Sixteen years after it went off the air, the TV show Friends is still immensely popular, especially with a younger audience that's never known life without social media and smartphones.
As someone who was born in the 1980s, I am in the interesting position of being young enough to have grown up with the Internet, but old enough to remember what life was like before it. I understand the appeal of this "simpler" past. It's easy to feel "trapped" by the same services and devices that are meant to make life easier. Social media creates a need to manage a persona and stay hyper-connected. News and entertainment websites provide unlimited personalized distraction.
However, despite all of these concerns, we don't want to go back to the way things were, either. We complain about being hyper-connected, but then complain louder when the in-flight WiFi doesn't work.
The trick, then, appears to be the ability to embrace the good of modern technology while not becoming hostage to the bad. Which is I why I appreciate the work of Cal Newport in Digital Minimalism, Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky in Make Time, and other similar books. In all of these examples, the common theme is to adapt your use of technology in a way that supports your larger goals. Many of these adaptations, interestingly enough, constrain the technology from its original ability. For example, website-blocking apps like Freedom allow you to focus your Internet usage based on a limited time window.
Constraining your use of technology in this way is not always in line with how the creators of this technology intended it be used. Twitter insists that you view a non-chronigical list of Tweets in and around your networkk, so that you'll always be presented with something new and captivating. Using a third-party client, though, brings you back to a chronological view, and the serenity that comes with having a finite amount of information to consume.
Making these sorts of decisions isn't easy, and is -- at times -- actively discouraged by the companies we interact with. But if the end result is more control of how our time and attention is spent, nothing could be more important than that.