Have you ever caught yourself mid-scroll and had no idea how long you had been there? Forty-seven videos deep into a feed that somehow went from global catastrophe to “watch this cow reunite with his favorite farmer.”
Not lost in a good book. Not deep in a conversation. Just… gone. Thumb moving, eyes glazed over, disappeared for forty minutes into a feed that won’t even remember you were ever there. And when you snap out of it, there’s this kind of dread that comes with it. Not guilt, exactly. Something that feels similar to grief. Like you missed something. Like you were somewhere else while your actual life kept happening without you. And you missed out.
Maybe that’s why everyone wants a slower life. Not because we’ve become lazy or nostalgic, but because we’re exhausted from being everywhere except the place we’re actually standing.
We didn’t sign up for this. Well, not really. Not on purpose anyway. We just sort of arrived here. Nobody sat us down when they said the dial-up tone would be no more and said, here’s the deal. You will rent your music, your shows, your software, your car features, all for a monthly subscription. You will own none of it. You will carry a device that rules your days before you’ve decided what kind of day you wanted it to be. You will say something out loud, to another human being, in your own kitchen and then be served an ad for it an hour later on whatever device you have fallen down another mind-numbing scroll with. You will mistake convenience for freedom. Connection for community. Information for wisdom. And eventually, distraction for living.
You’ll wake up feeling strangely homesick for a version of life you didn’t realize you were leaving behind while it was all happening. It was just one update at a time. One “this is how everyone is communicating now” at a time. And somewhere along the way, keeping up with the pace of apps, algorithms, the expectation that you’re always reachable, postable, available stopped being a choice and started being the water we swim in.
And when something becomes the water? You stop noticing it’s wet. You just notice that you’re tired. That you can’t finish a book anymore. That you pick up your phone in line at the grocery store. And not because you want to, but because your hand does it before your brain gets a vote. It’s almost become… natural. Which is funny, because if you’d shown this to someone in 1994, they’d have assumed the robots had already won.
Maybe that’s the part nobody warned us about. Not that technology would change how we live – we knew that. We watched it happen in real time. First the internet came into our homes. Then it came into our pockets. Then it came into every quiet moment we used to spend looking out the window. But what we didn’t realize is that it would change how present we’re capable of being inside our own lives. Dinner became a photograph before it became a meal. A sunset became content before it had the chance to take our breath away. Somewhere we started experiencing things secondhand instead of just relishing in the act of living.
That’s the pain, I think. Not a big dramatic collapse. Just a low hum underneath everything. The sense that you’re constantly just a few steps outside your own life, watching through the glass.
And it isn’t just the technology. It’s everything we quietly agreed to call normal without ever actually being asked if we agreed. That busyness is a badge of honor. That every spare moment should be optimized. Heaven forbid we wait in line at Target with nothing but our own thoughts for ninety seconds. That every hobby should eventually make money. That every text deserves an immediate reply. That bigger houses, newer things, faster everything, and permanently feeling behind is simply what being a successful adult looks like now.
No one ever handed us a rulebook. We just woke up one day living by one. We accepted these ideas so gradually they stopped feeling like opinions and started feeling like facts. Except they aren’t facts. They’re just the story we’ve been telling ourselves for a very long time.
So maybe it isn’t strange at all that people are reaching backward. Cooking a real dinner instead of ordering one. Eating it at the table, together, phones somewhere else in the house. Reading an actual physical book because it has never once tried to sell you something between chapters. Buying an older home instead of a new one, because it already knows what it is. It doesn’t need you to prove anything to it. Wearing the same five outfits without apologizing. Growing a tomato plant for no reason other than the knowing that some things are supposed to take time. Leaving a job that paid well and quietly cost every hour you had left over. Shopping at that one store where the cashier remembers your name so you can feel like humanity still exists somewhere out there.
None of that is going backward. But I don’t think it’s nostalgia either. Nostalgia is longing for a version of the past that may never have fully existed. This feels… different.
This is people remembering, on purpose, what it feels like to actually be somewhere. To taste a meal instead of photographing it first. To finish a thought without a notification interrupting the middle of it. To sit around a dinner table with the people you love and have nowhere else you need to be other than right there.
Slow isn’t the opposite of ambitious. It’s the opposite of distracted.
I don’t think people miss the nineties. I think they miss what it felt like to be fully present inside their own lives. And I think that’s what we are all craving. Coming back to our own lives. The actual, textured, messy layered, slightly inconvenient ones. The ones that aren’t optimized or curated or measured by how efficiently we move through them. The ones where a walk is just a walk. Dinner is just dinner. A Saturday afternoon doesn’t have to become content or a side hustle or another way to get ahead.
And oddly enough? That feels almost rebellious now.
Choosing the book over scrolling because a paperback has never once tried to serve you an ad. Taking the long way home over the faster route. Sitting on the porch after dinner instead of turning on the next episode. Letting yourself be bored long enough for an actual thought to show up.
Maybe you feel it too. That ache. The one you can’t quite name on your worst scrolling days. I don’t think it’s random.
Maybe it’s your own life, quietly asking you to come back to it.
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