What’s something you miss from the old days?

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What exactly are the “old days?”

I suppose that depends on whom you’re asking. For me, the old days would be the 1970s and maybe the 1980s. For some of my students, the old days might be 2021. At my age, I’ve reached the point where I can talk about something that happened 40 years ago and realize that it still feels like it happened last week. That’s a little unsettling.

There are plenty of things I miss about growing up in the 1970s. The music was fantastic. Television was something the entire family could enjoy together, and Saturday morning cartoons were practically a religious observance. Movies were an event, and playing baseball with your friends didn’t require scheduling, registration fees or a parent standing on the sidelines with a folding chair. You just found enough kids, somebody brought a ball and bat, and you played until it was time to go home.

Of course, that’s nostalgia talking. The 1970s weren’t perfect, and neither were the 1980s. There were plenty of problems in the world, and some of them were considerably worse than the problems we’re facing today. I don’t want to pretend we were living in some kind of golden age when everybody was happy, everybody got along and nobody ever did anything wrong. That’s not the world I grew up in.

But there are some things I genuinely miss, and they go considerably deeper than the music, movies and television shows.

I miss basic civility. I miss the expectation that people could disagree without despising one another. I miss intellectual curiosity, when not knowing something was a reason to learn about it rather than an excuse to dismiss it. I miss a sense that there were some basic moral standards we could agree upon, even when we disagreed about everything else. And I miss knowing the people around me.

I miss talking to people.

Not texting them. Not emailing them. Not commenting on their Facebook posts. Actually talking to them, hearing their voices and having conversations that weren’t interrupted every few seconds by a notification announcing that somebody somewhere had something terribly important to say.

Don’t misunderstand me. I love technology. I’ve been fascinated by computers and electronics for most of my life, and I appreciate what they make possible. I’m sitting here writing this on a computer, and technology allows me to share my thoughts with people around the world. That’s an extraordinary development, and I wouldn’t want to give it up.

But somewhere along the way, technology that was supposed to connect us started isolating us instead.

We have the ability to communicate with more people than any generation in human history. We can talk to someone on the other side of the planet as easily as we can talk to someone across the street. But I sometimes wonder whether we actually know fewer people today than our parents and grandparents did.

We know what thousands of people are doing because they post pictures of their meals, their vacations and their pets. But do we know the names of the people living two houses down? Do we know when our neighbors are struggling or when they have something worth celebrating? Do we know them well enough to knock on their doors just to say hello?

I had an experience several years ago that brought this home to me in a rather ridiculous way.

I was playing a game on Facebook called Mafia Wars. If you never played it, the idea was to build a criminal empire by recruiting people into your organization and engaging in various criminal activities. You could virtually kill people, sell drugs and do all sorts of other things that would land you in prison if you tried them in the real world.

And I was getting pretty good at it.

Part of the game involved recruiting other players, which meant sending and accepting Facebook friend requests. I started receiving requests by the dozens, sometimes seemingly by the hundreds, and I accepted them. After all, the bigger my criminal organization became, the more successful I could be.

At one point, I looked at my Facebook account and realized I had more than 10,000 friends.

Ten thousand!

I started looking through the names and realized I didn’t know at least 90 percent of these people. Many of them were from the Middle East, a part of the world I’ve never even visited. I knew virtually nothing about them, and they knew virtually nothing about me. Yet Facebook insisted we were friends.

I began wondering why I was calling these people my friends when I wouldn’t recognize them if I passed them on the street. I also started thinking about the game itself. Here I was, spending my time becoming increasingly proficient at virtual murder, drug dealing and organized crime. Those weren’t exactly skills I wanted to list among my accomplishments.

So I quit playing Mafia Wars and went through my Facebook account deleting thousands of people I didn’t know.

I’m sure the international criminal underworld was devastated by my retirement.

But the experience made me think about what we’ve done to the meaning of friendship. We’ve turned it into a number on a screen. A person we’ve never met can become a friend with the click of a button, while someone we’ve known for years can become a stranger because we never take the time to talk anymore.

And that brings me to something else I miss about the old days: reality.

I’m not talking about some romanticized version of the past. I’m talking about the experience of living in the actual world, surrounded by actual people, doing actual things. We played games with people sitting across the table from us. We played baseball with kids from the neighborhood. We went places, explored things, made mistakes and learned from them. We used our imaginations, but we didn’t have to disappear into an electronically manufactured universe to do it.

Today, we can spend hours in virtual worlds, building virtual fortunes, fighting virtual enemies and accumulating virtual accomplishments. Meanwhile, the real world is still out there, waiting for us to participate in it.

I see some of the consequences in my classroom. I have students who can navigate complicated digital environments but struggle with basic skills that were once considered ordinary knowledge. I’ve encountered students who can’t identify their own addresses on a map. And when we discuss things that happened in history or encounter references to the world outside their immediate experiences, I’m sometimes amazed by how unfamiliar that world seems to them.

That’s not entirely their fault. They’re growing up in a society that increasingly makes it possible to function without knowing things people once had to learn. Why remember directions when a phone can tell you where to turn? Why learn something when a search engine can provide an answer in seconds? Why go outside and find something to do when an entire universe of entertainment is waiting on a screen?

The problem is that having access to information isn’t the same thing as possessing knowledge, and experiencing a simulation isn’t the same thing as experiencing life.

I don’t want to suggest that every child today is trapped in a digital world or that every child growing up in the 1970s spent every waking moment outdoors doing something productive. We had our share of wasted afternoons, and we certainly weren’t all budding intellectuals. But I do think there was a simplicity to our lives that we’ve lost, and I’m not convinced all the technological advances in the world have made up for it.

That’s one reason I’m so encouraged by the way my daughter Lizzi and her husband Talon are raising my grandchildren, Aurelia and Sully. They’re making a conscious effort to build some of that simplicity into their children’s lives. They’re giving them opportunities to experience the real world, to play, to explore and to enjoy being children without allowing technology to dominate everything they do.

I admire that, especially because I know it can’t be easy in the 21st century. The pressure to keep up with technology is enormous, and it’s only going to increase as the children get older. But I believe Aurelia and Sully will be better off because their parents are making those choices now.

And I hope I can contribute a little to that as their grandfather.

I don’t need my grandchildren to grow up in the 1970s. That would be impossible, and frankly, there are plenty of things about today’s world that I wouldn’t want them to miss. I want them to enjoy the benefits of technology, the opportunities to learn and the possibilities that my generation could scarcely have imagined.

But I also want them to know the joy of spending an afternoon playing a game with someone they love. I want them to experience the satisfaction of learning something simply because they’re curious. I want them to understand that people are more than profiles, friendship is more than a number, and the world is much bigger than whatever happens to be appearing on a screen.

Most of all, I want them to know the people around them and to understand the value of being known in return.

So what do I miss about the old days? Sure, I miss the music, the movies, Saturday morning cartoons and the neighborhood baseball games. I miss a world that sometimes seemed a little less complicated and a lot more personal.

But I don’t really need to go back to 1975 to enjoy those things that mattered most. We can still be civil. We can still be curious. We can still get to know our neighbors, pick up a telephone instead of sending a text, and put down our devices long enough to enjoy the people sitting across from us.

We can use technology without allowing it to use up our lives.

The old days aren’t coming back, and that’s fine. But some of the things that made them special don’t have to disappear with them. I miss the reality. And I think it’s time we started spending a little more time living in it.

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Copyright © 2026 Doug DeBolt.