I’ve been having conservations about the past with the people in my circle. It’s timing, mostly. These conversations are more likely when people die, and when people hit midlife – much as you plan to be the exception – and I have both boxes of those boxes ticked.

Do you remember? Do you remember when we went camping? When mom made that dress for me? When you crashed your bike and got stitches? When you moved away, had your kids? Do you remember the old car, the old house, the old set of measuring cups, that creepy forest behind the house?

Do you remember the old ways of doing things? Do you remember the folk cures, and grandpa’s way of ironing, and grandma’s trick for slugs? The old ways are better, of course, for all that we love our computers, cell phones, and indoor plumbing, for all that we like not dying in childbirth, or from measles, or unpasteurized milk. The future is the undiscovered country, an unknown and scary thing, but the past is a known quantity, set in stone as it was forever and always, or at least, as it was according to our memories.

And, as we all know, the human memory is a wondrously accurate thing. In that we remember very little with any degree of clarity.

Not only is the past misremembered and out-of-focus, we give it rose-coloured glasses. We forget about the hard, the struggle, and the challenge. We forget about suffering and despair and the impatient wait for the future when things will improve and be better. We forget how exciting and wonderful new was. We look back at the past’s highlight reel, and compare the high points to the gritty grind of the day-to-day, and decided that our problems are a result of living in the now. We forget that change is always hard, that it often sucks when we’re in it.

New becomes the enemy. Better is a bad idea, and change becomes something considered mostly unnecessary. Change becomes superfluous. Why fix what isn’t broken, as they repair is the only reason to evolve and innovate.

This tendency to cling to the past and embrace it as perfection is especially true in these days of technological explosion. It’s not just change, it’s new at a frantic pace. We can now know everything, watch everything, and connect constantly. But this new reality can be hard for our monkey-lizard brains to accept, especially when it comes to uncertainty, validation, and community.

It’s tempting to believe that a system restore to a previous point in time might answer complaints about our changed world. But, you can’t unring a bell, and even if you could jump back, you’d still have to start walking forward again. Clinging to the past without leaving space for the future is a mistake. We don’t want to live small lives because we’re afraid.

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I remember what life was like before everyone had a computer. I remember when there was no internet for the rank and file, no online, and no internet of things. I remember no cell phones. I remember card catalogues. I came of age in the nineteen-eighties and nineties; I came of age as technology exploded – I had a foot in each camp.

It was amazing to live through. It was an experience to observe and participate in the shift from analogue to digital. The changes came fast and furious, and I enjoyed being an early adopter. My family was on board. we wanted the computers, the cell phones, and the World Wide Web. I was ready for the Star Trek age to begin.

I’m still waiting. There is apparently a difference between the twenty-first and twenty-fourth century. Life is very different in the internet age from the life my parents and grandparents experience, and yet, it’s also not different at all. We are still human animals with human animal needs at the end of the day. A phone with a terabyte of data in your pocket is an amazing thing, but you still need to eat, you still need an umbrella in the rain.

Believing that things were better when you came of age isn’t a function of the internet age, it’s a function of the human condition. Writers and philosophers have been complaining about the next generations and “kids today” since they started writing things down. Looking down at the generations that come after our own is species universal, it seems. Perhaps there’s a gene.

Children today are awful, and the state of the world leaves much to be desired. It was better when we did things the way we used to. Families were happier, relationships were better, the sky was bluer, and water made things more wet. From Socrates to social media influencers, the details vary, but the laments remain the same. Change is here, and we don’t like it. Except when we do. Nothing tickles my funny bone more than reading a complaint about changing times and the evils of technology posted on social media via a cell phone.

Much of our behaviours and qualities are as they ever were. Life is life, and people are people. We change more slowly than we like to think. It’s the tools we use that shift the most. Life before the internet was different, but no so different as complainers like to suggest. And different is neither good nor bad, it’s just change.

I think life might have rolled more slowly once upon time. We seem to move at a quicker pace, be it movies, music, or relationships though. I perhaps miss life at a stroll. Perhaps I miss the idea of life at stroll never having lived it. But mostly, I’m happy to ring in the changes.

I like having the world’s knowledge at my fingertips. I like being able to shop online. I like cars that warn me when other drivers are too close. I like modern conveniences. I like chemotherapy and antidepressants. I like helmets. What I miss from my life before the internet, when I pause to think about it, is my youth. Youth truly is wasted on the young.

I didn’t appreciate my collagen nearly enough either.

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