After spending a sizeable portion of his life behind bars, this man got a rude awakening when he wandered around Times Square for the first time.
While taking in the dazzling displays, Otis Johnson seemed to realise just how much he had missed out on while spending 44 years locked up.
He was left wondering whether the smartphone-clutching passersby were secret CIA agents due to the headphone wires draped around their neck, completely unaware of Apple's ascension to tech titans.
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But considering Johnson was jailed in 1970 and therefore completely bypassed the digital revolution, it's no wonder really, is it?
This is a guy who has probably never heard of the likes of Steve Jobs, Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos...whether that's for better or for worse.
Johnson was imprisoned when he was 25 years old for the attempted murder of a police officer in May 1970 in New York - and by the time he was freed, he was 69.
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The former martial arts teacher never confessed to the crime and maintained his innocence, previously telling Dazed: "Why would a man shoot at a police officer and then stand on the corner talking to people with the same clothes on?"
Upon his release from prison in 2014, Johnson claimed he was handed an ID, documents discussing his criminal case history, two bus tickets, and $40 (£32.04).
"Prison affected me a lot," he told Al Jazeera 12 months after he gained freedom. "My re-entry was a little bit hard at first, because things have changed."
You can say that again - as when Johnson was first locked up, the first mobile phone hadn't even been invented yet, and he was a few decades off the invention of the iPhone.
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So you can forgive him for being a little taken aback when he saw neon billboards plastered across Times Square, and for suspecting people glued to their gadgets might be government agents.
Taking in the extraordinary sights at the tech-drenched tourist hotspot for the first time, Johnson said of the advertisements: "On the windows?! I ain't never seen anything like this before! Look! On the windows?
"We ain't seen nothing on no windows but people walking by, not no video," he laughed, before sharing his thoughts about the people who passed through the thoroughfare.
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"I was looking at the atmosphere, the new things that was happening and I seen that the majority of people were talking to themselves," he continued.
"Then I look closely and they seemed to have things in there ears. I don't know with those things, the phone things...iPhones they call them or something like that?
"I thought, 'What, everybody became CIA or agents and stuff like that?' Because that's the only thing I can think of if somebody walking around with wires in the ears. That's what they had when I was out during the 60s and the 70s."
Johnson said he was also baffled by the fact that people could 'walk and talk on their phone without even looking where they're going'.
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"That was amazing to me," he added, before saying of the street performers which stalk Times Square: "I stand out here for a long time watching this crazy stuff."
The advancements in technology weren't the only things that had changed while Johnson was inside though, as the cost of making a call on a pay phone had shot up by 75 percent.
"I remember this when I first got out," he smiled. "I was gonna make a call - then I seen the 1$ thing. It was what, 25 cents when I was out?"
As well as this, the supermarket aisles in the US were adorned with a lot more stuff than they were in the late 1960s, which came as quite a surprise to Johnson.
"I eat different things now because I'm looking at all this crazy stuff they got," he said. "The funny dinners, different coloured drinks.
"There's so many things that you can eat, so it's a hard choice to pick out the food that you want. For instance, the peanut butter - it had jelly in it?
"And I ain't never seen nothing like that before, it definitely wasn't in the prison system. Peanut butter and jelly in the same place, in a jar? That that was strange."
He was extremely relieved to see that Skippy's peanut butter still had a place on the shelves, a condiment which he fondly remembered from his younger years.
Despite the demise of some of his favourite snacks coming as quite a blow to Johnson, he was still thrilled to have his freedom.
"Being in society is a good feeling, a very good feeling. Being inside the prison, you only can go outside at certain times. So I like being in the sun and also observing people. It's nice. It's nice to be free."
Hearing Johnson's perspective really might make you think twice about your mammoth amount of screen time, that's for sure.
Olivia Burke