The Movie Theater, a Bucket of Popcorn and What We’ve Lost Along the Way

I’m a horror movie fan, so when the new Insidious movie came out this weekend, I decided to do something I hadn’t done in a long time. I went to a movie theater.

And I was genuinely excited. Not just interested or casually looking forward to it. I was excited like a little kid. I got my popcorn, found my seat, settled in, and for a moment, I realized just how much this simple experience meant to me. Going to the movies used to be such an ordinary part of life. Now, somehow, it felt almost like an event.

Sitting there on Saturday afternoon, popcorn in hand, I started thinking about why.

And then Memories Rushed Back

Years ago, my good friends Carol and her husband, Ivory, and I used to go to the movies at least twice a month. Carol and I would commute in from New York City to our homes in Westchester County, and when the workweek was over, Ivory would pick us up at the train station. We would grab a quick McDonald’s hamburger, usually eating it in the car because we were determined to make the movie on time, and then, of course, there was popcorn.

It was routine. At the time, I didn’t think much about it. We weren’t consciously creating memories. We were just going to the movies. We did it all the time.

But sitting in that theater on Saturday, those Friday nights came rushing back to me. I remembered the train station, the hurried cheeseburgers, the laughter, the anticipation of getting to the theater on time, and the three of us settling into our seats with our popcorn. Something that had once seemed so ordinary suddenly felt incredibly precious.

And then another memory surfaced.

I thought about my college love. We used to go to the movies a lot, too. Sitting there Saturday, it was almost like a flashback. For a moment, I could see him bringing my popcorn to my seat and making sure I had whatever I wanted. And, of course, there are other memories that came flooding back too – some I won’t mention here, but let’s just say you can fill in the blanks LOL!

It struck me how one Saturday afternoon at the movies could bring so many different moments from my life rushing back.

Carol and Ivory have since moved to South Carolina, and life has changed in so many ways. Technology has given us something wonderful. We can FaceTime. I can see their faces, hear their voices and talk to them even though they are hundreds of miles away. I am grateful for that.

But Facetime Doesn’t Replace Those Friday Nights

Those nights weren’t simply about watching a movie. They were about being together. There was the drive, the conversation, the hurried dinner, the laughter, the anticipation and the shared experience of sitting beside one another in a dark theater and reacting to the same movie at the same time. It was a different kind of connection, one that technology can imitate but can’t quite reproduce.

And that got me thinking about how much else we may have lost along the way.

Technology has made it incredibly difficult to simply be present. Think about how different a conversation used to be. You sat across from someone and talked. You weren’t interrupted by a notification, a text, an email or the sudden urge to see what was happening on Facebook. If you were watching television, you watched television. If you were having dinner, you had dinner. If you were driving somewhere, you were simply driving.

Now we carry an entire world in our pockets, and that world is constantly asking for our attention. We have also lost something that I think is tremendously underrated: the ability to be unreachable.

There was a time when you could leave the house and nobody could contact you until you came home. If someone called and you weren’t there, they called back later. You could take a walk, go shopping, sit on the beach or spend an afternoon doing absolutely nothing without feeling as though you should be checking in with someone.

And Then There Are the Algorithms. Oh, the Algorithms!

I find it fascinating – and sometimes a little disturbing – how quickly they decide they know us. Pause on one video for a few seconds and suddenly your feed is filled with hundreds of versions of the same thing. Watch one video about aging and apparently you are now interested in every anti-aging product, exercise routine, supplement and dire prediction about getting older.

The algorithm doesn’t actually know what we want. It knows what made us pause.

Yet it keeps feeding us more and more of the same until we are living inside a little digital bubble that someone else has designed for us. We used to discover things accidentally. We wandered through bookstores. We flipped through magazines. We turned on the television and stumbled across something we never would have thought to search for. Sometimes discovering something we didn’t know we wanted was part of the fun.

Technology Has Also Changed Our Relationship with Privacy

My mother used to say, “Not everyone has to know our business.” Boy, has that changed.

There was a time when your personal life was actually personal. Your neighbors didn’t necessarily know where you went on vacation, what you ate for dinner, what you bought at the store or what you were doing on Saturday night. You could have an experience without announcing it to the world.

Now we post the vacation, the restaurant, the birthday dinner, the new house, the relationship, the breakup, the family gathering and sometimes things that I am fairly certain my mother would have considered nobody else’s business. We have voluntarily turned much of our private lives into public content.

And while social media can be wonderful for keeping up with people, it has also taken “keeping up with the Joneses” to an entirely different level.

There was always some version of comparison. We knew someone with a nicer car, a bigger house or a better vacation. But at least there was a limit to how many people we were comparing ourselves with.

Now we can wake up in the morning and immediately see hundreds of people who appear to have better bodies, happier marriages, more beautiful homes, more successful children, more exciting vacations and more perfect lives than we do. Of course, we know those lives aren’t actually perfect. We are looking at curated versions of people. But knowing that doesn’t always stop us from comparing our ordinary lives with someone else’s highlight reel.

There’s So Much We Have Lost

And I think we have lost something else in all of this: our appreciation for ordinary life.

There is a tremendous pressure now to make everything an experience, to photograph it, document it and share it. But some of the most meaningful moments in our lives weren’t experiences at all. They were ordinary Tuesday nights, Friday nights at the movies, dinner in the car, conversations on the telephone or sitting around watching television with our families.

