The World in My Pocket, the World I Miss

I remember the world before the internet. Long summer days stretched forever while I climbed hills, surfed sand dunes, and wandered the golf links. My friends and I camped beside twinkling streams, drank cider in pine forests, and slept in bivouacs under the open sky. We laughed. We played. We got chased by the police. We were happy.

Now the world has shrunk into the palm of a hand - compressed into a glowing rectangle that demands constant attention. Endless horizons have been replaced by infinite scrolls. Twinkling streams arrive filtered through pixels; pine forests survive as backdrops for curated feeds. We no longer get lost in the woods. We are tracked by GPS. We no longer risk the thrill of being chased. We play it safe behind glass, trading pine needles and cheap cider for the hollow dopamine of a notification. We are connected to everyone, yet more solitary than ever, trading the messy, reckless joy of a life lived out loud for a silent digital tether that never quite lets go.

Am I being too doom-and-gloom? Just another jaded middle-aged man who, like his father before him, grits his teeth and rails against progress for its own sake. This week I picture myself unshaven, a little manic, head poking through a sandwich board that reads: The End Is Nigh.

For the past decade I’ve spent hours each day immersed in podcasts - my unofficial academy. They’ve taught me everything from literary history to the mechanics of investing. I’m genuinely grateful to the people who share that knowledge so freely.

And yet there is an irony in this digital enlightenment. My mind has never been more crowded with facts, but my world has never felt quieter. I carry the history of the world in my pocket, yet I miss the instinctive wisdom of those long, aimless summers. In the forests of my youth, we didn’t need guides to mindfulness or lectures on presence. We were simply present.

Now I walk different hills with a voice in my ear explaining how the world works, while the world itself waits patiently for me to look up. I may be better informed, but I sometimes wonder if I’ve traded the raw, unscripted joy of living for the comfort of understanding.

Reading followed a similar path. From my late twenties into my thirties, I devoured classic fiction: Joyce, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Burgess. I rarely left the house without a paperback. In every in-between moment, queues, journeys, waiting rooms, I turned yellowing pages and lingered in the prose. These days, finding time to read feels like searching for hay in a stack of needles. Paperback readers have become rare, slightly eccentric figures. Tucked into carriage corners or shaded beneath beach umbrellas while the rest of us drift past, eyes fixed on our phones, barely noticing the world we occupy.

What is that world? It is the place where most adults once spent their free time. A world of concentration, linear thought, meaning over information, language over noise. Now the knowledge of the ages sits a swipe away. We can replay any match, revisit any concert, access anything, anytime. This abundance banishes boredom and promises everything.

Or does it?

What might we gain by setting down the phone and picking up a Penguin Classic?

Perhaps the gain is simpler than wisdom or self-improvement; perhaps it is just the return of attention. A paperback from Penguin Classics does not buzz, vibrate, or summon you back. It waits, quietly indifferent, asking only that you stay. And if you do, something subtle happens. The mind stops skimming and begins to settle. Time regains a little depth. The silence that once felt empty begins to feel inhabited. You are no longer managing information but keeping company with a thought - your own as much as the author’s. It is a modest exchange, almost old-fashioned: a few hours of your life for the chance to feel fully inside it again.

And perhaps that is what has quietly gone missing. Not knowledge, not access, but the ability to remain. To stay with a moment long enough for it to matter. To be bored without anxiety. To let a thought arrive without summoning another to crowd it out. A book does not improve you in the way a system promises to; it simply restores proportion. It reminds you that experience unfolds at human speed.

I suspect we do not really want less technology. We want fewer demands masquerading as necessities. We want to choose our attention rather than have it harvested. The old world I remember was not better in any grand sense. It was just less hectic inside the mind. There was more room for silence, for risk, for the unmeasured hours that seemed, at the time, to stretch forever.

So perhaps the question is not whether progress has cost us something, but whether we have the courage to set small boundaries against it. To leave the phone behind on a walk. To read ten pages without interruption. To look up when the world is quietly offering itself.

Nothing dramatic. No manifesto. Just the faint, stubborn decision to be somewhere fully - even if only for an afternoon. And to discover, again, that life does not need to be mediated to be meaningful. It only needs to be noticed.