One hot afternoon, on entering a classroom, the steady hum of the air conditioner struck me: this wasn’t the world I grew up in. Somewhere between that hum and the rustle of tissue paper, we stopped listening- not to the world, but to ourselves.
We stopped barking. Not in anger, but in identity. In memory. In soul. Like dogs trained to sit quietly, we learned to silence the sounds that once made us who we are.

I never grew up with smartphones. My earliest memory of a phone was my father’s yellow Lemon keypad. Products and clothes weren’t delivered to my hometown. Coffee wasn’t a therapeutic ritual. Online games weren’t a means of recreation.
I only remember wearing clothes my mother bought from the local market. I drank tea with rice in it for breakfast-a simple and soulful start to the day. Recreation meant playing jackstones, house-house, Seven Stones, or chasing cousins barefoot across courtyards. We were never bored. Life was full of connection, noise, and stories.
We barked then, freely and joyfully.
Not with words alone, but with laughter, dialects, barefoot games. That bark was our belonging.
These memories, though seemingly simple or even outdated, were rich with flavor, laughter, and identity. They made us feel human.

Today, life is undeniably easier, fancier, more modern, more advanced. No one can deny the growth and progress. But somewhere in this polished progress, the bark began to fade.
Even though smartphones arrived in my household during my high school years, I vividly remember when watching a Korean drama from mobile phones was something undreamt of. With so many new introductions and cultural influences, we’ve certainly grown.

But deep down, I wonder: what have we left behind to become who we are today?

I recall my father refusing to use a tissue once, stating he hadn’t grown up using one and didn’t need it. That moment lingered and stayed with me. Maybe it was dignity. Perhaps rebellion. It wasn’t just a habit but it was something simple, quiet, and dignified. And it made me ask: has life changed for the better, but at a cost? Is something essential quietly slipping away with every culture we adopt, every mindless scroll?

I’ve noticed a shift in how people connect. There’s much less in-person gathering and talking; in fact, there are people I come across who primarily get together to play online games. As a result, conversations are becoming rarer, losing their authenticity, lacking depth, and increasingly confined to screens, making them fleeting.

We’ve been trained our entire lives, like how dogs are taught to sit, stay, obey. But what’s the value if the dog cannot bark? If it has lost its bark or to make it worse, if it has been taught never to bark? Not to disrupt. Not to speak in our own tongue. Not to eat from our roots.

The world today tells us modernity is sipping lattes, wearing designer clothes, speaking with polished accents, and photographing food before eating. But when was the last time we saw people having real conversations? When did we last make and eat food passed down through generations? Language also often becomes the silent victim. I’ve seen people hold back from speaking in their own dialects, worried they’ll be judged, seen as less, or feel out of place if not good at English. They hide a part of who they are, just to fit in. The stories we once shared have been buried under global entertainment. So now we have to ask- whose stories are we really listening to, and whose have we stopped telling?

I come from a region rich in language, flavor, rituals, and soul where songs were sung in dialects, folk lores were passed down in our dialects, traditional cuisines were prepared at home for meals, and functions were celebrated even without any calendar reminders. And these weren’t mere traditions but ways of knowing who we were.

Now, I watch that soul slowly fade with every trendy global diet, every cultural influence we adopt and every word we forget to speak. We’ve been well-trained to fit in.
But maybe it’s time we remember how to bark.
Like dogs taught to sit quietly in the presence of guests, we’ve been conditioned by systems to behave, adapt, and blend in. We don’t bark. We scroll. We blend. We forget. And somewhere in this quiet obedience, something essential is slipping away—our voice, our flavors, our stories, our identity, our soul.

This isn’t to say modernity is evil. I, too, enjoy quick deliveries and technological convenience. But when convenience replaces connection and trends erase tradition, we must ask: what are we truly becoming?

Perhaps it’s time to revisit the words we once spoke, the dishes we once shared, and the stories we once told not just to remember, but to return to ourselves.
To remember is to resist.
To bark is to belong. And perhaps, to bark again is to come home.

Rügono Seyie