Before Everything Knew Our Name

People like to say life was simpler back then.
It’s usually said with a shrug, or a laugh, the way people talk about aches they’ve decided to live with. The word simpler gets worn thin from use. It sounds lazy. Nostalgic. Like a man who’s run out of present tense.

I don’t think life was simpler because people were smarter, or tougher, or better at anything in particular. I think it was simpler because fewer things were asking for their attention at the same time.

Fifty years ago, most days arrived with limits. You knew how far news could travel before supper. You knew who might knock on the door, and who wouldn’t. Information came with weight because it came slowly, carried by people or paper or a voice on the radio that spoke once and moved on. If you missed it, you missed it. If it mattered, it found you again.

That kind of scarcity did something useful. It forced judgment.

You decided what was worth keeping because you couldn’t keep everything. You argued about things face to face, with pauses long enough for a man to reconsider his words before they hardened. Silence still had a job. Waiting did too.

I remember when knowing something meant you had spent time with it. Not just reading it, but living alongside it long enough to see where it failed. You didn’t call that research. You called it paying attention.

Now we live in a time where almost nothing arrives alone. Every fact drags a crowd behind it. Every moment comes annotated, disputed, amplified. We don’t wait for information anymore. We brace for it. And because it never stops arriving, we stop deciding what to do with it. We collect it instead, the way a man might stack tools he never plans to use.

People say this makes us more informed. Maybe it does. But I’m not convinced it makes us more certain.

When everything demands a response, nothing gets the care it deserves. Decisions turn reactive. Opinions form before understanding has time to catch up. Even grief doesn’t get to finish its work before it’s interrupted by the next alert asking for a thought, a comment, a side to stand on.

That’s not complexity. That’s congestion.

I don’t miss the past because it was better. I miss it because it had edges. You knew when a day ended. You knew when a conversation was over. You knew when to stop talking and start listening, because there wasn’t another voice waiting in your pocket to replace your own.

Back then, if something troubled you, it stayed with you long enough to be examined. You couldn’t scroll past it. You had to walk with it, sometimes for days. That kind of company changes a man. It teaches patience, whether he wants it or not.

We’ve traded that for speed. For reach. For a sense of being present everywhere while standing nowhere in particular. We call it connection, but it often feels more like noise layered so thick it becomes its own kind of silence.

I don’t think the answer is to go backward. The ground doesn’t work that way. But I do think there’s value in remembering what limits once gave us — not because they were virtuous, but because they were real.

A life with fewer signals leaves more room for judgment.
A day that doesn’t explain itself gives a man time to decide what matters.

I still try to keep parts of my life that way. Not out of stubbornness, but out of necessity. I turn things off. I let questions sit unanswered. I allow myself not to know everything the moment it happens. It’s the only way I’ve found to hear my own thoughts long enough to trust them.

Maybe that’s what people mean when they say things were simpler.
Not that the world made sense — but that it didn’t insist on explaining itself all at once.

— Hank Redding