NBA All-Star Weekend is supposed to be the celebration of the best basketball players on the planet.

The best players of the East against the best of the West. Or in 2025, the best of America against the best of the World. Either way — The most talented players alive, all on the same floor at the same time, competing for something most players will never even get a chance to compete for.

On paper, it should be electric.

But for a while, it wasn’t.

Somewhere along the way, the NBA All-Star Game quietly became something else. Not a competition — a showcase. Players lobbing half-court shots, laughing on defense, throwing up trick passes that didn’t need to go anywhere because nothing was actually at stake. Flashy for the sake of flashy. Fun in a way that felt hollow. The best players in the world treating the biggest stage of the weekend like a pickup game at a gym that nobody really cared about.

The reasoning behind this trend made sense, technically. The ultimate goal of an NBA season is the Final Championship. One bad landing, one twisted ankle in a game that doesn’t count towards the finals, and your whole season changes. The risk-reward calculation is real and players know it.

But something was still being lost. The spirit of it. The standard of it. The idea that when you’re one of the best in the world and you’ve been given a stage, you show up fully and you give the fans something real.

That standard had been quietly lowering for years.

Then a 7-foot French kid walked into the locker room carrying a book.

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Pre-game Literature

It’s February 2025. San Francisco. Victor Wembanyama is making his All-Star debut — coming off a unanimous Rookie of the Year season, already looking like something the sport hasn’t quite seen before.

And he brought a book with him.

Not a flashy watch. Not a new car to show off in the parking lot. A book. Under his arm. In the locker room before the biggest exhibition game of the year.

Nikola Jokic — three-time MVP, one of the greatest players alive — walked over and looked at him.

“You really brought a book?”

“Yeah! I read before every game,” Wembanyama said.

Jokic kind of scoffed and put his face in his hands. The whole exchange had the energy of someone watching a kid do something slightly bizarre — endearing but puzzling. Like, here? Now? At All-Star Weekend?

Yes. Here. Now. At All-Star Weekend.

Because that’s who he is. Not a performance of who he is. Not a curated image of focus and discipline that he switches on for the cameras. He reads before every game — regular season, playoffs, All-Star, it doesn’t matter. The routine doesn’t change based on whether people are watching or whether the occasion seems to call for it.

LeBron James, when asked about Wembanyama around this time, said he’d heard that nobody better call him past 9 o’clock at night because he’s either reading or he’s asleep.

“That lets you know where his mind is,” LeBron said. “That’s super cool. That’s super dope.”

It is. But it’s also more than cool. It’s a standard. A quiet, private, completely consistent standard that doesn’t bend for the moment.

Play Like You Mean It

Here’s the part that makes the story complete.

Wembanyama didn’t just bring his book and then coast through the game like everyone else. He showed up and actually played. He was dunking on people. Chasing down shots to block. Hustling. Competing. Visibly frustrated when his team lost the final.

He actually tried hard. At the All-Star Game. Even when the culture of the event had spent years slowly normalizing not trying.

Earlier that weekend he’d gotten himself and Chris Paul disqualified from the skills competition after finding what he thought was a loophole in the rules — because even in a side event on a Friday night, he was looking for an edge. Trying to win. Not because anyone expected him to, but because that’s apparently just how he’s wired.

Think about what that combination looks like from the outside. He slows down before the game. He reads. He’s in no rush. And then when it’s time to play, he plays like it means something. The stillness and the intensity aren’t opposites — they’re connected. The reading isn’t a quirk, it’s preparation. The same discipline showing up in two different forms.

He wasn’t doing it for the reaction. He wasn’t performing focus for a brand deal or a highlight package. Jokic laughed at him and he didn’t flinch. He just kept doing what he always does.

That’s the part worth paying attention to.

A Greater Influence

The 2026 All-Star Game arrived and Wembanyama showed up just like before. Same energy. Same standard. No special adjustment for the occasion.

Before the game, fellow All-Star Anthony Edwards was asked if the intensity could match the Olympics. He said flatly: No. Several stars were limited by injuries. The expectation, from the players themselves, was more of the same.

Then Wembanyama came out and scored the World Team’s first seven points right out of the gate. Playing defense like it was Game 7. Visibly frustrated when his team gave up an open three on the final play. Storming back to the bench the same way he would after a regular season loss.

And the vibe of the game shifted too.

After the game Edwards said: “I ain’t gonna lie, Wemby set the tone. He came out playing hard, so it’s hard not to match that. It woke me up for sure.” That’s the MVP of the game — a 24-year-old who’d said the night before that he wasn’t going to try — crediting one player for changing the entire energy of the evening.

The veterans felt it too. Kawhi Leonard dropped 31 points in 12 minutes. LeBron was sprinting the floor. De’Aaron Fox hit a buzzer-beater to win a game. All three opening games went down to the wire. The NBA registered its highest All-Star audience since 2011.

Before the game Wembanyama had said simply: “It’s the game I personally cherish. Being competitive is the least I can do.” And if they didn’t match his energy, he said, he’d bring it alone.

And he did. Which caused other players to follow his lead and step up to match the level of competition.

Not because of a rule change or a marketing campaign or a pregame speech from a legend. Because one player refused to lower his standard, and everyone else eventually rose to meet it.

That’s not a small thing, it’s the whole point.

When One Person Decides to Try

The All-Star Game had a problem that nobody could fix with format tweaks or rule changes. The problem was never the structure. It was the standard.

When the standard is that nobody really tries, that’s just what the game becomes. Everyone looks around, registers that this is how it’s done, and matches the energy in the room. It’s social. It’s human. We calibrate to the people around us almost without realizing it.

But that also means it only takes one person to break the spell.

One player deciding to actually compete changes what’s possible. The younger players feel the pull to match it — to prove they belong. The veterans feel it too, that instinct to show they’ve still got it. Suddenly there’s something to push against. Suddenly the game has stakes again, even informal ones.

One person raises the standard and the room recalibrates.

