It’s not a world I recognise anymore.
That feeling didn’t arrive with thunder or grand revelation—it crept in, quietly. I was wedged into a narrow seat somewhere near the middle of the plane, surrounded by people but not among them. On either side of me sat two young adults—present in body, absent in presence.
One scrolled endlessly through a stream of flickering, soundless videos. Their eyes barely blinked, fingers moving in an almost hypnotic rhythm. The other typed into a phone with machine-like precision—thumbs tapping furiously, pausing only to smirk at the screen, as if locked in a private universe.
Neither of them looked at each other. Neither looked at me.
And to be fair, it wasn’t rude. There was no overt hostility. No deliberate exclusion. Just… a strange absence. Of warmth. Of shared space. Of the gentle acknowledgment that once came naturally between strangers inhabiting the same few square feet of a shared journey.
I didn’t feel lonely, exactly. This was something else—something harder to name. It was a kind of invisibility. The sense that I was part of a version of the world that had been quietly archived—still present, but no longer supported. Like a software no longer compatible with the latest devices.
Just a few years ago—seven, maybe eight—travel felt different. Not because the seats were roomier or the food better, but because the people felt closer. You boarded a flight not just to reach a destination, but with the quiet possibility of a story.
A smile exchanged while waiting for take-off. A shared chuckle when a child cried out mid-flight. A casual conversation about where you were headed and why. Sometimes, if you were lucky, you’d meet someone you’d remember for years. Not by name, perhaps, but by warmth.
Now, the aircraft hums with a strange silence—not the peaceful kind, but the kind that buzzes beneath the surface. The human presence is here, densely packed, but spiritually… distant. Each person cocooned in their own digital stream, headphones on, heads bowed—not in prayer or reflection, but in passive absorption.
I’m not trying to romanticize the past. I know that nostalgia can paint the ordinary with golden hues. Perhaps their world is richer—in expression, in reach, in information, in connection—just in ways that aren’t visible to me.
Maybe their silences are filled with meaning I can’t decode. Maybe their thumbs and screens carry stories just as real as the ones I once exchanged in aisle seats and coffee queues. But in that moment, mid-air, somewhere between departure and arrival, all I could feel was how unfamiliar the air had become around me.
And not just in the cabin—but in life itself.
Maybe this is what aging truly is. Not just the greying of hair, the soft ache in the knees, or the slower pace of thought. But this quiet, creeping realization that you’ve become a visitor in a world you once fully inhabited. A guest in a culture whose cues you no longer quite catch. Whose music plays in a frequency just beyond your hearing.
It’s not tragic, exactly. But it is profound.
To watch the world morph around you, to witness its evolution with a mix of awe and estrangement. To find yourself still here, but no longer of here.
And maybe that’s the final lesson time gives us—not how to hold on, but how to let go. With grace. With curiosity. With a quiet hope that while you may not speak the new language, you still have something to say.
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