Millennials and Zoomers Lost in the Matrix

Show Notes

We recorded this one on inauguration day with Dan looking at six inches of snow in Houston and me staring down a high of "maybe zero" up north, and somehow that frosty open set the tone for an episode that wandered everywhere. We started with the Telepathy Tapes — that beautifully produced Ky Dickens show about autistic "spellers" who seem to communicate without speaking — and I'll just say it the way I said it to Dan: I consider myself a skeptic, and this thing has me struggling to stay one. We watched a couple of the trials ourselves, the parent in one room and the child tapping out a random number in another, and neither of us could quite refute it or quite swallow it. So instead of explaining it, we just sat in the discomfort of maybe the cold rationalist in me has been plugging his ears to a channel that's actually there.

From there we fell straight down the simulation hole, which is where the title comes from. Once you start asking whether consciousness is the thing science isn't ready for yet, you end up at The Matrix and Cypher deciding the steak tastes real enough, and at Douglas Adams insisting the answer is 42 — though Dan, ever the pedant I love him for, corrected me that 42 universes was far too narrow a number given the infinite improbability drive. We talked about whether robots even need to be humanoid, why C-3PO couldn't just be an app you cast off your phone, and whether human bodies are built to live on a Star Destroyer with no sunlight. My honest answer: I think I'd go insane on a sun deck somewhere wishing for ten thousand lux.

That sunlight tangent is actually what cracked open the real subject. Dan and I think a lot of our science fiction has gone dark, and we wondered out loud whether all that darkness loops back on us — if everyone believes the economy sucks, it's gonna suck sooner. We need more positive sci-fi. Reaching for examples, we landed almost entirely on older stuff: Star Trek's explorers, who Dan will go to the mat to defend as expressly not colonialists, that being the whole point of the Prime Directive; The Martian and Project Hail Mary; Vonnegut for his stubborn belief in humanity. The newest thing we could name was Andy Weir, and even there we caught a stale jacket bio calling Artemis his "next book" when it actually came out before Hail Mary — a tiny time-loop of our own.

Then a tweet pulled us to the actual heart of it: being a millennial sandwiched between cable-news brains and zoomers who supposedly can't read. I pushed back on the cheap shots — I avoid phone calls too, I'd rather fill out a clean form than explain myself out loud, and good riddance to the and-now-this infotainment cycle that Neil Postman nailed in Amusing Ourselves to Death decades before any of us. But the part that stuck with me was the alcohol data. The drop among younger folks isn't a dip, it's a cliff, and Dan's line cut clean through the whole self-diagnosis conversation: everyone thinks they are hurt when in fact they're just human. I think we agreed the suffering this generation may be short on is the productive kind — the controlled, boundary-finding kind that The Coddling of the American Mind is really about. I hated being told millennials were lazy shitbags, so I won't do it back. Zoomers, keep rocking.

We closed somewhere unexpectedly tender. With the new administration telegraphing its moves, we both copped to wanting to pay closer attention this time — not for the grift, but because the money might buy the thing I actually want, which is time to give some back. Dan's been circling a mentorship program called Minds Matter, intimidated by the multi-year commitment, and I told him the truth I've had to tell myself: that fear is the thing you can always use to never do it. You can't save souls in an empty church. My dad used to say it best — sometimes you have money, sometimes you have time, you rarely have both. Here's to a future where we finally have a little of each.

— Sean