I’m sitting here in my late forties, thinking about how we used to run toward the future with our eyes wide open. Now it feels like we’re sprinting in the opposite direction while swearing we’re breaking speed records…and light years away.
Remember Reading Rainbow? LaVar Burton’s voice still echoes in my head: “Take a look, it’s in a book…” Every afternoon that theme song hit, I was glued to the television, then bolting to the library when I got the opportunity was like it a family field trip to Disney World. I’d check out the maximum number of books at a time drag them home, and devour them on the front porch. I even read the local newspaper, The Leaf-Chronicle, cover to cover because I wanted to know what grown-ups were arguing about at the grocery store. That show didn’t just teach me to read; it taught me to hunger for stories, for facts, for the feeling of turning a page and discovering a whole universe someone else built with nothing but twenty-six letters.
Fast-forward to now. My kids—and half the adults I know…get their “reading” in fifteen-second bursts between swipe-ups. A reel flashes by, somebody with perfect teeth says something outrageous, the algorithm rewards the outrage, and suddenly that’s the new truth. Nobody checks the book. Nobody even wonders if there ever was a book. We’ve replaced the library with an endless slot machine that pays out in dopamine and keeps us pulling the lever.
We’ve shelved history like it’s an embarrassing high-school yearbook. Dates, context, primary sources…too heavy, too slow, too likely to make us feel bad about something. Better to stay blissfully ignorant than risk a bruise to the ego. So we rewrite the past in real time, clipping out the inconvenient parts until what’s left fits neatly into a meme. And when someone dares to point at the original text? Cancel the messenger. Mute button engaged. Conversation over.
I miss real conversations. The kind where you sat on somebody’s porch until the mosquitoes got bad, arguing about Vietnam or the moon landing or whether Elvis was actually dead. We didn’t always agree; Lord, we did not…but we looked each other in the eye. We listened long enough to get mad, long enough to change our minds, long enough to laugh about how dumb we’d been five minutes earlier.
Now we’ve got the Gen Z stare. You’ve seen it (buttttttt, probably haven’t realized it)…dead eyes, slight head tilt, the thousand-yard scroll that says, “I’m physically here but spiritually I left this interaction seven TikToks ago.” It’s not just kids. I catch myself doing it at stoplights, thumb flicking through other people’s lives while my own idles in park. We’re all walking mute buttons, terrified that if we actually speak we might say something that gets screenshot and ratioed into oblivion.
Post-COVID didn’t create this, but it poured gasoline on the fire. We spent two years learning that human beings are vectors. Touch became threat. Proximity became reckless. So we retreated deeper into screens that promised connection without contamination. We got really good at performing intimacy in comment sections and really bad at practicing it in real life.
Here’s the part that keeps me up at night: you can’t drive forward while the car is in reverse. It’s mechanically impossible. The engine will scream, the tires will smoke, and you’ll still end up exactly where you started…only now the transmission is shot. Yet that’s precisely what we’re doing as a culture. We demand progress while stomping the nostalgia pedal. We crave community while perfecting the art of the soft block. We want wisdom but punish anyone who takes longer than eight seconds to deliver it.
I’m not romanticizing the past. There was plenty wrong with yesterday…plenty. But at least we faced forward. We argued with facts on the table instead of feelings in the cloud. We read whole books before we burned them. We looked people in the eye when we disagreed instead of cropping them out of the photo.
The future isn’t going to rescue us from this moment; we have to turn around and walk toward it. That means putting the car in drive: picking up actual books again, sitting with ideas that make us uncomfortable, talking to human beings without the safety net of the block button. It means teaching kids that curiosity beats clout, that boredom is where creativity starts, that silence isn’t always violence….sometimes it’s just listening.
LaVar Burton closed every episode the same way: “I’ll see you next time.” He never said “like and subscribe.” He never begged for engagement. He just trusted that if the story was good, you’d come back.
Maybe that’s the revolution we need…trusting that truth, spoken plainly and patiently, is still more powerful than any algorithm. Maybe it’s time we stop walking bassackwards and start running toward each other again.
I’ll leave the porch light on…doors open…you’re welcome to come in…have a seat…and listen.
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