The Last Generation That Had to Write

I time-traveled through old Facebook posts yesterday for no reason. Wondering why Lindsay Clark kept posting on my wall telling me we should hang out and wondering why I never wanted to.

Getting a random girl in a college class to become your friend felt like discovering an entirely new social passageway. Facebook was built to connect people. Now it mostly feels like senior citizens wishing each other happy birthday while everyone else brags about their Wordle scores.

Then Instagram replaced Facebook with pictures and videos. Now people have “digital friends” they spend more time apart from than with. Online personas matter more than reality.

I watched The Crash yesterday — the documentary about the 17-year-old girl who drove her truck into a wall and killed two of her friends. She reminded me of the “Catch Me Outside” girl: raised by goofy parents, shaped by attention, and performing constantly for social media. The whole thing felt less like a story about one bad decision and more like what happens when people grow up believing the internet is real life.

Also, I still want to know how she survived that crash. The documentary somehow avoided the only question I kept thinking about the entire time.

After that, I read some of my old blog posts and it made me wonder whether I’m even the same person now. Back then it was rec basketball, classic movies, and yelling about money. Now it’s traveling, working, and complaining about how much money the government takes from me.

That eventually led me to today where technology has changed the way we create.

People barely have to write anymore. A few prompts and suddenly you have a blog post, a business plan, or “sage advice.” I went on the Uk trip, wrote about it myself, and AI summarized the experience better than I could… even though I was the one actually there.

So why spend the time writing at all?

The ironic part is I’ll probably run this post through ChatGPT before posting it. How would anyone know the difference?

And if you know that it’s AI, who cares? That song you heard? AI lyrics. That book you read? Ran through AI. That artwork? You know the answer.

Do we secretly look down on people who use AI? I think we do. If I read something that feels AI-generated, I immediately question it. Jeff used the word “decipher” in Teams today and I instantly wondered if he actually wrote it himself.

But does it matter if the point gets across clearly?

Maybe writing eventually goes the way of cursive and hand-adding. Useful once. Mostly obsolete now.

So what’s next? What are humans still vital for?

Physical work. Feeding people. Therapy. Coaching. Leadership. Maybe Elon is right with a universal basic income.

I’m a firm believer that the future should be embraced and if you don’t adapt with it, hopefully you have enough money to retire. That’s what I’m going for.