5 Things That Used to Be Normal and Are Now a Luxury

A few days ago I was sitting in a café in Sofia, thinking about things that were normal when I was a kid, or even when my parents were, and that now take real effort to get. It’s not that they’re out of reach. It’s that you have to go hunting for them. 1. Being offline The world has gone digital to the point where everything happens online. That brought plenty of good things, but it stripped away something simple: the right to disconnect. Half the time you can’t leave the house without your phone, because certain places need you to carry a small computer in your pocket to do anything at all. My least favorite: reading a restaurant menu off a screen. 2. Silence For a while, traveling around, I went looking for places where I could sit in silence (absolute silence doesn’t exist, but you know what I mean). It was much harder to find than I expected. And the worst part is that something that should be possible almost anywhere has turned into a business. Countryside houses that cost more…