Wembanyama didn’t fix the All-Star Game overnight. But across two years, he brought something real into a space that had been running low on it. And that matters more than any final score.

Why This Stuck With Me

I’m a NBA fan from North Carolina who doesn’t follow the Spurs, doesn’t have a particular history with French basketball, and had no specific reason to care about Victor Wembanyama before that weekend in 2025.

But when I saw a 21-year-old show up to the most performative event of the basketball calendar with a book under his arm, do his routine exactly the way he always does it, laugh off the skepticism, and then go out and actually play — I became a fan instantly.

Not because of the athleticism, though it was extraordinary, but because of what these actions say about who he is when nobody’s requiring him to be anything in particular. What he decides to do without being told to, or required to, or even copying someone else. He’s just doing it because he feels like it’s the right thing to do.

He didn’t need the All-Star Game to feel important in order to show up fully. He brought his standard with him and applied it to whatever situation he was in. The situation didn’t set the standard. He did.

That’s rare. And it’s getting rarer.

We live in a culture that is very good at performing effort and very selective about actually applying it. We post about discipline. We quote people about hard work. We consume content about high standards while the actual standard of how we spend our days quietly drifts toward convenience, toward whatever requires the least resistance, toward matching the energy of the room even when the room isn’t trying.

Wembanyama didn’t do that. At 21, in his first All-Star Game, surrounded by the best players on earth at an event that had basically institutionalized coasting, he just did what he always does.

He read the book. He played the game. He tried to win.

The Standard

You’re not playing in the NBA All-Star Game. Neither am I.

But the question Wembanyama is quietly asking applies to everyone.

Do you bring your standard to the situation, or do you let the situation set your standard for you? Do you show up fully to the things that don’t require you to? Do you do your preparation even when nobody’s checking? Do you try in the rooms where the culture is to not try — or do you just match the energy and tell yourself it’s fine because everyone else is doing the same?

The book in the locker room wasn’t about basketball, it was about being the kind of person who has a standard and keeps it regardless of the occasion. Who doesn’t save their best self for the moments that feel important enough to deserve it — but brings that self everywhere, quietly, consistently, without needing applause for it.

And it turns out that when you do that — when you just keep your standard even when nobody else is — sometimes the whole room wakes up.

That’s what it means to be greater.

Not louder. Not flashier. Just more consistent. More intentional. And without compromise.

Log off, spread love, be greater.

— [gf]

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Counterculture has always been simple at its core.

It’s groups of people looking at the dominant culture around them — sometimes the entire world — and saying: something about this feels off. Not always that it’s collapsing. Not always that it’s evil. Just that it’s incomplete. That something important is being traded away for something cheaper.

And if you look closely at history, you’ll see it appear over and over again — whenever the mainstream drifts too far in one direction, something rises up to push back.

Counterculture isn’t chaos. It’s correction.

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The Pattern:

The 1950s looked stable on paper. Suburbs were expanding. Corporate jobs promised security. The television glowed in neat living rooms. The American Dream was clearly defined: work hard, fit in, accumulate, don’t question too much. It worked — for a lot of people. But beneath that prosperity, some felt spiritually suffocated. The “Beats” rejected suburban conformity and corporate ambition. They questioned whether climbing the ladder was the highest possible aim of a human life. They gathered in coffeehouses, wrote long restless poems, and hitchhiked across the country searching for intensity and meaning. They weren’t trying to destroy America, they were trying to feel alive within it. When success became the highest value, they went looking for depth.

By the 1960s the tension was no longer subtle. The Vietnam War escalated. Televised violence entered living rooms. The dominant culture said: this is progress. The “Hippies” disagreed. They opposed the war, rejected materialism, advocated for peace and connection in a world that felt militarized and hardened. It wasn’t just fashion — it was a moral protest. When society felt violent and mechanical, they leaned toward gentleness and meaning.

Then by the late 1970s something strange had happened. The counterculture of the 60s had started to feel aesthetic. Psychedelic rebellion showed up in advertising. The language of freedom became a marketing strategy, so the “Punk” movement emerged as a rejection of both the mainstream and the commodified version of rebellion. It was three chords, basement shows, DIY posters. It was raw and loud because culture felt too safe, too pre-packaged, too polished. It stripped everything down to something real and honest.

The pattern repeats every time. Counterculture emerges, influences the mainstream, gets absorbed, gets diluted, and then something new rises in response. Feminism. Gay rights. Meditation. Cannabis. Tech culture itself — all once considered fringe, now normalized, and in many cases monetized. The soul that once sparked the movement gets softened, and the edges get rounded off.

Counterculture is necessary. It prevents stagnation. It plays devil’s advocate. It keeps society from drifting too far in any one direction without someone noticing and pushing back. It’s like our culture’s immune system.

So what is the dominant culture today? And what is quietly rising up in response?

Culture Today:

To understand where we are, you have to understand how we got here.

In 2007, Steve Jobs stood on a stage and introduced the iPhone — a device that put the entire internet into your pocket. For the first time, the online world wasn’t something you visited at a desk and then left. It followed you everywhere. Into your bedroom, your commute, your dinner table, your last quiet moments before sleep.

For a while, this felt like pure expansion. New apps, new communities, new ways to connect and create. Small creators — artists, writers, YouTubers — were building real audiences from their bedrooms. People were meeting their future partners online. The world felt bigger and more accessible than it ever had.

But like everything eventually does, the online world fell victim to corporate takeover. The weird, diverse, human internet slowly became centralized. Platforms that once felt like open communities became advertising machines. Algorithms replaced discovery. Short-form content replaced long-form thought because it was more engaging, more addictive, easier to serve. Then in 2020 the global pandemic arrived and finished what the smartphone started — when the physical world shut down, we all migrated online full time. And when it reopened, most of us never fully came back.

Now the default state is online. Not as a choice — just as the water we swim in.

