What has been lost? Nothing. Has something gone out of my experience of life by ordering all the shopping on Ocado rather than by pushing a cart around the aisles of a supermarket for an hour and a half? Yes: A pain in my backside has been relieved. It is all now done by a series of small, familiar flutterings over the keyboard, which I can do at my leisure, any time of day or night, without looking for the car keys or straining my sense of sociability by running into hundreds of people who are being similarly tortured by their own basic needs. I’ve always liked music, the sheer luxury of having a particular recording there when you want to hear it, but nothing in my long years of hunting for and buying records can beat Spotify. I’ve heard many a nostalgist say there was something more, well, effortful, and therefore poetic, in the old system of walking for miles to a record shop only to discover they’d just sold out. People become addicted to the weights and measures of their own experience: We value our own story and what it entails. But we can’t become hostages to the romantic notion that the past is always a better country. There’s a few million girls with flatirons who will happily tell you the opposite.

Getting better is getting better. Improvement is improving. There will, of course, always be people who feel alienated by a new thing and there might be a compelling argument to suggest all this availability is merely a high-speed way of filling a spiritual gap in our lives. Yet I can assure you there was no lack of spiritual gap in the lives of people living in small towns in 1982. It was just a lot harder to bridge that gap. We used to wait for years for a particular film to come on television, thinking we might never see it. One had practically to join a cult in order to share a passionate interest. I can still remember Tupperware parties, when — Oh, the good old days! — women would meet at each other’s houses on rain-soaked evenings to try out and buy pastel-colored breakfast bowls. And that was a good night! Communication was usually a stab in the dark: You might find someone to talk to about your favorite book, but more likely you wouldn’t, unless you moved to New York or took to wearing a sandwich board. And now you can find the love of your life by posting a picture and proving you’ve got a GSOH (great sense of humor). Every day now there’s something new to replace the old way of doing a crucial thing that was hard to do. Is it the middle of the night and you live in Idaho and you want to talk to someone about your roses? Is it Christmas Eve in Rome and you want to know where to hear some music and light a candle?

Physical loneliness can still exist, of course, but you’re never friendless online. Don’t tell me the spiritual life is over. In many ways it’s only just begun. Technology is not doing what the sci-fi writers warned it might — it is not turning us into digits or blank consumers, into people who hate community. Instead, there is evidence that the improvements are making us more democratic, more aware of the planet, more interested in the experience of people who aren’t us, more connected to the mysteries of privacy and surveillance. It’s also pressing us to question what it means to have life so easy, when billions do not. I lived through the age of complacency, before information arrived and the outside world liquified its borders. And now it seems as if the real split in the world will not only be between the fed and the unfed, the healthy and the unhealthy, but between those with smartphones and those without.

Technology changed my character. It didn’t change my parents’. My mother says she wasn’t touched by the moon landing or the Internet, though she admits that having a fridge has made a wonderful difference. She’s not nostalgic for the days when they would place the milk bottles out on the window ledge overnight — that does the trick, in Scotland — though she has a general feeling that life was cozier and friendlier years ago. I must have taken some of that from her, but the more I think of it the more I see it as an affectation. For me, life did not become more complex with technology, it’s became more amenable, and what a supreme luxury it is, being able to experience nowadays your own reach in the world, knowing that there truly is no backwater, except the one you happily remember from the simple life of yore.

My daughter was right to laugh. Because what she was hearing was a hint of vanity and a note of pride in my stories of the unimproved life. In point of fact, we sat in the past and burned with the desire to get out, to meet people, to find our voices, to discover the true meaning of luxury in our confrontation with a panoply of genuine choices. Our wish wasn’t to plant a flag on the ground of what we knew and defend it until death, but to sail out, not quite knowing what was past the horizon but hoping we might like it when we got there. My favorite record when I was a teenager, trapped in a box bedroom in a suburban corner of old Europe, was “How Soon Is Now?” by the Smiths. I had taken a bus and a train and walked for miles to buy the record, and it told a story about giving yourself up to experience. I don’t know where the physical record has gone. It’s probably still in my mother’s attic. But the song is right here at the end of my fingertips as I’m typing, and in the new, constantly improving world around us, it took me just under 15 seconds to locate it. Would anyone care to dance?