Do you remember staying up until 3, 4, 5 a.m. on a Tuesday morning just chatting? I mean just chatting — no webcams, no voice calls, no elaborate virtual worlds to distract you. Just a barebones chatroom or some primitive Instant Messenger window with three fonts and a notification sound that sounded like a dying toaster. And we would just sit there and talk about anything. Movies we liked. Weird thoughts we had. Stupid jokes that were funny only because it was 2:30 a.m. and we were too sleep-deprived to have standards.
It was raw. It was unfiltered. It was human connection in its most feral state, like two raccoons pawing at the same trash can at midnight and deciding to hang out for a while. Before MMORPGs turned the internet into a co-op dungeon crawl. Before Discord became a corporate office simulator with channels like #general, #rules, and #please-introduce-yourself-like-you’re-filling-out-an-HR-form. Before “content creation” turned every stray thought into a TikTok-ready monologue for strangers’ consumption. We just talked. No filters. No pictures. No clout-chasing. Just words on a screen and the little dopamine pop of seeing a reply — honestly, better than sex some nights. (And yes, sometimes we stayed up sexting too. Don’t pretend you didn’t.)
And it was magical. A ritual. A liminal space where time dissolved and you became two disembodied brains swapping secrets until dawn. We forged weird little internet friendships that felt like blood oaths, even if we had never seen each other’s faces. It was about communicating for the sheer animal joy of hearing another human voice through the static.
Now? Forget it. Nobody talks. Nobody even wants to talk. If you want to “get to know” someone, you get shunted to their bio like you’re reading the back of a cereal box. If you want a real conversation, you get an invite link to a Discord server where conversation is either dead silent or scrolling past at the speed of a slot machine. If you do try to speak, your message gets buried under a cascade of gifs, bot alerts, and someone arguing about Minecraft lore.
And people have excuses — oh, the excuses. “We’re all so burned out post-COVID!” “People are more isolated now!” “We’re all neurodivergent!” Spare me. I was one of the neurodivergent isolated weirdos, and we were the ones keeping the chatrooms alive until sunrise. This was literally our ecosystem. We stayed up until ungodly hours typing long, unhinged paragraphs about anime, quantum mechanics, and whether you could cook an egg with a desk lamp. We built parasocial relationships before they were even a cautionary Buzzfeed thinkpiece — and it was fine, because at least we were actually speaking to each other. And yes, sometimes we got horny and overshared, and that was part of the chaos too. The internet was feral, sweaty, ridiculous — and that was good.
So no, it’s not that we can’t talk. It’s that we don’t care to. The interest is gone. The willingness to sit with another person’s thoughts and respond to them like a human being has been euthanized and buried under a pile of reaction emojis. The internet now is a stage, and everyone’s just screaming their monologue into the dark, waiting for applause. Interaction has been boiled down to a thumbs-up, a gif of Pedro Pascal laughing, or the digital equivalent of a shrug while scrolling.
Discord servers now feel like abandoned mall food courts: sticky, echoing, filled with ghosts of conversations that used to matter. Every so often someone lobs a meme across the room like a crumpled receipt and then vanishes for a week. The intimacy is gone. The slow burn of a conversation that builds into a friendship is gone. Everything’s fast, disposable, and sanitized. It’s like trying to have a heartfelt conversation in a public bathroom while someone is blasting TikToks in the next stall.
And over all of this — the silence, the disconnection, the absence of genuine human voices — hangs the reek of corporate ownership. The internet is no longer a weird frontier. It’s a shopping mall. Everything is for-profit. Your conversation isn’t just conversation — it’s data to be harvested, sold, and used to advertise weighted blankets back to you. You can’t even find a place to talk without an algorithm demanding you follow, subscribe, monetize. It’s all engagement farming now. Even the memes are ads.
I miss talking. I miss staying up until the birds were screaming outside like they were personally offended by my insomnia, realising the sun was coming up and I had school in three hours but not caring because the conversation was too good to leave. I miss getting to know someone not through their hot takes or their curated pronoun-fandom-political-alignment bio, but by the slow, messy, gorgeous process of asking questions and waiting for the answers — even if those answers sometimes turned into flirtation that kept me awake for another three hours.
Now it feels like we’re all ghosts haunting each other’s timelines, mouthing words no one will ever hear. It’s not cute. It’s not “just the way things are now.” It’s sterile. It’s lonely. It feels like standing in an empty parking lot screaming into the night, only to have someone send you a gif of SpongeBob shrugging in response.
We used to care. We used to log in just to talk, not to broadcast, not to build a following, not to farm engagement, but to connect. And now we’ve collectively decided that talking is cringe, vulnerability is cringe, effort is cringe. Fine. Call me cringe. At least I’m still here, still yelling into the void, still horny at 3 a.m., hoping someone yells back — even if the internet now feels like a strip mall full of vending machines trying to upsell me Funko Pops while I scream.