The dominant culture today is optimized for speed, engagement, visibility, and monetization. We stream instead of owning. We scroll instead of reading. We post instead of talking. We react instead of reflecting. We consume without digesting. Attention has become the most valuable commodity on earth, and an entire global industry exists to extract as much of it from you as possible — every spare moment, every idle minute, every quiet space that used to belong to your own thoughts.

And it’s working… maybe even too well.

The result is a culture that feels thin. Not collapsed, not hopeless — just flattened. Conversations that don’t go anywhere. Content that disappears before you’ve had time to feel anything about it. A constant low-grade sense that you’ve been somewhere without really going anywhere at all. Everyone online, more connected than ever, yet somehow lonelier than before.

A Quiet Resistance Forms:

Then, quietly, something started pushing back.

Not a huge trend. Not a movement with a name or a leader. Just individual people, scattered across the world, making slightly different choices. Choosing to opt-out of pieces of the dominant culture in small, private, deliberate ways.

Vinyl record sales have been growing every year for nearly two decades — outselling CDs for the first time since the 1980s. Physical book sales have held strong even as every tech company told us print was dead. Film cameras are back. Disposable cameras are back. People are buying things they could easily stream — albums, movies, games — just to own them. To hold them. To have something real.

The dumb phone movement is real and growing. People are swapping smartphones for flip phones or basic devices that just call and text and do nothing else. Not because they hate technology, but because they want their attention back. They’re tired of the pull. They want their phone to be just a phone again. They want to be somewhere without being everywhere else at the same time.

Digital minimalism has become a legitimate lifestyle philosophy. People are deleting apps, setting screen time limits, taking weekend detoxes, building analog morning routines before they ever touch a screen. They’re reading physical newspapers. Writing in paper journals. Going to bookstores on purpose. Hosting dinners where phones stay in a basket by the door.

These aren’t coordinated. Nobody is organizing this. It’s just people, independently, arriving at the same conclusion: that the frictionless, always-on, infinitely optimized online life is missing something they need. That ownership feels different from access. That silence feels different from distraction. That finishing a book feels different from finishing a scroll.

When culture becomes too thin, people start craving texture again.

This is the counterculture of our generation. It doesn’t have a name yet. It doesn’t have a uniform or a sound or a scene. But it has a feeling — the same feeling the Beats had in their coffeehouses, the Hippies had at their festivals, or the Punks had in their basements. It’s the feeling that the dominant culture has drifted somewhere that doesn’t serve human beings very well, and that it’s time to build something different.

Outside Perspective:

I’ve spent most of my life slightly outside the mainstream current.

Montessori kid. Raised by grandparents. Skater in a private school. Buddhist in the American South. A punk fan, tech enthusiast who reads physical books and owns more vinyl records than most people my age have even held. Someone who grew up online and chose to step back from it.

I know what it feels like to go against the grain, and what I’ve learned is that being outside the dominant current gives you perspective on it. You can see when things drift. You can feel when something important is being lost.

Right now, what’s being lost is depth. Attention. Ownership of your own mind. The ability to sit with a thought long enough to actually finish it.

Punk showed me that the response to that isn’t to politely suggest that people slow down. The response is to build your own thing. Make your own rules. Own your own stuff. Show up without waiting for permission.

Being offline isn’t the absence of something. It’s the presence of something the algorithm can’t give you — silence, boredom, the slow satisfaction of finishing a book, the feeling of actually owning something instead of renting access to it until the platform decides otherwise. The experience of being somewhere without documenting it, or thinking a thought all the way through without reaching for a screen.

These things used to be ordinary. Now they’re almost radical.

You don’t need a movement, and you don’t need a tutorial. You just need to make a few different choices — privately, consistently, without performing them for an audience.

That’s how every counterculture actually starts. Not with a declaration, but with a person quietly deciding that the dominant way of doing things isn’t working for them anymore.

Resist the Current:

Choose one way to go against the mainstream this week.

Buy your favorite album instead of streaming it. Read the book instead of the thread. Go for a walk without your earbuds. Write something by hand. Sit with boredom for ten minutes and see what happens.

Not because technology is bad, but because your attention belongs to you.

And in an optimized world, deciding for yourself what deserves your attention might be the most countercultural thing you can do.

Log off, spread love, be greater.

— [gf]

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There’s a little hilltop spot hidden behind some trees in my neighborhood that I discovered while skating around one afternoon.

It’s nothing special on paper — just a tall grassy patch elevated above the surrounding streets and houses with a clear view of the horizon. But it became my spot. The place I’d go sometimes to sit quietly, read, think, or just watch the sun go down. In a world of screens and noise, it was a little sanctuary of peace.

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There was only one problem: there was litter and trash scattered everywhere.

Every time I showed up, I would see it. Plastic bottles. Food wrappers. Random junk that had been left behind. I was trying to connect with nature, be peaceful, and enjoy the sunset, but I had to look at all this man-made mess.

And yet every single time, I walked right past it.

I always had the normal justifications in my mind:

“I didn’t put it there, so it’s not my responsibility.”

“I’m already doing the right thing by not littering myself.”

And honestly? Most people would agree with that logic. You’re not the one who made the mess. You’re minding your business, living right, not hurting anyone. That’s good enough, right?

But one evening it hit me: every time I walked past that trash, I was making a choice. Not a passive one — an active one. I had the ability to change something. I could see the problem clearly. And I decided, again and again, to do nothing.

That’s when I started to feel like “good enough” wasn’t actually good enough.

Someone wise once said: “With great power comes great responsibility.” Because here’s the thing: if you have the power to improve something and you choose not to, that’s still a choice. The outcome is still partly on you. Doing nothing is never really neutral. It’s a vote. And if you keep casting that vote — let someone else handle it, it’s not my problem, I’m already doing enough — then you are quietly contributing to the way things are.

Whether you’re a teenager visiting the usual hangout spot or a CEO making decisions that affect millions — we all have choices to make. And saying “I didn’t cause the problem” has never once made a problem smaller.

