When life loses its quiet rituals

When Robert Shrimsley recently asked in the Financial Times, “Does anyone go to the cinema anymore?”, he was offering more than a casual observation on declining box office numbers. Unwittingly, he posed a fundamental question about the fate of the small, rhythmic rituals that once gave human life its recognisable shape.
Because before the cinema, a whole sequence of similar questions forms a quiet queue: Does anyone still read a ink--print-ed newspaper over morning coffee? Does anyone wake up to the un-script-ed banter of live radio? Does anyone still write a letter by hand, fold it, and trust it to the mail? Does anyone wait a full week for a television show to air at its scheduled hour? And, most radically of all: is it still possible to live without a smartphone? (I still know a few resolute souls who deliberately refuse to own one.)
These are not technical questions-;- they are existential ones. They ask what becomes of the human experience when we strip away the analogue anchors that used to bind us both to the world and to ourselves.
Going to the cinema, first with a sweetheart, later with a spouse, was never merely about watching a narrative unfold on a large canvas. It was an exercise in radical presence: a commitment to sit with one person, in one dark room, for ninety minutes, completely shielded from notifications, messages, and the temptation of alternative screens. The darkness of the auditorium was a sanctuary, a tacit agreement to leave the chaotic world outside the double doors and allow the film to fill the space between two people.
When that shared sacred space is reduced to a Netflix feed in a living room,´-or-a laptop balanced on a duvet, something unquantifiable dissolves. The collective spell breaks. The external world, once kept at bay, creeps back in through the glowing rectangle resting on the nightstand.
The same subtle tragedy has befallen the radio. To wake up to the voice of a presenter whose cadences and laughs you have known for years offers a profound sense of continuity. Radio asks nothing of you-;- it presents a continuous stream of thought, music, and news. Riding along with a radio station is like taking a bus whose exact stops you may not know, but whose driver you implicitly trust.
Streaming platforms, by contrast, demand constant executive -function-: the song. Choose the podcast. Pick the language. Skip the intro. This illusion of endless choice comes at a steep psychological price. It forces you into a state of perpetual self-examination: What do I want right now? Who am I at this exact moment? Live radio granted you the quiet grace of simply being a listener, an anonymous member of an invisible, shared audience.
Then there was the broadsheet newspaper, that tactile, oversized rectangle of paper that imposed its own physical tempo. You could not “scroll” a -print-ed page. You had to fold it, adjust your posture, tilt it toward the morning light, and let your eyes settle on your favorite column.
To read a newspaper in a bustling café was not just an act of gathering information-;- it was a quiet declaration of your place in the world. It signalled that you were a person taking time to observe, allowing the day to move around you at its own pace. When news is flattened into a relentless cascade of push notifications, the world ceases to be a collection of curated pages-;- it becomes a series of digital alarms.
Handwriting was another ritual of beautiful slowness. A physical letter carried what an email never can: the weight of the hand, the hesitation before selecting a word, the texture of paper, the scent of the envelope, and the permanence of ink. When we type on glass today, we leave no physical trace, only data. The loss here is not about calligraphy-;- it is about our relationship with time. Who still enjoys the luxury of writing something that cannot be edited after sending? A letter read slowly, kept in a desk drawer rather than an ephemeral cloud.
This brings us back to Shrimsley’s question: “Does anyone go to the cinema anymore?”
It serves as a barometer for whether we can preserve even one of our shared analogue sanctuaries. Industry stats tell us that roughly 123.5 million people visited UK cinemas last year, a modest recovery from the pandemic years, yet still well below pre-COVID baselines. While those figures matter to studio executives, they miss the deeper human metric: How many of those moviegoers were seeking a shared moment of escape? How many went simply to feel that life is still lived out in the public square, rather than consumed alone in a dark room before a private display?
Enter the “attention economy.” In this hyper-financialised landscape, your time is no longer your own-;- it is raw material extracted by platforms competing for screen time. Every minute spent staring at a device is a fraction of a cent for a corporation, and a loss for a human ritual.
When you stream a film at home, you rarely experience the narrative fully-;- you experience the anxiety of endless choice: Should I keep watching? Should I switch? Is there something better? The screen is no longer a window onto the world-;- it is a mirror reflecting your immediate restlessness. Radio liberated us from that restlessness by choosing for us. The newspaper offered a retreat by imposing its own order. The smartphone, conversely, leaves you no peace, constantly whispering: What do you want next?
The attention economy does not merely displace our habits-;- it rewires our relationship with time itself. Time that was once lived in vibrant public spaces is now consumed behind closed doors. Shared moments are atomised into individual streams. Time measured by meaningful rituals has been replaced by time measured in engagement metrics and notifications.
Shrimsley’s question is ultimately about whether we retain the agency to reclaim fragments of our time from the market, away from platforms designed not to help us live, but to keep us attentive.
Technology has done far more than -alter-our media consumption-;- it has subtly rewritten the architecture of daily life. Going out to the cinema is no longer a cultural staple, but merely one option among millions. The morning radio host is no longer a constant companion, but an app easily swiped away.
And as these quiet habits fade, something intangible wears away with them: the reassuring sense that life is an experience shared in public, a collection of simple rituals that grant us internal coherence. We find ourselves living in a world devoid of shared pauses, lacking places we visit for a meaning that transcends mere “content.”
Technology did not just digitise our media-;- it quietly stole the quiet serenity found in the simplest things: a paper ticket, a folding page, a cup of coffee and a familiar voice filling the quiet space between ourselves and the world.

Rate the article
Bad	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10	Very good
Result : 100%							Participated in the vote : 1