I'm 70 and when I see old footage of packed shopping malls and crowded movie theaters, I don't feel nostalgic — I feel like I'm watching evidence of a world that genuinely believed showing up in the same room was how you built a life, and I don't think we'll see that again

Last week, I watched "You've Got Mail" with my granddaughter over video call, and when Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan finally meet in that little garden, she said something that stopped me cold: "Why didn't they just FaceTime from the beginning?"

I laughed, but later that night, I couldn't shake the feeling that we're living through something bigger than a technological shift. We're witnessing the quiet dissolution of a fundamental human assumption: that being together, physically together, is how we create meaning in our lives.

I see it everywhere now. The mall where I bought my daughter's prom dress in 1995 is being converted into medical offices. The bookstore where my father would take me every Saturday morning closed five years ago.

Even before the pandemic accelerated everything, we were already pulling apart, already choosing the convenience of delivery over the ritual of going out, already substituting likes for laughter shared across a table.

The weight of empty spaces

There's a particular kind of grief that comes with watching the infrastructure of togetherness crumble.

I feel it most acutely when I drive past the old Sears building downtown, its parking lot now overtaken by weeds pushing through the asphalt. That store wasn't just about shopping. It was where you ran into your child's teacher and actually had a conversation, where teenagers gathered by the fountain not to buy anything but to be seen, to exist in the same orbit as their peers.

My father, who delivered mail for forty years, understood this implicitly. He knew everyone not because he studied some customer database but because he walked the same routes, handed letters directly to people, asked about their sick mothers and new babies.

The repetition of physical presence created bonds that no algorithm can replicate. When he retired, half the town showed up to his party, not because he was particularly extraordinary, but because showing up was what you did. It was how you honored a life lived in proximity to yours.

Now I watch my own grandchildren navigate a world where showing up is often optional, sometimes even seen as an inconvenience. They have friends they've never met in person, relationships sustained entirely through screens. When I expressed concern about this to my grandson, he looked at me with genuine confusion and said, "But Grandma, we talk every day."

As if talking and being together were the same thing.

What we've gained and what we've lost

Don't misunderstand me. I'm not blind to the miracles of our connected age. I learned to video call when my grandchildren moved across the country, fumbling with buttons and accidentally hanging up more times than I care to admit. Now I can see my granddaughter's art projects the day she makes them, watch my grandson's basketball games from a thousand miles away. There's magic in that, undeniably.

My weekly supper club with five women I've known since my teaching days has survived precisely because we adapted. When two members moved away, we started doing monthly video dinners alongside our in-person gatherings. We share recipes through group texts, send each other articles, maintain a constant thread of connection that enriches our friendship.

But here's what troubles me: we've started to believe these digital connections are equivalent to, or even superior to, physical presence. They're not.

They're wonderful supplements, bridges across distance, but they cannot replace the full-body experience of being with other humans. You cannot smell bread baking through a screen, cannot offer a spontaneous hug, cannot read the thousand micro-expressions that flutter across a face in real conversation.

The architecture of loneliness

Ray Oldenburg wrote about "third places," those spaces that aren't home or work but serve as the communal living rooms of society. Coffee shops, barbershops, pubs, parks. What he understood, what we're forgetting, is that these spaces do more than facilitate interaction. They create the possibility for unplanned connection, for the beautiful accidents of human contact.

I think about my church, which I joined after my second marriage, initially for my husband but eventually for myself. Yes, you can watch services online now, and many do.

But there's something irreplaceable about sitting in that pew, feeling the vibration of voices singing together, passing the peace with actual hands touching actual hands. It's not about the sermon, which I could certainly access from my couch. It's about the commitment to showing up, about being a body among bodies, about the discipline of physical presence.

During my thirty-two years teaching high school English, I watched teenagers hunger for this kind of presence even as they seemed to reject it. They would cluster in hallways, sprawl across classroom floors during lunch, create elaborate reasons to be near each other. They understood intuitively what we adults are forgetting: that proximity is its own form of intimacy, that sharing space is how we practice being human together.

Building a different kind of life

Recently, I wrote about finding purpose in retirement, and I realize now that what I was really writing about was finding new ways to maintain physical presence in a world that no longer demands it. Without the forced proximity of work, without children to ferry to activities, without the errands that used to structure our days, we have to be intentional about seeking out shared space.

But I fear we've lost the will for this kind of intention. We've been sold the idea that efficiency is a virtue, that saving time is always good, that the elimination of friction from our lives represents progress. We can work from home, shop from home, socialize from home, be entertained from home. We've created a world where leaving is increasingly unnecessary, and we're calling it freedom.

What we're not acknowledging is the cost. Every trip to the store we don't take is a chance encounter that doesn't happen. Every movie we stream at home is a shared gasp or laugh we don't experience with strangers. Every meeting moved online is a coffee conversation that never occurs.

We're eliminating the beautiful inefficiency of human interaction, the messy, unplanned, inconvenient reality of being together.

Final thoughts

I don't think we can go backward, nor should we try.

Those packed malls and crowded theaters aren't coming back, at least not in the form we remember. But I worry we're not being honest about what we're giving up in exchange for convenience. We're not just changing how we shop or watch movies. We're fundamentally altering our understanding of what it means to be connected, to be present, to be alive in the world with others.

Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe the next generation will create new forms of togetherness I can't imagine. But from where I sit at seventy, watching the last video rental store in town pack up its inventory, I can't help feeling we're conducting a vast experiment in human isolation, and we won't understand the results until it's too late to remember what we've lost.