Millennials are hybrid people. We are the offline and the online generation, those who grew up with and without The Mighty Internet, with and without perpetual connectivity. I remember Lonely Planet books as the one trusty guide that promised to carry me in and out of a place (“Getting There & Away: bus 888 to the airport, 45 min”), highlighting safe places to sleep, even more places to visit. A street lamp in the darkness of the faraway unknown. Travelling then meant being hooked up to a Swedish public pay phone so I could spell out my credit card number to a youth hostel in the next city.

Then the Internet made a sound most people today would not recognize anymore: we consciously went online. Typing away on our parents’ computer and blocking the landline for hours, ideally during the night. For the first time, we travelled virtually. Physical travelling still meant “Getting There & Away”, but also relying on lists of Internet cafés: Places that offered an Internet connection to “go online”. On grimy keyboards, we checked hotels, train schedules, and the next stop, while someone was probably stealing your credentials. A virtual street lamp to orient you in a foreign place and connect you back home.

Then the sound of the Internet was lost to the smartphone. The magic hand-held in your pocket, always there, always online. Train schedules now in your hand. The route to and from the airport. Physical and virtual travelling converged. Our eyes are now glued to our phones, looking for directions instead of asking locals. Our faces light up from endless notifications, shitstorms, and textual quarrels that could be resolved over a cup of coffee. But the smartphone also brought possibilities, convenience, and flexibility. We can now travel virtually before we do it physically. It meant booking a hotel room at 2 a.m. because the communal authority was not happy to see a white foreigner sleeping in a friend’s home. The smartphone changed everything.

Then the big P happened: trapped at home, we only travelled virtually via our smartphones, via our computers to faraway places; we doomscrolled until fake news, fake outrage, endless virtue signaling made us sick of social media and the ubiquitous connection. It was the time I uninstalled all my social media apps from my phone. I was nauseous from the endless connectivity that tied me to some virtual non-place where attention is the only currency that matters, where social connections are thin and fleeting.

The Pandemic held lessons for all of us. I also realised that we had reached a stage where, after years of being non-stop online, we had to re-learn how to be consciously offline. We need to learn to put the phone away, to switch off the computer and look at flowers. Feel the haptics of our presence by making something with our hands. The post-pandemic years also announced the Age of the Stochastic Parrots, and with it the knowledge that whatever we put online would be regurgitated by some AI model, stripped of its original voice and author. All your online actions will be monetized – while this was already true before the Pandemic, it has now reached every website via a deluge of bot traffic (hello, bot).

This is the age when we have to put our phones away and look again at our hands and see what’s in front of us. If you’re at your sewing machine, your Zucks, Musks, Altmans of the world do not earn a single dollar. If your phone stays in your pocket, you will actually travel. You will talk to the locals. So use your phone to get there and away, but once you’re there, put it away and look at the world with your own eyes rather than through your camera lens.

Final note: The observation that when you use your sewing machine, you’re not feeding Silicon Valley billionaires, comes from Heather Lou, owner of Closet Core Patterns. She mentions it in episode 7 of “A Handbuilt Life” in conversation with Gretchen Jones.

Last modified on 2026-07-25