# Away Messages Were Better Than Stories
In 2000, I was Van, 17 years old, king of my dial-up kingdom. AIM was my Excalibur. The tritone chime—"uh oh"—hit like a sugar rush, signaling someone had pierced my digital fortress. I'd type in all caps for emphasis (WHASSUP?!), craft away messages like haikus of teenage angst ("brb, saving the world / or eating cheetos / same diff"), and spend hours in buddy lists that felt like a living org chart of my social universe. Phone calls were events: landlines glued siblings to walls, voices crackled with real-time stakes. You heard the pauses, the laughs that weren't emojis. People showed up—physically. No one checked their pager mid-conversation at the mall food court.
Fast-forward to 2026. I'm 43, and communication is a slot machine we can't stop pulling. Texts flood in like spam from a robot apocalypse: "k," thumbs-up reacts, voice notes no one plays because subtitles exist. My kids, glued to screens brighter than the sun we forgot, group-chat inside jokes I decode like hieroglyphs. Dinner tables are zombie conventions—forks in one hand, phones in the other, souls adrift in TikTok scrolls. We "connect" 24/7, yet presence is extinct. It's Schrödinger's conversation: Is that blue bubble typing, or have they ghosted into the ether?
This isn't evolution; it's devolution disguised as progress. Back then, talking required commitment. AIM meant logging on with intent—you weren't "always available." A call? That was vulnerability on a leash. We edited ourselves in real time, no filters or edits. Now? Algorithms mediate our mediocrity. Texts let us curate cowardice: Send, delete, regret later. We're drowning in bandwidth but starved for bandwidth between ears. Studies say we're lonelier than ever—shocker—because proximity without presence is just parallel play for adults. Social media turned us into broadcasters of banality, mistaking likes for love.
I miss the friction. The wait for a busy signal to clear. The eye contact that said more than "lol." Sure, 2026's tech lets me video-call grandma across continents, but who'd choose pixels over a porch swing? We've traded serendipity for surveillance. My away message today? "Out living. Ping if you dare pick up the phone."
Van, 2026 *(Word count: 378)*