Life & Wisdom Quote by Laura Hillenbrand

There is a particular kind of humility in admitting you’re alive in your era but not quite of it. Hillenbrand’s line lands because it refuses the usual tech-skeptic swagger. She doesn’t posture as a principled holdout or dress it up as nostalgia. She offers something rarer: a plainspoken confession that modern life is happening around her at a speed she can’t—or won’t—match, and that her distance from it is both fact and feeling.

The rhythm is the trick. “I’ve used a cellphone exactly twice” is comic in its specificity, a deadpan statistic that sounds like a punchline. Then she widens the lens: “Things move on. The world changes.” Those short clauses mimic the blunt inevitability of progress, like the ticking of a clock you can’t argue with. The final sentence, “And I don’t know it,” is where the emotional voltage hides. It’s not “I don’t like it” or “I refuse it,” but “I don’t know it” - a statement about access, energy, and participation. It suggests a life lived partly outside the feedback loop of constant updates and constant reachability.

In context, Hillenbrand has been open about chronic illness and a working life built on intense focus, research, and solitude. Read that way, the quote becomes less about technophobia and more about the cost of contemporary belonging: to keep up is to submit to a world that never stops asking for your attention.