I Prefer This World. But We’re Forgetting Something.

Everyone knows your name. Nobody notices when you go quiet.

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That’s the thing nobody expected me to say. I’m a millennial who lived both worlds — the handwritten cards, the phone calls, the actual effort — and honestly, I’m more comfortable now. I get answers faster. I feel connected to the world through Instagram stories. I know what my friends are doing without the friction of having to call them. LinkedIn tells me someone’s next move before they even tell their family. I can find a date from my bed instead of waiting for a mutual friend to introduce me.

It’s easier. Less confusing. More efficient.

I prefer this world. I genuinely do.

But I’m a psychologist. I sit with people all day — actually sit with them, face to face — and I’m hearing something I can’t unsee.

A girl came to me recently. Nothing catastrophically wrong in her life. Decent family. Good health. An arranged marriage proposal with a decent guy — not perfect, but good. And then the apps opened up. 1000 dating options if she wanted to look. Instagram to start a faceless account selling digital products on Etsy or Gumroad. Passive income schemes promising freedom from her 9-to-5. Every possible version of herself available, just waiting for her to choose.

She was drowning.

Not because something broke. But because everything was available and nothing felt right. She had options but couldn’t choose. She had a decent partner but he felt vague — nice enough, but he didn’t seem to have a value system, didn’t seem ready to actually take responsibility for choosing her. She wanted to leave her job but couldn’t figure out which direction to go. She wanted to be a blogger or influencer but was too shy, so she stayed faceless on social media, watching other women’s highlight reels, comparing, comparing, comparing.

She said something that stuck in my body, not just my head. She said, “I don’t even know if I’m unhappy anymore or if I’m just unhappy because everyone else looks so happy.”

I didn’t have a clean answer for her. I still don’t.

Because I prefer this world. I do. I like that I can Google a symptom at 2 a.m. instead of waiting for a doctor’s appointment. I like that I can text my friend in another country a voice note while making chai. I like that I didn’t have to depend on some uncle’s connection to find work — I could build a LinkedIn profile and reach people myself.

But I also see what she was sitting in. And I see it again and again. Not with the dramatic cases. Not with the people whose lives have visibly fallen apart. With the regular ones. The functioning ones. The ones who look fine on their stories.

They’re lonely. And it’s a specific kind of lonely that I don’t think we had a word for ten years ago.

It’s the kind where you have a thousand followers but nobody knows what you actually cried about last week. Where you’re swiping through people but nobody’s choosing you — specifically you, on purpose, with intention. Where you know your colleague got promoted but you don’t know if they’re okay. Where everyone is busy and connected and performing availability and nobody is actually sitting with anyone.

I learned something in training that I think about a lot. Secure attachment — the psychology term, stripped of jargon — basically means this: humans need at least one person who is paying real attention. Not available in theory. Not reachable by DM. Actually present. The kind of person who notices you’ve gone quiet. Who remembers the small thing you said about your dad three months ago. Who shows up even when it’s not convenient.

That’s not a feature. No app does that. No notification replaces it. And I think we all quietly know this, but we’ve gotten so used to the substitutes that we’ve stopped noticing the difference.

I prefer this world. But I think this world has a hole in it exactly where that thing used to be.

We traded presence for convenience. And look — I made that trade too. I’m not standing outside it, pointing fingers. I send birthday texts instead of calling. I react to stories instead of checking in. I know things about people’s lives from their posts that I probably should have learned from their mouths. I do all of it. And most days, it feels like enough.

But some days it doesn’t.

Some days I’m in the middle of something — working, scrolling, building whatever I’m building — and it just hits me. This dull, quiet missing. Not for a person exactly. For a time. For sitting in the living room with my parents and my siblings and nobody performing anything. No one was curating a moment. No one was thinking about what this would look like as a story. We were just there. Eating together, fighting over the remote, talking about nothing important — and it was the most real I’ve ever felt in my life.

My mother used to say this thing. She’d ask us — me, my siblings — to just spend time with her. Without the phone. And we’d roll our eyes because we were right there. Sitting in the same room. Eating at the same table. What more did she want?

I only understood after I started living alone. She wasn’t counting us. We were in the room, yes. But we weren’t there. Our eyes were on our screens, our attention was somewhere else, and she could feel the difference even if we couldn’t. She wasn’t asking for our time. She already had that. She was asking for our presence. And we didn’t even know those were two different things.

I think about that a lot now. More than I’d like to.

I’ve accomplished more in this world. I’ve grown more, reached more, become more independent than that version of me could have imagined. And I still carry this low, constant hum of having lost something I can’t even properly name. The simplicity of being with people who knew you — actually knew you — without you having to brand yourself or explain your journey or show your growth. People who just sat with you. No filters. No fakeness. Just the room and the people in it and that being enough.

I prefer this world. I do. But I’d be lying if I said I don’t miss that.

And then I sit across from someone like that girl. And she’s not broken. She’s not mentally ill. She’s just — lost in a very modern way. She has access to everything and belongs to nothing. She can see a hundred lives being lived and can’t feel her own. She knows exactly what’s wrong because she’s read the psychology posts about it. She can name her attachment style, she can explain the dopamine loop, she can tell me why comparison is the thief of joy.

She knows all of it. And she’s still drowning.

That’s the part that gets me. Because this world — this world I prefer — has made people so informed about their own suffering that they mistake the knowing for the healing. They read about loneliness on the same phone that’s making them lonely. They understand the problem in theory and scroll past the solution in practice.

The solution isn’t an insight. It’s not a framework. It’s a person. One actual person who chose you and keeps choosing you, not because an algorithm suggested it, but because they decided to.

I prefer this world. I’m not going back to slambooks. I’m not romanticizing the past — I remember it, and it had its own mess. The access we have now is real and good and I wouldn’t trade it.

But I am going to say the uncomfortable thing.

We are building a generation that is connected to everything and belongs to nothing. That knows everything about everyone and is known by no one. That can name every psychological concept but can’t sit in a room with one person and be actually, fully, inconveniently there.

And the fix isn’t deleting the apps. The fix is so much smaller and so much harder than that.

It’s calling someone when you could have texted. It’s remembering something they told you without being reminded. It’s choosing someone — not because they’re the best option in a sea of infinite options, but because you decided to, and you stayed.

That girl is still coming to see me. She’s not fixed. I’m not sure “fixed” is the right word for what she needs. But last week she told me something that made me think we were getting somewhere. She said, “I think I just want someone to pick me. Not because I’m the best. Just because they want to.”

And I thought — yeah. That’s it. That’s the whole thing. That’s what we’re forgetting.

I prefer this world. But that? That’s older than any app. And we cannot afford to lose it.

Thanks for reading!