The Brain Before the Internet

I once saw a poster in a café that read, "I miss my brain before the internet." I have carried it with me ever since, casting my mind back, attempting to remember and yearn for time before it was rewired. The irony does not escape me. You're most likely reading this on your mobile phone, as I am writing on my laptop. We are, against our own betterment, have become products of machines.

The easiest thing is to turn that into a resolution: "put the phone down, reclaim the attention." There are growing industries built on this premise, and it is not a bad promise. Stillness is worth yearning for regardless of age. Yet it assumes that when the screen goes dark, there isn't another waiting for you a few nervous ticks away.

There always is. Set one down and the hand reaches for the next, the way a tongue keeps finding the gap where a tooth used to be. What that reaching costs us is not attention. It is the daydream. The blank, unpoliced stretch of mind where nothing is being optimised and no one is owed a reply. Children live there without trying. We had it once, before the chaos moved in and took the lease.

So here is the small thing I would ask of you this week. Put the phone away. Hide the laptop, lock the remote in a drawer. Not to be present, we have heard enough about being present, but to let the mind wander far enough to meet itself again. Even if for a few empty minutes. Because it is not the brain before the internet we miss, but the boredom we never realized we took for granted.