The Weight of Knowing Everything

"The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it." - Henry David Thoreau

This is the thought experiment I’ve had rolling around in my head lately.

I’d like to spend a week in the 1980s.

I’m not talking about reliving my youth. There are plenty of things about modern life that I enjoy and wouldn’t want to give up. What I’m curious about is my brain. I’d like to know what it felt like to move through a day before I was connected to everything all the time. I’d like to know how I processed information before every quiet moment became occupied by a screen, a notification, a headline, a text message, or someone else’s opinion.

I used to read the newspaper in the morning and then I was done. Sports. Local news. National news. Editorials. I read the paper, drank my coffee, and went about my day. If something major happened, I’d catch the evening news. Otherwise, I wasn’t carrying the weight of the world around with me from morning until bedtime.

The same thing happened at work. When I started in outside sales in the early 1990s, my day belonged to me. I planned my route, called on customers, solved problems, and checked in with the office from a pay phone once or twice a day. That was it. The office trusted me to do my job, and I spent my time actually doing it.

When I left the house, I left the house. If someone wanted to get ahold of me, they had to work at it. They might call a friend’s house. They might call my office. They might leave a message on the answering machine and wait until I got home. Nobody expected immediate access because immediate access wasn’t possible. Being unreachable wasn’t unusual. It was normal.

Around that same time, Nextel showed up with its push-to-talk feature. Managers got excited. Companies talked about how much more efficient communication was going to become. I remember bitching about it almost immediately. I hated it because I knew exactly where it was headed. The moment someone can reach you instantly, they begin expecting to reach you instantly.

What started as a little chirp on a Nextel eventually became smartphones, email, text messages, Teams, Slack, social media, and a culture where availability is often mistaken for productivity. Looking back, that little chirp feels like one of the first signs that the world was speeding up. A customer meeting was no longer just a customer meeting. Your attention could be pulled away at any moment because someone else suddenly had access to you.

The irony is that I love a lot of what technology has given me. My partner lives in Chicago while I live in Milwaukee. We’ve been together for ten years. Technology helps make that relationship work. We text throughout the day. We video chat. We stay connected despite living in different cities.

I also love YouTube. I’ve learned more practical skills from YouTube than I can count. I’ve rebuilt sewing machines, repaired equipment, learned new processes, and solved problems that would have taken me weeks to figure out when I was younger.

Technology isn’t the villain in this story. What I wonder about is the trade. What did we give up in exchange for being connected all the time?

I think about baseball. When I went to a game, I went to a game. I wasn’t texting people about the game while I watched it. I wasn’t checking scores from around the league. I wasn’t posting pictures. I wasn’t scrolling through opinions about what I was seeing while I was seeing it. I was watching the game.

I remember keeping score. I remember conversations between innings. I remember getting completely lost in the rhythm of the game. For three hours, my attention belonged to one thing. That feels rare now.

Maybe that’s what I find myself missing. Not the decade itself, but the gaps that existed in daily life. The space between phone calls. The space between news cycles. The space between a question and an answer. The space between an event happening and everyone demanding an opinion about it. The space between leaving the house and becoming reachable again.

Those spaces used to exist. Now they’re mostly gone.

Maybe the greatest luxury of the 1980s wasn’t time.

It was the ability to be unavailable.

Unavailable because you were living your life. You were at work. You were at a baseball game. You were driving somewhere. You were having dinner. You were reading a book. You were sitting with your own thoughts.

Nobody expected immediate access because immediate access wasn’t possible.

If I could spend a week back in the 1980s, I don’t think I’d be studying the decade. I’d be studying my mind. I’d want to know if I was more patient. I’d want to know if I paid attention better. I’d want to know if I thought more deeply because I wasn’t constantly interrupted. I’d want to know what it felt like to sit with a thought for a while before the rest of the world rushed in.

I don’t want to go backward. I just wonder if somewhere between the pay phone and the smartphone, between the morning newspaper and the endless feed, between being reachable and being permanently available, we lost something important.

I’m not sure exactly what it was.

But I feel its absence every day.