My son was 11 years old when he volunteered to be the boy soloist at the school Christmas concert. Nobody else would do it. That alone made me proud. He was standing there looking like a young Aled Jones, and he was magnificent.

The school hall was full. Other parents leaned forward in their plastic chairs. Very intelligent with his pressed uniform and surprisingly melodic. It was one of those moments that announce themselves: pay attention, this is real.

I took out my phone to film it.

I thought about how my own mother would have cried seeing this. He had died five years earlier. So who the hell was he filming it for?

Online life happened at the same time I had kids.

Online life for me did not come despite the children; He arrived with them, practically the same day. I was the first of my friends to get married, the first to have a baby. While they were still in the real world, I was at home with a newborn and a new computer, and a discussion board was the only room where everyone else was also awake at 2am, or the only room I was in, at least.

And we all know what the first few days led to. Facebook emerged and phones became smarter. But it wasn’t just about browsing social media: the work was also digital.

As the editor of a family page, my children were happy, whether I liked it or not. I would rush to my computer to write radio scripts the same day as soon as my second baby went down for a nap. Sitting next to the bathtub, Googling symptoms. Don’t even cook without a digital recipe open on the screen. There was no shutdown.

I was physically present, but not really there.

Back then, if you had asked me, I would have told you that I was completely present. Physically it was. My children would tell you something different.

My youngest son is now 19 years old. Recently he said he had to ask me for anything three times. “I didn’t know if you were working or commuting. I got the same lack of reaction either way.” he added. For a child, the face looking at a screen is still the same face.

My three children are now adults. And I still see what I did when they were little everywhere: the phone and the stroller, the line of parents on their screens while the children play nearby. I know that father. I was that father. I’m probably still that parent.

But regret isn’t really about the big moments. It’s about the minutes. The small, unremarkable minutes that passed while I was half somewhere else. Minutes that individually do not seem like much but that add up, and continue adding up, until one day you do the math and 25 years have passed.

I regret scrolling all the time

I don’t regret working. I don’t regret the career, the deadlines, the ambition. But the rest (the meaningless checking, the reflective displacement, the being physically present and mentally somewhere else) What was it all for? What did I really gain?

Reading my son’s words again, I keep coming to the same answer. Time you will never return.

We’re talking about banning phones in schools and restricting social media for those under 16. None of this means anything if the adults who pick them up at the door can’t drop theirs off.