It’s hard to embrace, but I believe it’s true.

The Beginning of the Be Greater. Movement:

It’s Spring 2025, and I’ve been pulling back from the internet. Less scrolling, less streaming, less mindless consumption. More skating, more reading, more going outside and actually being somewhere. After years of absorbing so much content — endlessly consuming without really getting anything back — I felt a genuine urge to actually make something. To put something real into the world instead of just passing through it.

I’d always been a creative person. Growing up I probably started five different YouTube channels with different ideas that never quite got off the ground. But I was genuinely inspired by what YouTube used to be — this wild, personal, anything-goes place where people made stuff because they felt like it. No brand strategy. No optimization. Just people with cameras and ideas and something to say.

I grew up watching creators like Ryan Higa (@nigahiga), a Japanese American kid from Hawaii filming comedy skits with his best friend, a handheld camera, a bedroom background, and no budget. Or Sean McLoughlin (@jacksepticeye), an Irish kid uploading gaming videos from a cottage in Ireland, bursting with energy and personality.

These weren’t polished media productions. They were real people expressing themselves freely — weird, funny, silly, creative — and somehow that came through the screen and meant something. They were digital artists broadcasting their authentic personalities and visions.

None of them were “influencers.” Most of them didn’t even go by their real names. They were just people with an idea and the willingness to put it out there. That era of YouTube impacted me more than I realized at the time.

So, when I decided to start creating again, I started with a YouTube channel. I didn’t want to make a “Firstname Lastname” channel or become another face in the crowd. I didn’t want my life to be a brand or daily content. I was trying to move away from screens, not deeper into them. I wanted to spread a positive message and do it in my own way — short, personal, imperfect videos with something real behind them. I wanted to bring back a little bit of that old internet spirit.

So instead of making a “Garrett” channel, I made a “Greater” channel.

The @BeGreater YouTube Channel was born:

Now I just needed an idea for the first video.

I kept returning to my sunset spot. To the trash. To the choice I was making to walk past it.

So I made a new rule: every time I visited, I would bring a piece of trash back with me to throw away. Simple. Easy. No big commitment.

It felt good at first. I was being a good citizen. Doing my small part.

But the spot still looked the same. New litter accumulated faster than I was clearing it. My one-piece-at-a-time approach wasn’t really changing anything — it was just making me feel better about doing the bare minimum.

If I really wanted to be greater, I was going to have to do more than the bare minimum.

So I decided to clean up the entire spot.

My brain put 2 and 2 together and I decided that this little volunteer trash clean-up project would be the perfect first video for the BeGreater channel.

I went to the store and bought a pair of gloves, grabbed a trash bag, and went back to the spot. This time I cleaned the whole thing up. And I filmed a fun little video of the process with my smartphone.

That became the first Be Greater. video.

At the end of that video, I sit down and watch the sunset, with a full trash bag sitting in the newly cleaned background. And I genuinely enjoy that sunset more. Not because the view changed — but because I changed it. I did something I didn’t have to do, not for money, not for clout, but because I wanted to make that small corner of the world a little better than I found it.

That’s the whole idea behind that channel, this newsletter — Be Greater as a philosophy and a movement.

We live in a time where it’s incredibly easy to justify inaction. The world feels big and broken and overwhelming, and it’s tempting to think that nothing you do at your scale really matters. So why bother? Why go out of your way? Why do more than you have to?

But I think that logic is exactly what makes things worse. The world doesn’t improve on its own. It improves because individual people, in small moments, decide to do something instead of nothing. It’s not glamorous. Nobody’s giving out awards for picking up trash or holding a door open or showing up for someone who needed it. But it adds up. It always adds up.

And if the good people of the world allow themselves to get tired and burnt out and settle for “good enough” — well, there are plenty of people out there who are absolutely not settling for good enough. They are taking everything they can. So if the people who actually care decide to check out, the people who don’t care are left in charge. That’s how things get worse.

If we want a greater world, we have to be greater. It really is that simple.

Maybe someone out there also wants to make a difference but doesn’t know where to start. Maybe watching some dude pick up trash for a few minutes is the push they need to go do something — anything — in their own way. That would be enough for me.

Here’s the honest question worth sitting with:

If the world were watching you through a camera — not with your explanation, not your context, not your backstory, just your actual actions and their results — what would they see?

Are you proud of that person?

Is that person making changes or making excuses?

Are they spreading positivity or negativity?

Are they helping at all or just asking for help?

Do they step up or do they wait for someone else to?

Are they leaving things better than they found them?

You don’t have to change the world today. You don’t need a grand gesture or a perfect plan. Sometimes it’s as simple as picking up trash instead of stepping over it.

Start there. See what happens next.

Log off, spread love, be greater.

— [gf]

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Have you noticed that the world feels different now? Of course, it’s always changing, but I mean something feels off.

Everything is so fast-paced. Culture feels flatter. Everyone is constantly online. It’s harder to read or think quietly without reaching for a screen.

The world has been optimized, and with the rise of algorithms, our culture has become fragmented into pieces.

My name is Garrett. I grew up in the offline world, before the launch of the first iPhone. Back when the internet lived on a desktop in a computer room and didn’t follow us everywhere.

I grew up playing outside, skateboarding, exploring, being independent and just figuring things out through trial and error.

My micro-generation was alive for 9/11, but too young to remember it. We learned about it on classroom screens and by hearing teachers retelling their experiences. We witnessed Hurricane Katrina, the financial collapse of 2008, the golden age of the iPod, the launch of the iPhone, the rise of smartphones, the political shifts of the 2010s, the COVID-19 pandemic and lockdowns of 2020, and now the rise of AI.

We grew up alongside the internet. We got to live inside both worlds.

I’m not an expert or guru. I’m someone who witnessed this shift firsthand and I’m doing my best to make sense of it all.

If you want to know about me:

• I was born in North Carolina in 1999.

