Disclaimer: Side effects may include laughter and/or anger. Read or watch at your own risk.
Ten thousand years of agriculture, architecture, philosophy, genocide, and the occasional Renaissance—and what does the crown jewel of our species produce?
A generation that’d rather reorganize its Spotify playlists than touch another human being.
This is biology itself—a four-billion-year-old system that survived extinction events, continental drift, and the invention of Crocs—shrugging and going: “We’ll sit this round out.”
You were promised decadence. A Roman orgy with better lighting and a soundtrack. Humanity spent ten millennia building toward this exact shimmering intersection of access, privacy, and anonymity—and what did you do with that divine inheritance?
You declined. Not with a bang. With the serene, lavender-scented detachment of someone turning down a second helping of something they never really wanted.
“Maybe later.”
Caesar crossed the Rubicon. Lewis and Clark crossed a continent full of things actively trying to kill them. And you—with your unlimited data plan and a phone that’s basically a neurological vending machine—have crossed nothing. Because crossing things requires putting down the phone.
Somewhere between Woodstock and the Wellness Industrial Complex, the whole enterprise got reviewed. What was once the most gloriously chaotic thing two mammals could get up to on a Tuesday has been retrofitted into a compliance seminar with optional breakout groups on attachment theory.
And then there’s the thing nobody says out loud.
A bad date can now be published. Permanently.
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One regrettable evening, one misread signal, one moment neither party handled with grace—and it’s screenshotted, tagged, and indexed by Google within 48 hours. The social contract used to include a statute of limitations on embarrassment. The internet dissolved that clause without mentioning it in the terms of service.
The upside risk is a decent Tuesday night. The downside risk is your professional reputation and a Reddit thread that surfaces every time someone Googles your name.
So naturally, you did the only thing a sensible organism with executive function and a data plan could do. You opted out.
Sleep over sex. Stability over seduction. Cortisol management over carnality. Mental health—genuinely important, let’s be clear—now deployed like a diplomatic passport at the first sign of romantic turbulence.
The Boomers practically invented consequence-free hedonism and handed you the brochure. You acknowledged its historical significance, set it on the recycling pile, and made a smoothie.
The Gen Xers—my people—at least had the decency to be nihilistically interested. We didn’t care and we showed up. That’s a crucial distinction.
You don’t care and you sent a calendar invite marked “tentative.”
This isn’t repression. Repression has heat. Repression is a Victorian novel where all the subtext is doing structural load-bearing work.
This is indifference. A quiet, well-hydrated rebellion against the oldest operating system ever written into human hardware. Not “we can’t.” Not “we shouldn’t.” But:
“We’re not that interested.”
Entire industries are pacing in glass-walled boardrooms, staring at the data like it personally offended them, desperately trying to seduce a generation that doesn’t seem particularly seducible.
And the target demographic is watching a documentary about sourdough starter and going to bed at 9:30.
Generation Z: the first cohort handed infinite access who responded with selective disengagement. It’s not that the appetite’s gone. It’s that you’ve figured out you don’t have to act on it.
And that—whether anyone wants to admit it or not—is power
The real question, the one Plato would’ve asked if he’d had a Reddit account, is this:
When everything is available, instantly, endlessly, on demand… what actually becomes worth wanting?
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The Cary Harrison Files — KPFK 90.7 FM / Pacifica Radio Network. More at caryharrison.com or goharrison.com· Live on YouTube & Substack · Text or message:310-737-TALK
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