"Things" is broad. For basic entertainment, I don't think it's entirely true. To me at least, a great home theater and gigantic back catalogs of damn near ever

"Things" is broad. For basic entertainment, I don't think it's entirely true. To me at least, a great home theater and gigantic back catalogs of damn near everything ever made available in my living room is a flat-out better experience than waiting and hoping for whatever is worth watching to be available in a nearby theater. Learning about the history of a musical genre I get into from AllMusic and Wikipedia, and being able to find the music more or less instantly on Spotify is far better than having to find old issues of New Musical Express and Rolling Stone somewhere in print and then scouring every record store in the city hoping what I wanted was there. For human interaction, absolutely. You guys are great and all, but back in the high school/college days of hanging out late in a room talking the whole damn night about current events, philosophy, whatever topic we cared about, those resulted in far stronger bonds with people whose faces and names I actually knew. Sometimes friendships. Sometimes touch. Sometimes sex. Lots of basic human needs being met that are not all that well met by reading and typing text. I don't know how far to take this, though. Remember you're romanticizing the experience of a guy who grew up in the Great Depression. Both my grandfathers are dead now, but they lived until I was at least in my late 20s, so I remember them fairly well, and have learned quite a bit more about them talking with my own parents now that I'm in my 40s and we can talk as adults. Their lives were not great. They suffered through incredible hardship that scarred them terribly. They were closed off, withdrawn, emotionally distant, and abusive to their own families. They killed people and witnessed enormous numbers of their own friends getting killed. If you ask me was the pre-digital age better than now, you're asking me if my childhood was better than getting old. Of course it was. Everything was new and magical. I was healthy and got better at things and learned quickly. Life now is a boring grind. Is that because the world has gone digital or is it that I've gotten old?