From CB Radio to Social Media

The Lost Art of Human Connection: From CB Radios to Digital Loneliness

Writing as a Refuge for a Wandering Mind

I started writing because my thoughts refused to stay in neat, orderly lines. Journals became a grounding wire—a way to corral the chaos in my head, if only for a little while. But unless a subject truly mattered to me, the words would scatter like radio static, dissolving into half-formed ideas and abandoned paragraphs.

Perhaps that’s why I’ve always been a loner. People’s egos exhaust me. Small talk feels like a performance. Yet, paradoxically, I found my most genuine connections not in person, but through the crackling frequencies of a Citizen Band (CB) radio.

The CB Radio Days: Randomness, Voices, and Midnight Magic

Before the internet flattened human interaction into text and pixels, there was CB radio—raw, unfiltered, and alive with voices. I operated on the fringes, using the (technically illegal) AM band before the UK legalized FM CB in 1981. Soon, my entire social circle consisted of people known only by their handles—Shadow, Steam Boat, Blue Lightning. School friends faded into the background; the airwaves became my tribe.

There was something beautifully anarchic about it. Conversations meandered for hours, strangers "breaking in on the side" with a "Hey, got your ears on?" Unlike today’s sterile DMs, you could hear a person’s character in their voice—the hesitation, the laughter, the way they said "10-4, good buddy."

One night, around 4 AM, a voice named Steam Boat cut into a chat between me and a local friend. Three hours later, we were in his living room, sipping coffee as he told us war stories—real ones, about forests with no bullets and hospital wards missing walls from bomb blasts. Then, as if the night couldn’t get stranger, he performed a card trick that left us speechless. My chosen card was waiting in an envelope behind his clock. "Paul Daniels’ agent wanted to buy this one," he said with a grin.

Before we left, I gave him a set of HMS Victory blueprints—he’d been hand-carving Nelson’s flagship, down to the last cannon, but lacked reference images. Months later, he finished it. Then he was gone.

The Networks We Built (Before Algorithms Did It For Us)

As a "late-nighter," I started keeping a logbook—recording call signs, signal strengths, the ebb and flow of voices in the dark. Soon, I was running unofficial networks, calling out for long-distance contacts (despite CB’s supposed 10-mile limit). On weekends, we’d patch together 60–70 people—truckers, nurses, teenagers—stretching from Scotland to Devon, all marveling at the miracle of hearing a stranger’s voice from hundreds of miles away.

There were no profiles, no likes, no performative personas. Just voices in the static, choosing to connect.

The Digital Trade-Off: Knowledge for Connection

When adulthood (and the internet) arrived, my radios gathered dust. The world gained instant information but lost something harder to define—the texture of human interaction. Today, we swim in a sea of memes and 5-second clips, faces glued to screens, mistaking digital noise for real connection.

AI now blurs the line between real and synthetic. Conversations are algorithmically curated. Friendships are measured in reaction emojis. And I wonder: Did we sacrifice depth for convenience?

The CB era proved something profound: We crave randomness, spontaneity, the thrill of a voice cutting through the dark. We just forgot how to listen.