Old person here.

before computers, how did you learn to do something?

Books! and People! And while they wouldn’t give you endless answers to every trivial thing you wanted to know, you could call the library to ask a question for them to look up for you.

was a constraint lifted

Maybe, but not really. I think people talked and shared more. If you were in the midwest, you’d never eaten Thai, Japanese, Ethiopian, or even Lebanese food, and it wasn’t available. The ingredients weren’t available, either, so you weren’t going to learn to cook it from scratch. Even if you had a cook book. By the 1990s, I had an Americanized Thai cook book with substitutions for some things. Now I can get everything from fish sauce to harrissa paste at local stores. That was more important than access to recipes. Also, there were strange recipes in the 70s – like Watergate Cake and Chex Mix (which you had to make at home and always had nuts), and all kinds of jello ‘salads’.

Was life more simple

Yes. I gather this was true prior to the 70s/80s I remember, but simplicity came from vetted curators. If you bought name brand things, they would work and last a long time. “No one was ever fired for buying IBM.” – because their stuff worked. Same for GE, Kodak, Pyrex, Whirlpool, and so on. Not anymore. I’m pretty sure everyone is working to make the cheapest possible version of everything now, so figuring out what version of a thing to get is much harder, and you can’t trust that online reviews aren’t paid advertising.

We believed experts, and called out liars. We knew people who’d had polio harm their families, so we got vaccines because they obviously worked better than ‘healthy living’. For things like music, you knew which critics had your tastes, and could trust their suggestions for what to hear were spot-on. They got a decent salary for their dedication and you supported that by buying their publications. Enjoy rock? Maybe Robert Christgau was your guy, or maybe Lester Bangs, but both would give you an entertaining read with solid recommendations. It was WAY better than algorithms.

Further: while there is much wrong with the studio system, the cost of getting a record pressed meant we were not flooded with the volume of bad, under produced junk that litters the music world today. There would be no “Sgt. Pepper’s” without a LOT of studio work. Also, there was a glorious heyday of FM radio before it got the same commercialization as AM where you DJs (especially the late night ones) would make interesting set lists that we all heard together over the airwaves.

All that said, moving to internet searches was easy, but the results feel fractured. We all read the same newspapers, and generally believed them, knowing each had some biases and we never had every detail. We might have different opinions, but we had the same facts. I remember reading a book on raising ducks and accidentally learned that their chromosomes are not X/Y, but Z/w (boys are ZZ and girls Zw). I did not expect to learn that. A search for ‘raising ducks’ generally doesn’t mention that, and a search for duck sex traits doesn’t bring up raising them. Knowledge ran deeper, if more slow.

To sum up: Yeah, the internet is nice, but I miss feeling like we all share the same world.