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Newsletter The MorningFast Forward

How do we balance our desire for modern conveniences with our nostalgia for the uncomplicated felicity of our pre-internet past?

Listen · 12:15 min

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!A tangle of brightly colored electrical cords plugged into a power strip.

*Credit...

María Jesús Contreras*

By

Melissa Kirsch

Aug. 29, 2026, 5:22 a.m. ET

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The cursed island town in the horror-comedy series “Widow’s Bay” is so remote that there’s no Wi-Fi and cell service is unreliable. This means residents are left to landlines and walkie-talkies to communicate. These limitations not only add to the feeling of creepy isolation, but they also dispense with the modern challenge of depicting smartphone usage onscreen. When Mayor Tom Loftis wants to talk to someone, he must call them using the multi-line phone in his office or the rotary model affixed to his kitchen wall.

Nostalgia for outmoded technology is bittersweet: We can’t imagine life without present-day conveniences, but things were so much simpler before! Our understanding of the world was slow to update. We said we’d meet at the restaurant at 6, and you couldn’t switch the location at the last minute or change the time if you were running late. We settled on the route we’d take to drive from A to B, no GPS to change it with a few seconds’ notice because of the traffic jam ahead. No moment-to-moment updates from friends, no impulse-Googling the name of that shampoo or tomorrow’s weather, no asking Claude. Our brains contained a certain amount of knowledge, and we didn’t add to it without time and effort.

In The Times today, Kera Bolonik writes about the mix tape, that relic of another era, which “took time, thought, careful listening and a level of physical coordination beyond what goes into the making of a Spotify playlist.” Good mix-tape-makers were experts in manipulating the pause and record buttons on the hi-fi, engaging with the equipment to create a tangible artifact. Unlike a playlist, tapes were material, present in the landscape. It made sense that something so meaningful took up room in the world.

“You have to imagine a space where music was a rumor,” the writer Jonathan Lethem told Kera. “You might hear something and not be able to know what it was, and no one can tell you, and it’s driving you crazy.” In the Shazam-less past, you’d hear a song and have no way to instantly entrap it. You’d live with the memory of the song you heard, hoping to catch it again on the radio. I remember becoming enamored of a song I heard on the radio in France in 1995 and telling my boyfriend back home that I’d heard the best new David Bowie track. There was no new Bowie album that we knew about, but we asked the clerks in every record store about it all the same. It would be six months before it came out in the States, and we discovered it wasn’t a Bowie song at all, but “A Girl Like You” by the Scottish musician Edwyn Collins. I put it on every mix tape I made that year.

There’s a whole universe of pared-back gadgets for those who miss the simplicity of old tech: dumbphones, internet-connected typewriters, screen-free digital cameras. There are apps that take a long time to send texts. But there’s something unsatisfying about using tech to address over-technification. Perhaps the answer lies in the technology that has persisted in its unimprovable simplicity: A pad and paper have never failed to save my journal entries or added formatting I didn’t ask for. I treasure my wristwatch that I never have to charge, the digital alarm clock that shows me the time from across the room.

I no longer have the dual-cassette boom box on which I made countless mixes, but Maxell released a Bluetooth cassette player this year. I don’t love the idea of buying something new in order to capture the magic of something old, but that something old might be worth pursuing. As Kera wrote: “More than just relics, mix tapes are portals to specific moments. Perhaps even more than old photos, they reanimate the past.”

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