OUR EXTINCT WAY OF LIFE

If I had the power to bring one thing back from extinction, I definitely wouldn't choose a dinosaur.. As cool as it would be to see one walking around, I have a feeling I wouldn't survive the first five minutes..

I wouldn't bring back an old phone, a forgotten product, or even a particular animal.. I would bring back something much less obvious..

I would bring back the old way people used to make time for one another.... Just that simple way of living where people could knock on your door, sit down, talk for hours, share food, laugh about absolutely nothing, and leave without checking the time every five minutes..

Sometimes I feel like we didn't exactly lose this way of life... We simply became too busy for it...

Think about how strange modern life has become.. We have smartphones that allow us to speak to someone on the other side of the world in seconds, yet we sometimes struggle to call the person living ten minutes away.. We have video calls, instant messages, social media, voice notes and group chats.

We are more connected than any generation before us.. Yet somehow, people can still feel incredibly lonely.
That contradiction bothers me...

Before now, You didn't always need an appointment... You didn't need to send a calendar invitation... You didn't need to text, "Are you free?" three days before visiting... Sometimes you just appeared and if the person was home, you talked...
If they weren't, you came back another day...

Of course, not everything about the old way of life was perfect. There were plenty of problems.. People had their disagreements, family issues, gossip and unnecessary drama..

I'm not romanticising the past... I'm talking about something much simpler.. presence, Being physically present with people, Listening without looking at a screen, Eating without taking pictures first...

Having conversations that didn't end because somebody received a notification, Sitting outside in the evening while neighbours talked about everything and nothing, Children playing together until someone shouted their name from across the compound because it was getting dark, Family members visiting and staying longer than they originally planned because the conversation was too interesting to end...

Those moments may look ordinary but perhaps that is exactly what made them special.. We have become very good at documenting life and not always as good at living it...

Sometimes we attend an event and spend half the time trying to capture it for people who aren't there.

We go somewhere beautiful and immediately think about taking a picture.

We sit with friends and suddenly everybody is holding a phone.

We meet family members after a long time, but after a few minutes somebody is scrolling through their timeline and then we wonder why time seems to move so quickly..

Maybe the problem isn't always time.. Maybe it's attention... We are physically present in many places but mentally somewhere else.

That is the part of the old way of life I would bring back... The ability to simply be somewhere... No notifications, No pressure to respond immediately, No feeling that every minute must be productive, No obsession with documenting every experience.... Just people being Together and I think children especially deserve to experience that kind of life..

I'm not saying we should throw away technology and return to the past.

Technology has made life easier in countless ways.. It has connected families across countries, created opportunities, improved communication and given people access to information that previous generations could only dream about and while I love many of those things, I don't think progress should mean losing everything that made life meaningful before technology arrived... Maybe we can have both..

We can have smartphones and still visit people..

We can have social media and still have real conversations..

We can work remotely and still make time for family.. We can use technology without allowing it to consume every quiet moment of our lives..

So If I really had the power to bring something back, that's what I would choose... Not because the past was perfect but because I think we lost something valuable while rushing toward the future.

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