I don’t know about anyone else, but I’m hoping — maybe even praying — that the shudder I feel beneath my digital fingertips is real. A tremor, a shift, a slow turning back toward something older and more human. A drift away from the hyper‑individual you do you and I’ll do me, and back toward a gentler let’s do us. A return to waves, to analogue life, to craft, to making, to meaning.

I was born in 1969. I’ve lived and worked through the full cut and thrust of the digital age. For most of that time, technology was simply a tool — useful, powerful, but contained. Yet over the last decade or so, it has seeped under every door and between every floorboard of our lives, until it feels less like a tool and more like the air we’re forced to breathe.

Yes, I’m delivering this to you through a digital system. Yes, I proofread it with digital tools. Yes, I’m staring at a digital screen. But I still hope — fiercely — that this piece reaches you with the same soul and human warmth that I feel when I read something written with real heart.

Despite my immersion in the digital world, I’ve always kept my hands alive. I can paint, carve wood, grow food, build things, fix things. I can coax a tune from a guitar — some say it’s good, though to me it’s more toffee‑rock than rock‑god. But when that moment of flow arrives, when the world dissolves into shape and form and colour, when detail becomes both softer and more vivid at the same time — that’s the feeling that makes life worth living. The same fusion we sometimes only associate with deep, connected, sensual love. The feeling that proves we’re human in an increasingly digital world.

Watching plants grow. Birds soaring. Light shifting across leaves. Even the second hand sweeping across the minutes of your life. These tiny things remind me that time is eternal, and we are only passing through.

As I sit here typing, I wonder what the next forty years will bring. The last forty have reshaped the world. I remember the smiling face of the early Apple Mac as it slowly — painfully slowly compared to today — blinked awake. What will we remember about today in forty years? Because although technology has changed everything, it has never given me the same soulful connection that real life does. Digital memories feel hollow. Analogue ones glow.

I trained as a photographer, and I still remember the magic of watching an image bloom on paper in the darkroom. A real chemical process, unfolding in real time. It had depth. It had presence. It had soul.

If I’m still here in forty years — and there’s a chance — I can’t imagine today’s children looking back with the same connection to the analogue world. And yet… maybe this shudder I feel under my digital feet is the beginning of something new.

Maybe it’s wishful thinking. Maybe it’s intuition. But I sense a shift coming — at least in the Western world. A movement away from devices, away from constant stimulation, away from algorithmic drip‑feeding. A movement toward self‑sufficiency. It will start small: a pot of salad leaves, a tomato plant, a few herbs. Then maybe a raised bed. Then maybe a local food network. Makers making again. Communities forming again. Technology returning to its rightful place — a tool, not a tyrant.

I dream of a world where people fall in love with living again. Not a hippy counter‑culture, but a new way of being. I’ve worked with many creatives, and there’s a particular electricity that comes from scribbling ideas with a pencil — a generative force where concepts fuse and grow into something bigger than the original spark. I want that feeling in everyday life. I want to swap carrots for someone else’s peas and share stories about how their little world is working.

Some will call me a dreamer. Especially in a world where meals ping in microwaves and children don’t know where milk comes from. A world where the reverence for raw materials — the energy, the life, the labour behind every object — has been forgotten.

I don’t think everyone will return to analogue. In fact, I suspect most people will plug themselves into virtual worlds and live there, their bodies reduced to containers for their avatars. But I do believe enough people will reach back into their DNA and reclaim the wisdom of the past. They’ll remember that food takes time and love and energy — and tastes better for it. They’ll rediscover that life lived at nature’s pace is richer, deeper, more nourishing.

I’m tired of the digital desert — the parched feeling, the scouring winds of ones and zeros. I’m tired of the frantic pace where even the digital egg timer has given up. We are animals, alive, bound to Mother Nature whether we admit it or not. And when the day comes that she reminds us of her power, I’d rather meet her wearing gardening gloves than clutching a swollen finger from too much scrolling.

Or maybe I’m just a dreamer who needs to start living the dreams instead of enduring the nightmares.  Maybe I’m just one person who decides to live the way they wish the world already was?