A childhood, offline.

Yes this photo is a little blurry - but that is me, the little one!

I didn’t grow up with a screen in my hand.

There was no constant ping, no scroll, no endless feed of other people’s lives. I didn’t even own a smartphone until I was 18.

I grew up in Dorset, in a house with two and a half acres of garden (oh how much I appreciate that now) – it was a wild and wonderful childhood playground. It wasn’t landscaped or manicured. It was alive and untamed in all the best ways.

Summer holidays felt endless. Long days blurred into evenings, and I’d be outside from breakfast until dusk. I was never bored.

Those summers at home were full of simple, analogue joys. I could often be found climbing on some part of the roof (it wasn’t that high!), making some random concoction of plants and mud that I’d found, playing with things I shouldn’t have done in the shed (knives, battery acid, rat poison, you know, the usual) – or I’d simply lay on the grass and look up at the clouds, trying to work out what shapes they resembled. I rode my bike in circles on the drive, played hide and seek with friends, built dens and made water slides from tarp.

There were no phones to track me. No social media posts to curate. No pressure to be anywhere else, or to be anything other than what I was: a kid, in a garden, utterly present.

My parents left me to it - a kind of gentle, trusting distance that felt like freedom. I had no idea what anyone else was doing with their summer holidays. The outside world didn’t come in unless we invited it. That boundary was sacred.

And within it, I felt safe.

I think about that a lot now.

How rare that sense of spaciousness has become. How the modern world has crept into every corner of our lives - our pockets, our bedrooms and our dinner tables. It feels like there isn’t anywhere the outside world can’t get to us. It just wasn’t like that when I was younger. Home was a safe place – a sanctuary where the outside world couldn’t get to you.

Children today grow up with the world in their hands - and with it, the weight of comparison, distraction, and performance. It makes me feel a quiet kind of grief. Not just for them, but for all of us. In fact, maybe it’s not that quiet – and the grief is also mixed with anger, too.

Because it’s not just kids.We’re all being pulled out of the present.All being nudged to trade silence for scrolls, solitude for stimulation.

So I ask myself: What can we do to bring it back?

Not necessarily the exact childhood I had – but maybe pieces of it. The spirit of it. The analogue moments. The simplicity.

What if we carved out pockets of time without our phones?What if we made space to wander, to play, to be bored, to daydream?What if we sat in a tree again, or made tea on a fire, or just let the outside world stay outside for a while?

Tech companies want everything to live on our phones. That’s no accident - it keeps us coming back. It’s not just convenience, it’s conditioning. The goal is dependence.

But what if we bucked the trend I ask myself?What if we chose a little rebellion, a little stillness, a little time offline?

We can’t all live like it’s 1998. And I don’t think we have to go full retro to feel real again. I think we just need to take our lives back from those trying to steal it.

Yes, I’m looking at you Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok. Hands off. This life is ours.

Laura x

p.s writing this has made me realise I may have been a bit of a tomboy growing up, and I love it.