This is NPR's LifeKit. I'm Malik Agarib and editor on NPR ScienceDask.

And today, we're talking about what life was like before the internet, how it's changed and what we can do about it.

We're never bored anymore because we have constant access to information, entertainment, and connection.

That's Pamela Paul. She's the author of the book, 100 Things We've Lost to the Internet.

It documents all those quirky little things that people used to do before everything went online.

I know a thing or two about those things because I'm 36.

Facebook was introduced the second semester of my freshman year of college, and the iPhone arrived when I was a junior.

Which meant, for most of my early life, I was doing things like making calls with a landline telephone,

looking up movie times in my local newspaper, politely making conversation at dinner instead of looking at my phone.

What can I say? I'm old-fashioned.

The latest statistic that I've seen is only 28% of Americans forbid use of a phone during meal times.

I do think about what we lose when everyone is just sitting there in their own sort of separate world on a screen,

instead of having some kind of conversation, instead of being forced into boredom.

So, what are we losing exactly now that everyone and everything is on the internet?

In this episode of LifeKit, Pamela is going to help us remember some of the good things and bad things about life back then,

and share advice about how to go analog if we're feeling nostalgic for that pre-smart phone life.

Reading your book really made me miss life before the internet, and you had a lot of time to think about our old lives.

After writing about 100 things, what have you learned about our old lives before the internet and our new lives now?

Well, one thing to keep in mind is that you're not alone in missing some things that were from our sort of before times,

our pre-internet era, but that we actually have the power to recapture those things.

And I think we sometimes forget that.

And so, I sort of stop every time I think about adding a technology or using a technology, and I ask myself,

...