So last Tuesday I’m at my brother-in-law Mike’s house for dinner, right? And I need to send this massive file to a parent – some presentation about screen time limits that I clearly don’t follow myself, the irony wasn’t lost on me. At home this would’ve been a whole production. I’d make coffee, start the upload, maybe grade a few papers while watching that progress bar crawl along like it’s personally offended by my existence. You know the drill.
But here’s the thing – I hit send and boom. Done. Like, literally three seconds and I’m getting the confirmation email. I’m staring at my phone like it just performed actual magic.
Mike’s over by the stove doing something with chicken and he sees my face. “Everything okay over there, Brenda?”
“How fast is your internet?” I ask, probably sounding like I’d just witnessed a miracle.
He shrugs. “I don’t know, pretty normal I guess. Why?”
“Pretty normal?” I’m practically squeaking at this point. “What do you have?”
“Oh, they installed fiber last month. Gigabit something.” He says this the way someone might mention they picked up milk at the store. Meanwhile I’m having what can only be described as a spiritual awakening about upload speeds.
The rest of dinner I was basically useless for conversation because I was doing mental math about how many hours of my life I’ve lost to loading screens. Hours, people. Possibly days. All those times Jake’s been screaming at his tablet to load a YouTube video faster, all those Netflix nights where we spend more time watching the buffering circle than actual shows, all those parent-teacher conference prep sessions where I’m uploading gradebooks at the speed of molasses.
Next morning I’m on the phone with my internet provider. You can guess how that went.
“I’m sorry ma’am, but your address doesn’t qualify for fiber installation at this time.”
“What do you mean doesn’t qualify? I have money. I want to give you money for faster internet.”
“It’s about infrastructure availability in your area.”
For about ten minutes I genuinely considered moving. I mean, Rob thought I was having some kind of breakdown when I started looking at real estate listings during my lunch break. But here’s the embarrassing truth – I’m not the only one dealing with this weird modern jealousy about internet speeds.
It’s like car envy, but nerdier and somehow more personal. Because at least with a fancy car you can choose to walk or take the bus. But internet? That’s how we work now, how our kids do homework, how we function as a family. When your connection sucks compared to everyone else’s, you feel genuinely left behind.
I remember the exact moment this became a real thing for me. Back in 2009 – Emma was maybe seven – I was at this education conference in Chicago. The hotel wifi was incredible, like nothing I’d ever experienced. I downloaded software updates I didn’t even need just to watch the progress bars fly by. It was pathetic but also kind of thrilling? Like getting to test drive a Ferrari when you’re used to driving a 1998 Honda Civic.
Back home, everything felt impossibly slow. Opening email attachments became this whole ordeal. Emma would ask why our computer was “broken” when videos took forever to load. How do you explain to a seven-year-old that our internet isn’t broken, it’s just sad compared to what exists in the rest of the world?
The thing about digital envy is nobody wants to admit they have it. It sounds so ridiculous – getting jealous over download speeds. But I’ve seen it happen to completely rational adults. My colleague Sarah got fiber installed in her apartment last year and for weeks she was doing speed tests like it was her new hobby. When the results weren’t as fast as advertised, she looked genuinely heartbroken. Over internet speeds!
Then there was Dave in IT at school. He found this perfect apartment, great neighborhood, reasonable rent. But it was just outside the fiber service area. You should’ve seen his face when he found out. Like someone had told him the place came with a permanent rain cloud over the parking lot.
These aren’t first-world problems in the traditional sense because internet access has become so fundamental to how we live and work. When I’m trying to upload lesson plans and it takes twenty minutes, that’s twenty minutes I could’ve spent with my kids or grading papers or just sitting down for five seconds. When Emma’s trying to submit homework and our connection keeps timing out, she gets stressed and I get stressed and suddenly we’re all mad at the wifi router like it personally wronged our family.
Last summer we rented this beach house that promised “high-speed internet.” What a joke. First morning I’m trying to join a virtual faculty meeting while Jake wants to watch Disney+ and Emma’s uploading something for summer school. The bandwidth couldn’t handle it. Everything crashed.
I ended up driving to the town library and joining my meeting from their parking lot like some kind of digital nomad. The librarian came out to her car and just nodded at me knowingly.
“Internet?” she asked.
“That obvious?”
“You’re the third person here today. I live four blocks away – same problem. My husband and I take turns coming here when we both have video calls.”
There was something both sad and comforting about that moment. Here we are, grown adults with jobs and mortgages, huddled in a library parking lot because our vacation rental internet couldn’t handle modern life.
