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Kids, let me tell you. During the 2000 election I was working my first "real" job at the Financial Times. Back then many newspapers didn't put their content online, not even behind a paywall, and it was my job to write newsletters that condensed the content of US newspapers.
We had a nice lady in DC who would buy physical copies of the papers, cut them up, and fax them to us in London, then we would read and summarize those stories for our daily digest and send them out to FT subscribers.
It was in many ways a great job, because we got to take both UK holidays (no newsletter) and US holidays (no newspapers), and we were finished and in the pub most days around 3pm.
We covered the entire 2000 US election this way. We weren't saturated with access the way we are today. Our phones couldn't tell us the news. We didn't have fast internet at home. We were often learning things as the news arrived page-by-page every day by fax.
This was how I experienced the 35 days of the Florida recount. Coming into the office early every morning, waiting for the fax to whir to life, and digesting the latest coverage and analysis one page at a time. For over a month.
(We had televisions. I'm not saying we didn't have live news. But it was very easy to not turn on a television back then, not pick up a paper, and come into work not knowing anything, especially when you knew you'd be reading newspapers all day.)
THAT was a long election. And there was no way to doomscroll. The internet ran out pretty quickly. You couldn't immerse yourself, unless you had 24-hour news, which cycled every 15 minutes. You also couldn't distract yourself. You just lived in a state of gnawing uncertainty.
This was also how I experienced 9/11, by the way. Reading every singe article the US press published every day for months, drip-fed into my brain. Harrowing, traumatic stories. We got very used to crying at our desks.
I'm honestly not sure if we're better off now, psychologically speaking, but I'm certainly glad I'm not experiencing this election at the pace that I experienced 2000. These five days have only felt like a year, and those 35 days felt like a century.
Addendum: This is the NYTimes homepage 20 years ago, and this was one of the better newspaper websites. Nowadays they paywall everything. Back then they just didn't put most of their content online.