• I graduated from East Carolina University, following in my grandfather’s footsteps (Go Pirates).

• I’m a 5th Degree Taekwondo Master.

And now, I write the Be Greater. Newsletter.

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What does Be Greater mean?

This publication explores what it means to “be greater” in a modern, optimized world.

It means making better choices and holding yourself to a higher standard, especially when the easier option is one tap away.

Being greater looks different for everyone. No one knows your life like you do. You have to be honest with yourself and decide which decisions are better for you and the world around you.

Being Greater could mean:

• Reading a book instead of doomscrolling

• Being more kind to the people around you

• Throwing away trash you see, even if it’s not yours

• Always returning your shopping cart, even when it’s far

• Stopping to think before reacting emotionally

• Working towards your dreams and goals instead of consuming endlessly

• Deciding not to buy junk food at the store

• Giving spare change to someone begging on the street

Or a million other things…

To put it simply: when you’re faced with a choice, choose the greater option. Not the easiest, or the most convenient, but the choice that you imagine your hero would make.

We can’t wait around for someone else to step up and fix things. We have to be our own heroes. Be the person you would want your kids and friends to look up to. Be the character you would love to be in a movie.

Live in a way that you’re proud of, even when no one is watching. Make decisions you wouldn’t feel the need to hide or explain away. Act in alignment with the type of person you want to become.

In a time where optimization and convenience are everywhere, don’t lower your standards just because it’s easier. Instead of waiting around for a hero, become the hero. Be the change you want to see. Raise your own standards and lead by example before criticizing the world.

The Modern Problem:

Our culture has migrated from the offline world to the online world.

Be Greater.

What Happened to the World?

Something feels off in the world. We can sense it, but it’s not so easy to put into words. If you’re reading this the year it was published (2026), then you know exactly what I’m talking about. The vibe has shifted…

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2 months ago · 9 likes · 7 comments · [garrett fowler]

That online world used to be a seemingly magical place, with diverse platforms, communities, games, channels, and niches. It was a fun place to visit, explore, connect with people, and then log off.

But over time the online world became more centralized, more corporate, more optimized.

When platforms are driven by engagement metrics to minimize risk, creativity becomes safer. Movies rely on sequels and remakes. Music gets tested and tweaked. Content is engineered for retention. Whatever is easily consumable gets amplified, and things that are strange, slow, or challenging get filtered out. This all results in safe art — passable but forgettable.

Optimization favors predictability, but soul requires risk.

It requires making something that might fail, something that not everyone understands, something created because a person felt like it had to exist, not because a market analysis said it would perform well.

At the same time, everything has become more convenient. We can give in to our habits and impulses — food, entertainment, outrage, distraction — with a few efficient taps and swipes.

When the systems and environments around us make every impulse easy to reach, the responsibility falls onto us to make better choices.

If we want to make the world a better place, we have to choose to Be Greater.

This Newsletter will Explore:

• Culture and the digital shift

• Modern counterculture

• Reading and attention

• Personal standards

• Civic responsibility

• Observations from someone living through it all

With occasional interesting essays or works related to books I am working on.

If you feel like something important has shifted in the world…

If you want to think more clearly and intentionally…

If you want to stay optimistic and live with higher standards in a world that constantly lowers them…

Then this is the place for you.

Subscribe and share. Thanks for reading.

Log off, spread love, Be greater.

- [gf]

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Something feels off in the world. We can sense it, but it’s not so easy to put into words. If you’re reading this the year it was published (2026), then you know exactly what I’m talking about. The vibe has shifted.

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1) Culture is feeling more hollow.

Things don’t have staying power, or stand out, or hit the same anymore. Movies, albums, trends, memes. It’s all so fast paced and fragmented into millions of different unique algorithms.

Every once in a while you get an outlier, a cultural event with enough attention to slip into the global mainstream, but even that doesn’t linger the way that it used to. People talk about it for a few days and then move on to something else.

The system moves too fast. The algorithms are optimized to encourage fast-paced, endless, and easily digestible content, but we don’t even digest the content we are consuming. We don’t stop to sit with things, or reflect on them, or analyze them.

And when we do, we look to other people’s comments, other people’s opinions, AI summaries. We are happily giving away our own critical thinking and problem solving skills without giving it a second thought. (The irony hurts.)

But what happens when things get too optimized, and we start smoothing out the texture, the grit, the human, the soul — all the things that make art and content meaningful?

Social media has become more corporate.

The music industry has become more corporate.

The film industry has become more corporate.

The internet, the online world, and in effect culture itself has become corporate — and corporate is not necessarily the birthplace of fresh art and soul. Some might even argue that corporate is where soul goes to die.

Now, the problem with corporate isn’t money or scale — plenty of great art has been made with big budgets. The problem is what happens when the primary goal shifts from making something meaningful to minimizing financial risk. Corporate structures answer to shareholders and quarterly returns, which means they optimize for what’s already proven to work. They greenlight the sequel, the reboot, the familiar face. They A/B test the album covers and sand down anything too weird, too niche, too challenging. The result isn’t inherently bad art — it’s safe art. Competent, focus-grouped, and ultimately forgettable.

Soul requires risk. It requires someone making something that might fail, that not everyone will get, something that exists because someone felt it had to exist, not because a market analysis said it should. That’s harder to do when there are investors to answer to.

Social media used to be a platform for communities and personal connection, but it has devolved into a heavily monetized, brand-driven landscape. Algorithms now prioritize professional content, ads, and influencer marketing over organic and personal posts. This shift has transformed feeds into digital storefronts, and people into brands.

2) Reading and attention spans are in a serious decline.

Our reading levels, after reaching record highs in the 2010s, have seemingly fallen back to where they were in ~2004 and ~1980. The gains we have made over recent decades are now quietly slipping away. (1)

Teachers are reporting that students can’t sit with the same material they used to. They can’t focus as long, and they struggle to read the same amount of books and literature that previous generations of students read. Many educators are even having to adapt the course work to be more easily consumable.

