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It is ironic how a broken pair of spectacles opened my eyes to see the beauty (once again) in stepping out and doing little chores, like visiting a decades-old optician in an old-town centre lane instead of using some app-based, convenient service to schedule a doorstep pickup to fix my broken glasses.

The person who greets me at the optician is kind and helpful, he promises that he will sort out the issue as soon as possible and gives me an estimated waiting time of around 15-20 minutes. That is how long he thinks it will actually take to fix the issue and not because he is trying to sell me some cheap labour exploitation as “efficiency”. He offers me some chai and water while I wait. As I politely decline and sit down on a bench, it suddenly hits me that it had been years since I was last spontaneously offered chai at a shop while I waited.

I wonder what would have happened if I hadn’t decided to go in-person to the optician that day and wasn’t reminded of one of these previously-ubiquitous-and-now-suddenly-absent basic daily human experiences – how long before I eventually lost all memory of experiencing these very normal things. These are things I would do and experience regularly as a child and teenager.

Another recent encounter, with what feels like artificially-engineered reminiscence (because it doesn’t seem........

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