A Normal Person From 20 Years Ago Looks Like A Monk Today. Remembering life before the digital age. And perhaps in 20 years this scatter brained state will look idyllic. We've spent a

A Normal Person From 20 Years Ago Looks Like A Monk Today. Remembering life before the digital age. And perhaps in 20 years this scatter-brained state will look idyllic. We've spent a decade glued to glowing rectangles, meticulously documenting our breakfast, broadcasting our deepest thoughts (usually in 280 characters or less), and panicking if our phone battery dips below 50%. Our attention spans have dwindled to the size of a gnat's ambition, and we can barely remember what we had for lunch, let alone the last time we weren't subtly checking for notifications during a conversation.

Back then, "streaming" involved water, "cloud" was something fluffy in the sky, and "liking" something meant actually, you know, liking it, usually by nodding or maybe offering a genuine compliment, not clicking a little heart icon. People remembered phone numbers! They read maps made of paper! They had conversations that lasted longer than a TikTok video! It was a time of glorious, unplugged inefficiency that now feels like a lost, serene civilization.

Imagine trying to explain to someone from 2005 that in the future, we'd all carry supercomputers in our pockets, capable of accessing all human knowledge, yet we'd primarily use them to watch videos of cats falling off furniture and argue with strangers about pineapple on pizza. They'd think we'd gone mad, or perhaps joined a very strange, cult-like book club.

And yet, here we are. We've developed a collective twitch, an involuntary reach for our pockets every 30 seconds. We measure our social standing in "followers" and our self-worth in "likes." We can order groceries, find a soulmate, and learn how to build a nuclear reactor, all from the comfort of our toilets. It's a dizzying, overwhelming, always-on existence.

But give it another 20 years. When our great-grandchildren are surgically implanted with neuro-chips that beam data directly into their brains, making even looking at a screen seem quaint and archaic, they'll probably look back at us with misty-eyed nostalgia.

"Grandpa," they'll say, their holographic avatars blinking thoughtfully, "is it true you actually had to type words into a little box to talk to people? And you carried a separate device just for phone calls? How delightfully primitive! You must have had so much free time! And look, you actually slept for eight hours straight! Oh, to live in such a blissfully scatter-brained, offline, technologically disadvantaged, yet somehow still utterly distracted and constantly anxious time!"

And we'll just sigh, remembering the distant, idyllic past when our biggest digital concern was whether our dial-up connection would drop before we finished downloading that one grainy JPEG. Those were the days, my friend. Those were the days.