I Think We Have Lost Some of Our Shared Experiences There, Too

There was a time when families and friends watched the same shows. You had to wait for your favorite program to come on, and the next day everyone was talking about it. There weren’t hundreds of choices available at any given moment. You couldn’t binge an entire season overnight.

A conversation with a friend recently made me think about this in a different way. We were talking about some classic movies during the holiday season– movies that were released long before either of us was born, but that we knew because our parents had introduced us to them. One of my favorite Christmas movies to this day is The Bishop’s Wife, made in 1947. I knew that movie, the actors in it and something about the era in which it was made because my parents exposed me to it.

As we talked, I found myself wondering why today’s young people aren’t necessarily being exposed to these wonderful works of cinema. My friend, who is the mother of three – two grown children and a 13-year-old daughter – explained something I hadn’t really thought about.

“Diane, when we were kids, we sat with our parents and watched these films. They told us about the actors. They told us about the time period. They exposed us to that history.”

She was right.

We weren’t just watching a movie. We were being introduced to another generation, another time and another piece of our culture. We learned about actors we might never have known, movies made before we were born and stories that our parents themselves had grown up with. It happened naturally, simply because we were all sitting in the same room watching the same thing.

That Kind of Shared Experience Seems to Be Disappearing

Today, we have more entertainment than we could possibly consume, yet we often aren’t watching the same things as the people around us. A parent can be in one room watching a movie while the kids are off in their own little corners of the house, each absorbed in a different world on a tablet, phone, gaming system or laptop. One person is watching Netflix, another is watching YouTube, someone else is scrolling TikTok and someone else is streaming a completely different show.

Everyone is entertained, but they aren’t necessarily experiencing anything together.

And that is a loss that goes beyond missing a family movie night. We aren’t just losing the shared experience; we are losing one of the ways generations passed history, culture and stories to one another.

Those old movies weren’t simply movies. They were a bridge between generations. Our parents introduced us to them, we carried them with us, and some of us have passed them along to our own children.

Now that bridge is much harder to build when everyone is consuming something different, on a different screen, in a different room. We have more choices, but fewer shared experiences.

Technology Has Even Changed How We Remember

I can still remember telephone numbers from people I haven’t spoken to in decades. I remember addresses. I remember the numbers of friends and relatives because I actually had to remember them. There was no contact list storing hundreds of names and numbers for me.

We exercised our memories because we had to.

Now, if I can’t remember something, I can look it up. If I can’t remember how to get somewhere, GPS will tell me. If I don’t know something, Google will find the answer. If I forget someone’s phone number, my phone knows it for me.

It is incredibly convenient, but I sometimes wonder what happens to the parts of our brains we no longer have to exercise.

And Then There Is Letter Writing

There was something different about receiving a handwritten letter. Someone had to sit down, think about you and take the time to write their thoughts on paper. You could see their handwriting. You could keep the letter in a drawer and find it years later.

A text is immediate. A handwritten letter was intentional.

We have gained speed, but perhaps we have lost some of the meaning that came from taking our time.

Another Change I Find Troubling Is Our Relationship with Expertise

We have more information available to us than any generation before us, which should be an extraordinary advantage. But access to information isn’t the same as knowledge, and having a large following doesn’t make someone an expert.

We now have influencers offering medical advice without medical training, financial advice without financial expertise and opinions on complicated subjects based on little more than personal experience. Someone can make a video, accumulate a million followers and suddenly be treated as an authority.

Experience matters, but expertise matters too. There is a reason people spend years in medical school, law school, graduate programs, laboratories and professional training. A personal story can be valuable without becoming a substitute for professional knowledge.

And Perhaps That Is Where I Have Landed After Sitting in That Movie Theater Saturday

I don’t hate technology. Quite the opposite. I am grateful for many of the things it has given us. I can FaceTime Carol and Ivory in South Carolina. I can instantly find information. I can listen to almost any song I want, watch movies whenever I want and stay in touch with people I might otherwise lose.

Technology has made our lives easier in countless ways.

But I wonder if we were so focused on what technology could give us that we didn’t notice some of what it was quietly taking away: our patience, our privacy, our ability to be bored, our ability to be unreachable, our shared experiences, our memories, our attention and perhaps even our appreciation for the ordinary.

That is what I was thinking about as I sat in that theater Saturday.

I wasn’t just watching a horror movie.

I was remembering.

I was remembering Carol and Ivory. I was remembering Friday nights and train stations and hurried McDonald’s hamburgers. I was remembering an old love and a young man bringing me popcorn. I was remembering different chapters of my life and the people who occupied them.

And I realized that those memories were never created intentionally. Nobody said, “Let’s make a memory tonight.”

We were just living.

And Maybe That Is the Part I Don’t Want Us to Lose

The ordinary moments are often the ones that become extraordinary in retrospect. We don’t always know we are living through something meaningful until years later, when a smell, a song, a photograph – or apparently, a horror movie and a bucket of popcorn – takes us right back.

Technology can keep us connected. It can entertain us, inform us and make our lives remarkably convenient.

But it can’t recreate a Friday night with people you love.

And it can’t recreate the feeling of being there.

Let’s Have a Conversation:

Have you been to a movie theater recently? Who did you go with? How often do you share this kind of experience with people from other generations? What do you think you’ve lost because of technology? What have you gained?