If you plug in an antenna into your television and scan the local channels, you'll find Partridge Family and Walker Texas Ranger and the Jetsons and Stargate and My Two Dads and Sanford and Son and the Beverly Hillbillies streaming on a dozen forgotten .3 and .4 channels, interspersed with ads for electric wheelchairs and mesothelioma class actions and reading glasses like it's 2:37 pm on April 14, 1998.

If you walk in your area downtown with your phone in your pocket and look in the windows of the strange stores you've only driven past, you'll find collections of tennis rackets and VCRs and ladders and travel itineraries to Honolulu, and you can just walk in and talk with someone 72 years old who's run the store for 50 years, and maybe you'll buy or maybe you won't, but they are there.

And you can repair your shoes or hem your pants or put an old suit up for consignment like someone who would have done this on a lunch hour in 1987. And there is a local grocer that is slightly more expensive than Walmart but it is run by a married couple whose kids don't want the store anymore but you will get the best cheese you've had and a soda you'd forgotten about and an old man will put a little paper receipt printed with real purple ink and put it in a brown paper bag and wish you a good day.

If you start to insist on paying with only cash and if you start to eat at the first place you see and if you stop using a drive thru and an ATM card and DoorDash and Amazon Prime, you'll soon realize there's an entire world out there that is still there, and it is fading slowly, but not for you, for you are the one who are just discovering it, it may be crumbling but you are there to see it and to stand firm upon it for a little longer.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5905127&forum_id=2Reputation#50143660)