It’s not that checking your phone in line at the grocery store is a sin.
It’s that… something happened.
The line moved.
A child laughed.
And you weren’t there.
There is an ache under it all.
A sort of psychic motion sickness.
A nausea of spirit.
Before digital life wrapped itself around our attention, we lived with gaps.
Waiting rooms. Commutes. Toilets.
Those spaces were ours.
Places where, by accident, we found ourselves daydreaming.
Thinking slow.
Digesting life.
I’m nostalgic. I admit it.
I’m also a crank.
I want professional football to be gritty.
I want people to dress with a little class.
I miss renting videos.
I miss when “doing your business” meant thumbing through a muscle mag or Rolling Stone — or just sitting with your thoughts.
I probably over-romanticize the past.
Sue me.
But—
Even when I try to explain this persistent ache as nostalgia, it won’t wash off.
And that’s because something is different now.
Smartphones didn’t just change how we live.
They changed what we are.
And the reason it haunts me—the reason I ache—is because I remember something older.
Something truer.
A former shape of being that we once lived inside.
We’ve gone out of range of our spiritual anchors.
We used to be our bodies.
We used to live in our place.
We lived lives unseen.
Now, we’re always slightly outside of our own experience.
Perhaps the greatest casualty of the digital age is the private imagination.
We outsourced our inner lives.
Time lost its texture.
In an analog world, you were where your body was.
You were in the room.
Presence, once whole, is now ambient—a vague hum of partial awareness.
Without tactile, embodied experiences, you lose your coordinates.
You become a placeholder for a self scattered across a digital surface.
So what?
Hell if I know.
The digital lifestyle is here to stay. I know.
But—
Maybe we don’t need to resist.
We need to remember.
To reconsecrate our own realities.
Reclaim our own imagination.
Remember what it means to be human—in time, in space, in soul.
And to protect it.
Return to the slow drip of time that once gave life its shape.
Inhabit moments.
Let them breathe.
With gaps. With boredom. With daydreaming.
Maybe a magazine. Or silence.