Things we’ve lost in the digital age

I know, I could make my life easier and just Google how to play gin rummy

I was listening to an American politician interviewed on a podcast last week and, of course, I was triggered, but not by what you expect. I don’t need to go into detail about what side of the American political drama this representative was on, because this isn’t going to be a post that delves into any of those issues. However, the podcast started talking about the new US tariffs and recent comments the current president of the United States made about the number of dolls a five, eight, or 11-year-old girl might own. (Note to self, on my next call to my parents, I need to ask why I never received 30 to 37 dolls on any national holiday or my birthday. I am now considering my upbringing to be deprived.)

Anyhoo, when asked about the predicted higher prices for toys in the US, this politician said she didn’t buy toys for her children and instead believed in “sticks and mud”.

😬 Good for you, sweetheart.

To his credit, the host responded that most parents experience buying toys, usually manufactured outside the US, for their children. (My son spent so much time at the Lego store in Bluewater that we got to know the staff.)

The answer, promoting the child-friendly activities to be had with “sticks and mud”, veered towards sneering at those who have frequented brightly lit retail establishments fronted by cartoon animals at various times in their lives. It was a rejection of the convenience of modernity. And we all know that rejection is only possible if you are privileged enough to do so.

It’s like those apocryphal stories about tech billionaires who made their fortunes developing addictive, algorithmically responsive applications, but raise their children in bucolic environments where carbohydrates, sugar, and electronic screens are subject to a 10-mile restraining order.

Think Marie Antoinette playing at being a milkmaid in a make-believe farm at the Palace of Versailles, while feudal structures still ruled how French agriculture operated at that time. (Look it up.)

I greatly appreciate being able to call a taxi on my phone and deliver flowers to my mother in the US with a click of my mouse, because I remember the world before. I’ve been a 20-something woman at 1:00 am in central London, searching for an ATM in the rain so I can—hopefully—flag down a cab to take me home (and this is before I inform that cab that I need to cross the bridge and go “south of the river”).

I went to university with a glorified electric typewriter. I’ve also attempted to file a copy from an overseas event without a laptop or Wi-Fi (I found an internet cafe on Broadway in New York on that occasion).

This yearning for “days gone by” when children played with “sticks and mud” smacks of a particular type of paternalistic conservatism. It presents itself as a desire for “simpler times,” but it is really a reaction to the loss of so-called traditional values, which didn’t benefit everyone equally.

I embrace modernity, in all its glorious contradictions, benefits, and struggles.

However… (you knew it was coming)

My mother wasn’t a great cook. This isn’t a dig. My mom wouldn’t describe herself as someone who felt at home in the kitchen. However, she often made banana bread. Way back in 1997, at my request, she sent me the recipe via a fax machine to my office in London. I make this bread so often that my son once asked for it to be his birthday cake. (It’s too much of an everyday cake for me, I ignored his request and made a chocolate one instead because I am a control freak.)

Every time I make it—at least once a month—I pull the fax paper down from the shelf. Dotted with sugar, butter, and flour, my mother’s handwriting spells out “two cups” here and “one teaspoon” there.

Fortunately, both my parents are still with us. However, I am painfully aware that I am now in an era when the time when they aren’t is getting closer. How will I feel about handing a decades-old piece of cheap folded paper featuring my mother's handwriting when that time comes? I cook and bake a lot more than my mother does. None of my recipes are written by my own hand. They are from cookbooks or printed out from a website.

Handwritten letters, printed photos, ancient faxes—all memory triggers lost to time and replaced by better, more convenient digital offerings.

A few weeks ago, I tried to remember how to play gin rummy, but I couldn’t.

My family has a beach house in the US. My aunt initially bought it in the early 1970s, and my brother later took it on when it became too much for her. I spent a large portion of my childhood at this beachfront property. For most of those years, it had a small, arial-only TV, which on good days might have been able to tune into two or three channels.

In the evenings, my mother, aunt, and I played gin rummy (or Scrabble or Monopoly). When my son was small and my aunt still owned the house, the TV had been updated to one that had a DVD player included. On a trip to the local Wal-Mart, we bought a copy of the Garfield movie, starring Bill Murray, from a bargain bin. We watched that terrible movie at least four times.

When my brother took over the house, he installed WiFi and cable TV. Trust me, if I had bought the house, I would have done the same thing. However, the first time we visited, with the house under new ownership, there were no late-night gin rummy games accompanied by tea and cookies, no shared trauma of watching a $2 DVD of a CGI cat, and a quick search for the old Scrabble game came up short.

Another memory, another time, frozen in context and lost to more convenient and modern entertainment options.

Better writers than I have written about the changes in travel. The teenagers and early 20-somethings who donned backpacks in the 1970s, 80s, and even 90s to travel the world in a budget trip of overnight rain journeys and hostels came home with an army of new friends and pen pals. Those experiences happen less frequently now, as most of us carry our friends and family, easily contactable, in little devices in our bags. The jury is still out on whether these devices mean society is more or less lonely than before.

I often see young people spending most of their time at various tourist spots or places of outstanding beauty, not enjoying their surroundings, but instead attempting the perfect selfie or influencer pose to prove to their followers or just their friends and family that they are having the time of their lives.

It makes me feel like a grumpy old person, sneering at youngsters embracing a modernity I don’t engage in.

Being able to call an Uber almost everywhere and at any time has benefited my life. However, had these digital offerings been available in 1995, I never would have experienced an empty New York City bus picking me up from one side of Central Park at 3:00 am to drop me off directly in front of my apartment building because it was the driver’s “birthday” and didn’t think a young girl should wait that long for taxi to appear.

Maybe it’s my age, but I can’t stop thinking about the things we’ve lost in the digital age and the activities that won’t really be experienced again.

Anyway, I’m off to ask a GenAI bot the rules of gin rummy and see if I can laminate that baked-stained fax in order to keep my mother’s handwriting for another 30 years.

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I often find myself singing this whenever I feel like I have a moment I need to remember.

These are the lyrics running through my head:

Don't you write it down

Remember this in your head

Don't take a picture

Remember this in your heart

Don't leave a message

Talk to me face to face