That is not the best solution. We can’t just lower the bar so that everyone can step over it. We need to keep holding our standards high and put in the work.

Instead of ignoring the issue, or kicking the responsibility down the road for someone else to deal with, we need to actually take the time to address this problem — that students today can’t complete the same course work as students from previous years. It’s only going to get worse if the next generation of teachers have a more surface level understanding of the course work as well.

To get some personal answers and data on this topic, I conducted interviews with many of my former school teachers, who have worked with students every year across multiple different decades and cultural landscapes.

I figured that out of all the people I could talk to, teachers would have the best vantage point on observing large amounts of students’ behaviors over many different time periods. They have the perfect perspective on whether this is just an internet trend, or if this is the real thing.

Most of the teachers that I interviewed said the same things,

In the last ~10 years:

-Far fewer students are reading for pleasure.

-Students are less focused, have more difficulty completing assigned reading.

-Students appear less mature in the classroom.

-Students are less independent in their classwork, less confident, and asking for constant feedback on their work.

-Students are increasingly on their phones, and are less social than ever. Even when they are together at lunch, they are on their phones, or discussing something they saw on their phones.

And after the COVID-19 Pandemic and the Lockdowns of 2020, these trends only accelerated. (7)

And these same trends are reflected in adults as well. People stopped spending as much time in public or “third” spaces such as coffee shops, parks, malls, bars, etc. Even six years later, recovery has been slow and uneven. Fewer people are hanging out together in the country and in the world.

It doesn’t help that politics are getting more divided and less respectful, cash influences everything, and kids who shouldn’t even know or care about the political landscape yet are being thrown into the deep end and forced to pick sides and learn new terms. It’s all just dystopian to see honestly.

I know boomers and old heads talk about a “better world” back in their day, but recently it seems like there’s finally some truth to that. This goes beyond pure nostalgia or “my generation was better” arguments. This is a documented and observed cultural shift. We can see it happening in real time.

But don’t lose hope yet.

Despite diminishing levels of social engagement and overall trust, most Americans still believe strangers would be willing to help them if they were in trouble, injured, or if their car broke down in public. (4)

And I can agree with this, because recently my car actually did break down and a nice couple helped me push my car out of the main road. We aren’t doomed, we’re just going through a confusing time.

Research generally supports the idea that people with more, or stronger social connections—including more friends—tend to have higher levels of trust in their neighbors and a more positive view of their community and country as a whole. Socially connected individuals are also generally more likely to engage in “neighborly” acts, such as helping with errands or looking after homes. (5,6)

That tells me that the distrust and division going on is a loneliness and isolation problem. We are spending less time together both in the offline and online worlds. But when we actually go out and interact positively with more people, we realize that it’s not so bad.

The problem is that now everyone lives in the online world, and much of that world has shifted from a place of community and connection into a fragmented shopping mall of distraction and division.

And when that happened, our attention also fragmented. Along with our focus, our humor, our politics, our entertainment, and our culture.

In 2007 Steve Jobs made a “dent in the universe” launching the iPhone as a breakthrough smart device that literally put the internet into your pocket. All of the information on the entire World Wide Web was now in the palm of our hands.

This was an amazing and necessary technological breakthrough, and it was also the start of the online world. The digital world that now expanded beyond our offices and desktops. A world that could now follow us everywhere we go. Now all of a sudden, people had a foot in two worlds, partially online and partially offline.

For a long time this was awesome. There were new apps, new games, new ways to connect, new business opportunities. People were making friends, communities, even meeting their husbands and wives online in different states and countries. Small scale creators: artists, writers, YouTubers were being validated by making careers out of their work. People had new opportunities to work from anywhere in the world.

But like everything eventually does, the online world fell victim to corporate takeover. Longer, more thought out, and more creative videos began being replaced by short-form content, because it’s more engaging, more addicting, and easier to share. It’s the easier content to consume because there’s less thinking and attention span required of you.

Then, as short form began dominating the internet, the pandemic introduced another big turning point. We spent month after month in a state of lockdown, wearing masks, social distancing, isolating from each other.

The lockdowns were exactly what the internet needed to complete its global takeover. When we had nothing going on in the physical world, we all migrated to the online world full-time.

This may have marked the end of the offline world. From that point forward it was clear: Sure, anyone can log off for a while, but it appears the new default state is online.

This is why there are growing trends and counterculture movements showing up online. Digital minimalism, dumb phones, analog technology, music players, eReaders. People tired of consuming who just want to enjoy owning and experiencing things again.

Social interactions, community, ownership, and reading are declining — and along with them: critical thinking, intelligence, empathy. We need an offline / reading movement now more than ever.

This is why I write. Like Steve, I also want to change the world.

I genuinely want to do my part to make it a better place. I want to inspire people to be kinder, be smarter, be more creative, be more open-minded, be greater.

And I think one of the most significant ways to truly change the world is to influence culture.

Artists, authors, creators, messages, and movements can transcend lifetimes. I believe a well crafted message or idea can influence and inspire much more significantly than if I were to attempt to force change through complex, corrupt, and inefficient political systems.

These are my observations, and you are free to disagree, but I am optimistic about the world and the people that live here. I believe we must all be ourselves and use our strengths in the best way possible.

So I choose to write. To get this message out into the world. Maybe it’s largely dismissed, but maybe it changes somebody’s life.

Maybe it even influences culture as a whole.

The world has changed, as it always does. Our culture is constantly evolving, but now we are reaching a new turning point.

We must decide what we want the future to look like. Do we just keep using screens more, and making things more convenient, and spend more time away from each other, and get more divided politically, and stop reading as much, and make school work easier?

Or do we decide to slow down? To stop and think about what we are doing and why. To make sure that we are still innovating, coming up with new ideas, staying open-minded, curious, and disciplined in working toward a better tomorrow for all of us. Do we finally decide that we need to limit spending our entire lives online — endlessly and mindlessly consuming?

