By Margot Russell

Believe it or not, there are a lot of things I like about our modern culture. I’ve been forcing myself to notice them–and then to wonder what it would actually be like to go backward and adopt an analog world again.

I don’t miss filling out fifty forms at the doctor’s office. It’s great to do it online at home, ahead of time. I hope America’s doctors have gotten the word that making patients wait more than sixty minutes in a waiting room just doesn’t wash anymore. As systems become more efficient, wait times for appointments should have shortened. I’m not sure the emergency room will ever be a predictable place to visit, but urgent care centers have taken the edge off.

I don’t miss vinyl car seats. For most of my childhood and early adult life, I regularly stuck to the family car seat in winter months. Modern cars are like living rooms on wheels. It’s nice, isn’t it?

You won’t find me complaining about electric seat warmers or fancy temperature controls that let you precisely direct the flow of heat or air. My favorite thing is the cameras that help us back up or see what’s in front of us. Since my car is the closest thing I’ll ever get to flying a plane, I’m really not nostalgic for my dad’s 1982 Delta 88.

I don’t miss typewriters. It’s hard to believe War and Peace was patiently typed out word for word. It’s romantic that so many writers drafted chapters on bar napkins, but look how far we’ve come.

And it’s fantastic that anyone can write a book now and self-publish.

And that’s another thing I love: there are fewer gatekeepers. Until recently, you couldn’t publish a book unless someone decided it was worthy. Singers needed agents; now they release music online. Chefs share recipes and cooking videos and direct you to their self-published cookbooks. Journalists have podcasts and Substack spaces–they can be weathermen or war reporters all by themselves, without anyone’s permission. All they need is a phone and a microphone. So take that, Walter Cronkite.

And just as media companies became corporatized, ownership narrowed, and narratives bent toward agenda, the digital world made it possible to stream a diversity of voices–a Black man in Chicago, a housewife in Des Moines, a teenager in his bedroom in Pittsburgh. We’ve been able to find our own places for news and ideas and points of view, turning off the prewritten scripts funneled through legacy media. It is possible for us to think for ourselves still.

I’m glad there are no more ten-inch keys with oval plastic keychains for hotels and gas-station bathrooms–or at least far fewer of them. I’m glad there are pickup lanes for groceries so people who are sick or juggling four kids in the back seat can avoid shopping in stadium-sized stores. I don’t miss picking up airline tickets at an airline office. Farewell to banker’s hours, laws regulating Sunday behavior, and running downstairs to answer the phone.

People don’t miss being unreachable. They don’t miss hoping someone made it home alive, or waiting three days for news that now takes three seconds. They don’t miss circling city blocks looking for a pay phone that worked, feeding quarters into machines that swallowed them whole, or dialing “information” like it was a life skill. They don’t miss handwritten directions that collapsed into chaos at the first wrong turn, or being hopelessly lost with nothing but confidence on their side. We don’t miss rewinding answering machines, yelling “DON’T PICK UP!” from another room, or the quiet terror of realizing help was far away and probably closed for lunch.

We’ve gotten better at keeping most of our airplanes in the sky, and thieves and murderers are having a harder time staying hidden. Nest cameras are doing a bang-up job of bringing them to justice. Frankly, I’m surprised they even bother anymore.

So no, I don’t want to rewind the world completely. I don’t want to give up efficiency, access, or the quiet dignity of not being trapped by someone else’s timetable. What I want is discernment–keeping what works, questioning what doesn’t, and refusing the idea that progress only moves in one direction. Maybe the task now isn’t to go backward or forward, but to choose deliberately. To keep the tools that give us freedom, and resist the ones that quietly take it away.