I Miss the Person I Was Before the Internet

By Chris Lee

I used to get bored. Not the bored of staring at a phone waiting for a notification. The bored where you lie on the carpet and watch dust motes float through a shaft of afternoon light. The bored where you go outside and dig a hole just to see what's under the dirt.

I haven't felt that bored in twenty years.

This is a book about what we lost when we found the internet. Not just our attention. Not just our patience. Ourselves.

I Miss the Person I Was Before the Internet is an autofiction that reads like a memoir. Through thirty-six short, powerful chapters, a 50-year-old man named Chris Lee revisits the analog world of his childhood-the creek, the library card, the family dinner table, the mix tape, the paper map. He remembers who he was before the screen. And he asks the question that haunts a generation: Where did that person go?

From the phantom buzz in your pocket to the anxiety of the three dots, from the lost art of letter-writing to the strange comfort of a ghost in the feed, this book names the unease we all feel but rarely say out loud.

It is not a Luddite manifesto. It is not a self-help guide. It is an elegy. A confession. A love letter to the boy in the creek-and to anyone who misses him.

He's not gone, Chris Lee writes. He's just waiting for you to put down the phone.

For readers of Crying in H Mart, The Year of Magical Thinking, and Trick Mirror.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0GYP1P8ZN
• ISBN13: 9798258993557
• Release Date: April 2026
• Publisher: Independently Published
• Length: 190 Pages
• Weight: 0.52 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 6.0" x 9.0"