We are reaching that point in history, a crucial moment where we decide what comes next, and everything we do, every action we take, is a vote on what we want the world to look like. Just like how every scroll and every click on our screens is a vote for the online world we want to see. We can choose to support quality content, spread knowledge and positivity, and lift each other up instead of tearing each other down.

Because maybe that’s all it takes to start a movement.

In a world where everything is constantly online, things are feeling uncertain, and people are reading less — maybe one kid deciding to become a writer, to become an author, to write a book, to encourage reading, is all it takes to push us in the right direction.

I don’t know if any of this will matter. Maybe this gets lost in the same algorithm I’ve been writing about, but I think about that couple who helped me push my car out of the busy street. They didn’t have to stop. Nobody made them. They just did it because someone needed help and they were there. That impulse — to show up for a stranger, to do the small good thing — hasn’t gone anywhere. It’s just getting harder to see through the noise. So I write. Not because I’m certain it changes anything, but because it’s my version of stopping the car to try and help.

And maybe that’s enough.

[gf]

*This piece uses ideas, themes, and interviews from my book. If you’re interested in this project, then subscribe to stay updated, and please share. You might even help me find my publisher.

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References:

National Center for Education Statistics. (n.d.). Long-term trends in reading and mathematics achievement. U.S. Department of Education. Retrieved February 12, 2026, from https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=38 (1)

University College London. (2025, August). Proportion of Americans reading for pleasure fell by 40% over 20 years. Retrieved February 12, 2026, from https://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/2025/aug/proportion-americans-reading-pleasure-fell-40-over-20-years (2)

Macdonald, K. T., Barnes, M. A., Miciak, J., Roberts, G., Halverson, K. K., Vaughn, S., & Cirino, P. T. (2021). Sustained attention and behavioral ratings of attention in struggling readers. Scientific studies of reading : the official journal of the Society for the Scientific Study of Reading. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8411923/ (3)

Cox, D. A., & Hammond, K. E. (2025). A cultural crossroads: America’s uncertain future amid enduring discontent and rising disconnection. Survey Center on American Life. Retrieved February 12, 2026, from https://www.americansurveycenter.org/research/a-cultural-crossroads-americas-uncertain-future-amidst-enduring-discontent-and-rising-disconnection/ (4)

Martino, J., Pegg, J., & Frates, E. P. (2015, October 7). The connection prescription: Using the power of social interactions and the deep desire for connectedness to empower health and Wellness. American journal of lifestyle medicine. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6125010/ (5)

Silver, L. (2025, May 8). How connected do Americans feel to their neighbors?. Pew Research Center. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/05/08/how-connected-do-americans-feel-to-their-neighbors/ (6)

Educator Interviews. Conducted by [garrett fowler], January 2026. (7)

I sat alone on the Carolina coast, in the darkness of night, watching planes fly amongst the stars above the ocean.

The beach was empty. Just me, the sound of waves crashing, and the cool wind coming off the water.

I had graduated. I was out in what people call “the real world“ now, though sitting there in the dark, staring out at an ocean I couldn’t fully see, the real world felt like an abstract thing and this—the waves, the wind, the stars—felt like the only real thing left.

The ocean in front of me was black except where the waves reflected the starlight. I couldn’t quite make out the horizon, just a vague line where the stars stopped and the void of the water began.

A plane passed by overhead, slow and silent except for the distant hum that took a few seconds to reach me. A tiny string of lights crossing from one edge of the sky to the other, carrying people I didn’t know to places I’ve never been, over water that had been here longer than the idea of places.

I started thinking about someone else—maybe in Japan, maybe in Hawaii, maybe on another beach just like this one—looking up at the same sky. Different sand, different languages, different lives. But the same moon. The same stars. The same oceans connected to the one in front of me, wrapping around the planet in one unbroken body of water that didn’t care about borders or time zones or the things people built on its edges.

The water I was looking at had been here before humans had language for it. Before we named the oceans or drew maps or built ships to cross them. It had been ice during the last glaciers. It had been rain that fell on the dinosaurs. It had evaporated and returned and evaporated again, cycling through forms we couldn’t imagine, holding everything that had ever lived and died in it or near it or because of it.

And I was just sitting there. Briefly aware. Briefly conscious. A visitor on something ancient and indifferent, watching planes carry people between places that wouldn’t exist in the way we know them a thousand years from now.

The wind picked up. The waves kept crashing. The stars kept burning, some of them already dead, their light still traveling toward me across distances I couldn’t comprehend.

I had been worried about something before I came out here. A job application, maybe. A conversation I’d had. Some decision I thought mattered. Sitting there, it felt small. Not unimportant—just small. A ripple on the surface of something so much larger and older than my entire life. Each and every life was just a brief flicker of awareness on a rock that had been spinning for billions of years and would keep spinning long after I was gone.

I could see cruise ships and cargo ships way out near the horizon, carrying people and goods between continents. They moved across the same water that had carried Viking longships, slave ships, explorers who thought they might fall off the edge of the world. The ocean didn’t distinguish. It held them all the same way it holds everything—completely, indifferently.

Somewhere out there, under the dark water, were shipwrecks from wars I’d only read about. Planes that went down during missions I’d never know the details of. Entire civilizations had risen and fallen on the coasts of this ocean, and the tide just continues coming in and going out. Twice a day, every day, for millions of years — long before the first human stood on a beach and tried to make sense of it all.

I thought about the ground I was sitting on. Sand that had been rock, then worn down by waves over vast scales of time. Somewhere under this beach were layers of older beaches, older oceans, older worlds. Fossils of things that lived and died before we had words to describe them.

And now we drive on it. Build hotels on it. Fight wars over it.

The beaches of Normandy, where thousands of soldiers died storming the shore, are now tourist destinations. People take their kids there, swim in the water, take photos at sunset. The sand still holds the memory in some chemical way we don’t talk about, but mostly it just holds the weight of families on vacation, playing in the surf like that war never happened.