The crazy part is how your standards shift once you experience something better. Before Mike’s house, I thought our home internet was fine. Slow sometimes, but fine. Now everything feels broken. It’s like when you wear glasses for the first time and realize you’ve been living in a blurry world – except with internet speeds, and way more frustrating.
I catch myself getting irrationally angry at perfectly normal loading times now. A webpage takes eight seconds to load and I’m tapping my fingers like I’m being personally victimized by fiber optic cables. Emma rolls her eyes when I complain about upload speeds because to her, waiting thirty seconds for something is basically instantaneous compared to what I grew up with.
And she’s not wrong! I remember dial-up internet in college. I remember when downloading a single song took forty-five minutes and you’d better pray nobody needed to use the phone. The fact that I can stream Netflix at all should feel miraculous. But instead I get annoyed when it takes more than two seconds to start playing.
It’s the same thing that happens with everything else in parenting and technology – the goalposts keep moving. First we were amazed our kids could video chat with grandparents. Then we got frustrated when the calls weren’t crystal clear HD. Now we’re annoyed if there’s even the slightest delay or pixelation. We’ve trained ourselves to expect perfection from systems that are honestly pretty amazing.
But here’s what really gets me – the inequality of it all. I teach kids whose families can barely afford internet at all, and then I go home and complain because mine isn’t fast enough to upload files instantly. Some of my students are doing homework on their phones because they don’t have computers or reliable home internet. Meanwhile I’m over here coveting my brother-in-law’s fiber connection like it’s a luxury car.
The digital divide isn’t just between rich and poor anymore – it’s between neighborhoods, sometimes just streets apart. My friend Lisa moved six blocks last year. Same city, same internet provider, but her speeds went from terrible to amazing just because of where the cables happened to be installed. Six blocks! That’s like a two-minute drive, but it might as well be different planets in terms of internet access.
Rob thinks I’m being dramatic about all this. He works from home in IT so he’s used to dealing with connection issues. “Just adapt,” he says. “Find workarounds.” Easy for him to say – his job involves troubleshooting technology problems. Mine involves trying to teach Shakespeare to kids who can’t focus for three minutes because they’re used to TikTok’s instant gratification.
When I’m trying to show a video in class and it buffers every thirty seconds, I lose them completely. They get that glazed look that says their mental wifi has disconnected. Then they go home to their various internet speeds – some blazing fast, some worse than ours – and somehow they’re supposed to complete the same online assignments with completely different levels of digital access.
Emma’s applying to colleges now and some of the virtual campus tours won’t even load properly on our connection. We end up going to Starbucks so she can watch them without constant interruptions. It feels absurd that choosing a college requires finding better wifi, but here we are.
I’ve started checking internet speeds the way some people check property values. There are websites that map fiber availability by address, and I browse them like real estate porn. “Look at this neighborhood, Rob – gigabit speeds for thirty dollars less than what we pay for our sad excuse for broadband.” He just shakes his head.
Sometimes I wonder if this is how my parents felt about cable TV when I was young. We had basic channels while friends had HBO and MTV, and I thought we were living in the dark ages. But at least bad TV didn’t interfere with homework or work productivity. Slow internet affects everything now.
The worst part is how it makes you feel foolish for caring. It’s just internet speeds, right? But when your livelihood depends on uploading gradebooks and your kids’ education requires streaming videos and downloading files, those speeds matter more than they should. When Jake’s tablet crashes because it can’t handle his math app while someone else is using wifi, it’s not just inconvenience – it’s his homework hanging in the balance.
Maybe I should just be grateful we have internet at all. Maybe this is exactly the kind of entitled complaining that makes younger people roll their eyes at Gen X parents. But I don’t think it’s really about the speeds themselves – it’s about feeling left behind by technology that changes faster than we can keep up with, in a world where keeping up isn’t optional anymore.
Until fiber comes to our neighborhood, I guess I’ll just keep doing speed tests whenever I visit friends with better connections, like some kind of digital voyeur. And maybe I’ll hint to Mike about letting me work from his place occasionally. You know, for the sake of educational productivity and definitely not because watching files upload instantly gives me a weird technological high.
At least I’m not alone in this particular modern madness. Every parent I know has some version of internet envy, whether they admit it or not. We’re all just trying to function in a world that demands digital perfection while dealing with connections that barely handle our basic needs. If that’s not the most Gen X problem ever, I don’t know what is.
Brenda’s a Minneapolis teacher and mom trying to raise kids in a world glued to devices. Her posts mix honesty, guilt, and humor as she navigates parenting, teaching, and losing daily battles against technology. She’s not a technophobe—just a realist with Wi-Fi exhaustion.
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