Remember When We Had to Wait for Things?

A love letter to boredom, cable TV, and not having endless choices.

Life felt simpler before 2012.
Not perfect—just… better.

We didn’t realize it at the time, but that might’ve peaked. That perfect window right after the tech boom, but before everything became everything—before content creation turned into a work and porn, before every moment needed to be documented, liked, optimized, and judged.

Back then, “culture” (the most overused word) felt shared.

You had Frank making people feel things they didn’t fully understand yet. Kanye had everyone wearing distressed jeans and Jordan 1’s. Bieber had people looking confused and biting their lips in selfies. Wiz had them dying their foreheads and Tyler was building a cult.

Different worlds overlapped.
Styles mixed.
It felt like, for a second, everybody spoke the same language.

And then there was the internet.

Not the internet we have now—but the early version that still felt like a place, not a requirement. Vine made you be funny in six seconds or not at all. Early Instagram wasn’t endless—it was almost… quiet. You could reach the end. Imagine that.

There wasn’t as much to look at, so you actually looked.

And maybe that was the difference.

We had less—but we experienced more.

Cable TV, of all things, might’ve been part of it. You couldn’t just watch anything at any time. You had to wait. You had to choose. You had to commit. There was a rhythm to it. A structure. You watched what was on, or you missed it.

And now?

Now everything is available—all the time. Every show, every song, every opinion, every tragedy. And somehow, with all that access, it’s harder to choose anything at all.

Too many options. Not enough meaning.

I’ll be honest—I’m part of it too. Sitting there, scrolling past a thousand things I could watch, just to end up watching nothing. Overwhelmed by abundance. It’s almost impressive.

And I can’t help but wonder—when did convenience stop feeling like a gift and start feeling like a trap?

We move faster now. Not just in speed, but in emotion. We react to everything, all the time. Outrage, humor, tragedy, all blended into the same scroll. Nothing lingers. Nothing settles.

We don’t even sit with things long enough to understand how we feel about them.

Even the small stuff feels different.

Commercials used to be part of the experience. The jingles, the characters—the little breaks that somehow stuck with you longer than the shows themselves. Now we skip everything. We optimize everything. We remove every second of “wasted” time.

But… was it really wasted?

Or was that the part where life actually happened?

And somewhere along the way, it became cooler to be detached than to be tough. More acceptable to be constantly bothered than to let something roll off your back. Maybe that’s growth. Maybe it’s awareness. Or maybe it’s just exhaustion dressed up as progress.

I’m not sure.

I just know it feels different.

Not worse in every way. Not better either. Just… heavier.

And maybe the real question isn’t how we get back to 2012.

Maybe it’s this:

When everything is available, what’s actually worth choosing?
When everyone is loud, who’s worth listening to?
And when life moves this fast… are we still in it, or just watching it go by?

I still end up in the same place most nights anyway.
On the couch. Game on. Probably watching the Lakers. Phone in my hand, not really looking at it.

And I wonder—

If nothing was missing back then…
or if we just didn’t know how to miss things yet.

- Travis Bennett, a 30 something year old.

“Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it”. - Ferris Bueller

Be Ferris Bueller for a day