My generation is going to be the last in the West to remember life before the internet. I don't think anyone yet appreciates the scale of this psychological rift, or how jarring it really is.

Virtually everyone I have met in the last decade has an online presence. I can follow a lot of what they do in life, and could reach out and speak to them instantly, if I chose.

By contrast, if I think of someone I remember from my childhood - my early teachers, the dinner ladies, the friendly old man at the post office - and look them up, there will be simply no trace of them online. The same even goes for places I visited, which no longer exist.

I came to maturity with the internet, so am unfamiliar with most of the old archival ways of finding information, parish records, birth certificates, and so on. I would struggle to produce evidence that many of the people I knew as a child ever existed at all.

This is true, despite the fact that a fair number of them will obviously still be alive. But now it feels, sometimes, as if they only ever existed in my head, because they never existed on the internet. This is genuinely psychologically distressing to me at times.