Friday night at the mall. “Meet Santa”, outside Macy’s. Empty line. Nobody wants to meet Santa. Poor old guy is slumped in his velveteen chair, dejected over the lack of Christmas spirit in this place.

I am killing time, walking around while my kid bowls with buddies at the adjoining Round 1, getting some steps in, as we oldsters like to say. I am in self-absorbed mode, but in this moment, my heart hurts for Santa. I consider stopping for a pic with this crestfallen Lord of the North. But I don’t stop. These days, folks might mistake my nostalgia for a strange fetish.

As I pace the mall—populated more by ghosts than the living, a Holy Land in my eyes, conquered and neglected by the forces of twenty-first century commerce—I feel as a child betrayed. We gave all this up. In less than a decade, it will be a land of charmless warehouses. No spirit. No Christmas magic. Where is Buddy the Elf when you need him?

Perhaps my cynic’s eyes lie to me. There could be advantages in the stripping back of older ways. Our hunting, gathering ancestors had little time for things like philosophy, for hunting and gathering is tedious and long. If the shopping mall is a current version of the wild earth, where modern people go to hunt and gather things like shoes and scented candles and Bubble Tea, how much more time will we have for self-reflection, when all those things are hunted and gathered for us? Our future could be paradise.

Or it could be boring. An unmemorable montage of recycled memes and video clips, peppered with ads for things we’ll rarely use but will purchase anyway, just to feel different for a moment or two.

I believe there is hope for us, alluded to by a man older even than Ole’ Saint Nick. “There is nothing new under the sun,” the old man wrote, and we canonized his words in the world’s most popular book. You can take those words to mean many things. I take them to mean that all of our “new ways”—fast scrolling, attention losing, sound biting, misinterpreting, easy buying, easy financing, food and sex and digatainment on demand—none of this is new. It is a recycling of the old. The recycling has just gotten faster. And so, perhaps, will our tolerance for it grow shorter. We will be like the sweet-toothed glutton, forced to eat cake until he pukes and afterward never craves cake again.

We will crave the opposite. ‘What is the opposite,’ you ask? Ditch your phone for awhile, go some place quiet and find out. I suggest the mall.

It’s peaceful there, these days.