Longing for a Time Before Smartphones

Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Overcast | Pocket Casts Gen Z has romanticized the technology of the ’90s—or the era’s lack of it.

Young people long for a time when they were looking at one another instead of at their phones.

But could that nostalgia for a smartphone-free society actually help guide the future? That’s one of the driving questions in the latest season of How to Touch Grass , co-hosted by Julie Beck and Natalie Brennan.

This week on Radio Atlantic , we’re sharing the first episode, with an introduction by Hanna Rosin.

The following is a transcript of the episode: Hanna Rosin: I’m Hanna Rosin.

This is Radio Atlantic .

Do I remember a time before I had a smartphone? Of course I do. [ Music ] Long dinners with friends, nothing buzzing or pinging.

Standing in line with nothing to do but think, and stare.

Reading an entire book in two days.

And then back to when I was a teenager: telling my friends that I liked or maybe didn’t like their new perm, like, in person.

I guess that’s what they call nostalgia? But nostalgia is working a little differently for Gen Z.

I actually lived through the things I miss.

But a lot of them long for a time when they weren’t even alive—an era of iPods and CD players and calling your friends on a landline. [ Music ] I find it strange that people in their 20s are now fixated on shows I watched when I was in my 20s, like Friends .

It seems like longing that goes nowhere? But maybe nostalgia for the past, even an unfamiliar past, can help shape the future.