internet not just daily, but at all, or at least in any other way then very sporadically.
Now, we all know that 2017 is the year when this forum was created, but this goes deeper than that. Think of how recent that year still is for most people. Here's a bunch of movies that came out that year, for comparison:
Some of those, if you asked me, I'd probably say were 2020s releases, because they just seem so recent to me. That's how recent the internet is to a lot of older people, not just in the developing countries, but in the developed ones as well, being something they's so far only really dealt with for a fifth of their lives, if not less. Of course so many people on the internet act like the world hadn't changed a bit since the 90s and you are the weird one out for being on the internet, and you can just go socialize like they did the moment you go offline. The notion of the world working in any other way is as recent to them as those movies above.
According to official Eurostat data, as late as 2017, only 70% of EU's population used the internet daily:
97% of young people in the EU use the internet daily - News articles - Eurostat
EDN-20250715-1
That figure was already clearly boosted by so many young people using it, so, when you substract the young people, it probably falls into the 55-60% range for all the remaining age groups, and since the upper boundary for "young people" was 29, that would include people in their 30s
. Just based off of this graph, there's no way even half of people in the EU who were 40+-years-old in 2017 have been using the internet daily.For the US, I found this graph, which is about just using the internet in general, but it's still only about 15 percentage points higher than the EU, and it's probably much closer to 10 percentage points or so if we talk about using it daily:
How Many People Use the Internet in the United States?
How many people use the internet in the United States? Data shows that in 2024, there are 331 million internet users in the US, a 2 million increase from 2023.
www.oberlo.com
That then would fit with this worldwide graph from OurWorldInData, showing the percentage of people who used the internet at least once in the last three months, which seems to correlate pretty heavily with using it daily
.6 in 10 people in the world regularly use the Internet
The Internet is one of the world’s fastest-growing technologies.
ourworldindata.org
Yes. As crazy as it can seem to us, given that the vast majority of the people on this forum belong to the generations that pretty much grew up on the internet, as late as 2017, not even 10 years ago, there seems to have been no place in the world, with the possible exception of North America, where most people older than 40 used the internet not just daily, but at all, or at least in any other way then very sporadically
.Now, we all know that 2017 is the year when this forum was created, but this goes deeper than that. Think of how recent that year still is for most people. Here's a bunch of movies that came out that year, for comparison:
Some of those, if you asked me, I'd probably say were 2020s releases, because they just seem so recent to me. That's how recent the internet is to a lot of older people, not just in the developing countries, but in the developed ones as well, being something they's so far only really dealt with for a fifth of their lives, if not less. Of course so many people on the internet act like the world hadn't changed a bit since the 90s and you are the weird one out for being on the internet, and you can just go socialize like they did the moment you go offline. The notion of the world working in any other way is as recent to them as those movies above
.
