Thank you for this thoughtful reflection.

I totally agree with you, probably more deeply than you might imagine

The idea that we cannot hold the past and the present together is not a natural law. It’s not even a cultural inevitability. It’s an economic decision dressed up as progress. Technologies don’t erase what came before because the old ideas suddenly lost their usefulness — they erase them because the old ideas no longer maximise profit.

The landline, the handwritten letter, the unmediated interaction, the slow unfolding of time — none of these were defective.

They were merely unmonetizable.

But what you’ve pointed out so clearly is something I’ve been circling:

humans themselves do not grow this way.

We don’t discard the earlier versions of ourselves the moment a new one arrives. We don’t overwrite childhood with adulthood like a software update. We accumulate. We metabolize. We layer. A person at 45 is not a person at 45 alone — they are also five, and sixteen, and twenty-three.

Those earlier selves still speak.

Those earlier lessons still instruct.

Memory binds the earlier chapters into a single, continuous body.

No one would argue that we ought to amputate the past versions of ourselves simply because they are not the most “efficient” or “up-to-date.” And yet culturally, economically, technologically — that is precisely what we do. We abandon the parts of the past that cannot be converted into engagement metrics or recurring revenue.

Which raises the uncomfortable truth you point toward:

We live in a society where value is determined not by what is good for people, but by what is profitable for platforms.

If an older technology or an older rhythm of life does not produce extractable data, it is quietly replaced — not because it was worse, but because it was less lucrative.

But human flourishing has never mapped neatly onto profit models.

People require friction, waiting, privacy, unproductive time — all the things the old world offered and the new world optimises away.

So yes: in an uncorrupted world, the past and present should coexist. We should be able to keep the landline alongside the smartphone, the slow alongside the fast, the untracked alongside the quantified. We should carry our cultural past the way we carry our psychological one: as part of a single, integrated identity.

The tragedy — and maybe the opportunity — is that we now have to do this preservation ourselves.

No platform will do it for us.

No corporation will resurrect the unprofitable parts of life.

But individuals can.

Communities can.

Writers can.

Parents can.

Anyone who remembers the “before” can choose to keep it alive — not as nostalgia, but as continuity.

Because the point of living is not to replace our earlier selves, but to become the sum of them.

And cultures, if they wish to remain whole, must do the same.