Interest, if you’re able to catch it in the first place, has never been easier to lose. The culture of instant gratification is robbing us not only of our patience, but of a way in which our neurons used to fire. That don’t-tell-me-it’s-on-the-tip-of-my-tongue feeling is too soon satiated by a Google search, and having to wait for what you want is a relic of an age predating credit cards and DVR. What we’re losing in those waiting moments is hard to fully grasp because we can’t know for sure what we’re missing when we refuse to indulge in wondering about something, anything at all, for just a little a while.

Jaywalking, at least for Honolulu residents, is a thing of a more carefree past. Remember the days when you could jog across an open road at your discretion? Fail to wait for a signal these days and the police will make sure you’re $130 poorer. No, we don’t want to get hit by cars. Yes, we know how to look both ways. Dear officers: Any chance you could realign your focus on the druggies that deal outside of the door to our office? Please?

Keys are expert at getting lost–car keys in particular have this way of hiding from us when we need them most. We simply can’t stop losing them. But we’re also losing keys in a greater sense. Hotel keys have long been magnetized plastic rectangles. Skate keys and clock keys are largely forgotten. And we still use church keys, but don’t call them that anymore. Today, drinking a bottle of a beer doesn’t require a key, but an opener.

Language’s evolution is a metaphor for loss itself. It changes constantly and mostly imperceptibly as it happens. Words and phrases fall in and out of popularity (we’ve noticed “bitchin’” is making a comeback), while plenty of languages disappear all together. There are some 7,000 languages across the world with approximately 10 percent of the population speaking–and thus responsible for preserving–90 percent of them. This is to say nothing of grammar and penmanship, which has also fallen by the wayside as our relationship to language has become vastly more technological. The fallout there is, in our opinion, one of the most tragic in recent losses: the loss of letter writing. And if you’re lucky enough to know a still-dedicated letter writer, you know why.

Modems screaming their way to a dial-up Internet connection are an echo of the past. The same goes for that exhausted sound that printers–remember the kind that churned out spooled paper attached end-to-end with perforated edges?–used to make. When we talk about loss, we often think of technologies that have been replaced, but what about the sounds those technologies added to our daily lives? The aggressive punching of typewriter keys was replaced by a more gentle typing on computers, the heavy whir of a VHS tape rewinding is mostly gone, as is the click-click-click of the wheel on a rotary phone and the busy signal we once heard after dialing.

Nene birds, Hawaii’s stripe-necked state fowl, are doing relatively well these days. Our mostly beloved local goose may be threatened, but the nene (not to be confused with the Nene jet engine, manufactured by Rolls-Royce in the 1940s and now also lost to time) is no longer on the brink of extinction, thanks to conservation efforts from bird enthusiasts (though we have lost the nene, once a feast staple, from our dinner tables). In the early 1950s, there were fewer than three dozen nene left on the planet. The nene nui, a larger variety of nene–along with the Giant Hawaiian goose–weren’t so lucky. Both have been long extinct, and are known only from fossils.

Oahu is getting smaller every day. With each lick from the ocean, our island–some 4 million years old, and just a baby compared to the 4.5 billion-year-old Earth–gets closer to its inevitable return beneath the salty surface of the Pacific. The atoll Kure, once a Hawaiian Island with a complex ecosystem of its own, is now a shallow lagoon within a ring of coral, and has one dry spot where migrating birds still gather. In time, Kure will erode to become a mere seamount, or underwater mountain. This, too, will happen with Oahu and all of the Hawaiian Islands. In fact, it’s happening already.

Privacy seems hard to come by these days. The Internet, along with the paparazzi and those who produce, sell and purchase tabloids, have skewed expectations on what boundaries ought to be respected. Meanwhile, plenty of people now willingly offer details–from mundane to salicious–once kept private. Even more fail to understand the so-called digital footprint that their online activity leaves behind.