As long as German/Russian/American armies didn't come marching through, or a bomb didn't destroy your home a couple decades later. With the same analogy, nothing prevents you from living in a distant village nowadays, either.
Just because the world wants you to connect, you don't have to. Even with a normal job and a normal life, you can (and have to) still filter what you consume and what you spend time to digest.
Can we still filter? That's the whole point of what
@dgianstefani said earlier; there's so much tainted information, you can't even tell what to filter out anymore.
At some point you're just unable to see the truth. It will only come to you after experiencing where you went wrong. That's fine for kids, its even fine for adults... unless its about say, something like sexual harassment, or say, on what side of the road we're supposed to drive.
And about analogies... those bombs
do fall; the world
does connect; and we
are progressively adapting to each reality, but we're also experiencing how some things are becoming paradoxical right now, how goals we set and achieve turn into something that bites us in the ass lately... The economy and its unbridled growth is now squarely in that category for example. A lot of recent technological development falls in that category and the internet is really the catalyst for it. Many things can exist just fine, until they get caught on by everyone - and that is the ultimate purpose of a fully connected world. Transparency and access to information, one strengthening the other and vice versa. Without checks and balances, that train is unstoppable, much like how algorithms excel in playing into our weaknesses to generate money/clicks.
An analogy on thát: World of Warcraft. First of all, this game is
also built on systems that influence the psyche. To keep you coming back, it implements all sorts of neat tricks. Now; initially, you were a unique sight if you wore full raid gear, people would stand around you in capital cities and stuff, and ooh aah about it. One expansion later, everyone could raid more easily, more tiers of gear got available, so people could feel several degrees of special and more people could feel special. Then, another couple of expansions later,
everyone could raid by simple matchmaking, difficulties were introduced to cater to casual random grouping, and gear was adjusted accordingly. Now,
everyone could feel special. Except now, suddenly, nobody was special anymore, and everyone gets to play the same game. Too bad that in this process, everything that made the experience unique and defined was now gone. Everything feels samey, and only new progression
rewards could keep people tied to the game, instead of nice communities that together 'figured out a challenge' while at the end half the raid didn't even have a piece of gear to show for it; guilds then quickly turned into come-and-go collections of people who logged in whenever they felt like it. After all, for most things, you could also use 'randoms'. The community became interchangeable. WoW really evolved with its time: it is now on-demand, flexible, accessible for everyone and fully inclusive; and its also a thirteen in a dozen game - interchangeable, almost entirely, the only thing that makes it worthwhile is in fact its history; which it actively uses to sell expansions now.
Can we go back? The gaming market is no longer producing MMOs of WoW's unique qualities, even if that concept generated enough market for many other companies to also make a copycat and thrive for quite a while. So we do learn over time, we evolve, and we won't be going back. Its a simple fact, bar those exceptional individuals that choose to go against everything - and therefore miss out on everything. Yes, you can always go back to solitary confinement... but that was never the idea of progress was it.