In Vietnam, the jungles where soldiers fought and died and tried not to go insane are now backpacker destinations. Hostels and coffee shops built on ground soaked in history we’d rather forget but can’t fully escape because it’s still there, layered into the dirt.

You can visit the forest where Buddha sat and achieved enlightenment. You can see the small town where Jesus was born, and the lands where he was crucified. Where empires rose and fell and left behind ruins we now rope off and charge admission to see. The ground doesn’t care. It was here before the temples. It will be here after they’ve eroded into nothing.

We act like history is somewhere else. Something that happened in the past, in books, in documentaries. But it all happened here. Right here on this planet. This ground. This water. Every battle, every discovery, every moment of clarity or cruelty or love—it all took place on the same rock we’re standing on now, spinning through space at a speed we can’t feel, orbiting a star we take for granted because it’s always been there.

At least, it’s always been there for us.

Sitting there, I started to understand something I’d known intellectually but never really felt.

We’re not separate from this. We’re on it. Part of it. Temporarily conscious passengers on a rock that’s been spinning for four and a half billion years, most of that time without anyone around to notice or name it or argue about what it means.

Every person who’s ever lived—everyone who’s ever worried about anything, achieved anything, loved anyone, lost anyone—did it here. On this planet. There’s nowhere else it could have happened. No other stage. No other context. Just this one spinning ball of rock and water and atmosphere, somehow, against impossible odds, holding everything we’ve ever known or cared about.

The things we build feel permanent. Cities, monuments, systems. But they’re just arrangements of materials that were already here, briefly organized into shapes we recognize, waiting to return to the ground they came from. The Roman Empire felt permanent. Every empire does. And the earth keeps spinning.

I thought about how much time I’d spent worrying about things that wouldn’t matter in a year. Maybe not even in a week. Job applications. Social dynamics. Whether I was doing enough, being enough, moving in the right direction. All of it real, all of it important in the moment, but also—when I let myself see it from this distance—so small.

Not meaningless. Just small.

There’s a difference.

The ocean in front of me didn’t care about my plans. The stars overhead weren’t watching to see if I made something of myself. The earth would keep spinning whether I succeeded or failed at whatever I thought success or failure meant. And somehow that wasn’t depressing. It was freeing.

Because if everything is temporary—if even the ground we’re standing on is just a momentary arrangement of atoms that will eventually be something else—then maybe the point isn’t to leave a permanent mark.

Maybe the point is to just be here now. Briefly conscious. Briefly aware. Briefly able to sit on a beach and look out at the universe and feel the weight of time, lingering deeply in the moment instead of letting it quickly pass us by.

We get one chance. One brief window of awareness on a planet that’s been here “forever” and will be here long after we’re gone. Not to make a mark. Not to be remembered. Just to be here, aware and present, while we still can.

I sat there for a while longer. The waves kept crashing. The cool wind kept blowing. The stars continued burning, some of them already gone, their light just now reaching this beach on a planet they’d never know existed.

Eventually, I’d stand up, brush the sand off, and walk back to wherever I was staying. I would fall asleep, wake up, rejoin the world of deadlines and conversations and all the little things we call life.

But for now, I was just here. On the Carolina coast, in the darkness of night. Alone with the sound of an ocean that had been here long before the first human stood on a shore and wondered what it all meant.

The earth keeps spinning. The sun keeps burning…

For now.

I was twelve years old, sitting in the far backseat of our family car as we drove east toward the coast. My grandparents were in the front. My sister and her friend sat in the middle row, headphones on, watching a movie on the small flip-down screen mounted to the ceiling. My friend and I had claimed the very back—the way the cool kids used to take the back of the school bus. Not because it was better, but because it felt like ours.

The car smelled like McDonald’s. Fresh fries and coffee. That particular mix that only existed at the beginning of long trips, before everything blurred together and the smell faded into the background of the day.

I had headphones in too—cheap white wired earbuds trailing down into my pocket, plugged into a lightweight metal iPod. The album playing was The E.N.D. by The Black Eyed Peas—the one with the green digital face on the cover. Futuristic, at the time. We listened to it on repeat, learning every word without trying.

In my hands was a Nintendo DS. I was playing Pokémon Diamond, and my friend was playing the Pearl version beside me. We had badges to earn, levels to grind through, rare Pokémon we were convinced we were close to finding. Entire worlds contained in our palms—small enough to hold but large enough to get lost in for hours.

Outside the window, the scenery repeated itself. Long stretches of highway lined with trees. Pine after pine. Occasionally something would break the pattern—a gas station, a roadside billboard, a bridge over a river, a big house we’d learned to recognize. These landmarks became checkpoints. Proof that we were making progress, even when the drive felt endless.

The stops mattered.

We always stopped at the same places. Bathroom breaks. Pit stops for drinks and snacks. A quick loop around the store. We would look at the seasonal t-shirts, and sometimes we would buy the new one for the current year with our saved up allowance or the money we got from a recent Christmas or Birthday card. We would stand too long in front of the fish tanks, looking at the eels and different species that were being displayed in the fishing area.

Sometimes my grandmother pulled off the highway to an outdoor outlet mall with a nice big playground in the middle. A real one—slides, climbing structures, space to run. We’d spill out of the car, stretch our legs, soak up the summer sunlight. Maybe get some ice cream. Maybe find a new pair of Crocs.

Then it was back to the car. The DVD was paused where we’d left it. The game closed but waiting for our return.

The drive took at least four hours. Often longer, especially with my grandmother, who liked to stop at random little stores along the way. But time didn’t feel wasted. It had shape. You could feel it passing—not as something being killed, but as something being inhabited.

We had devices, but they had edges.

The DS battery dipped into red. The iPod held only the albums we’d chosen ahead of time. The movie ended. When something ran out, it stayed out. So we talked. Played cards on the armrest when the batteries died. Invented new games. Made friendships with my sister’s friend we wouldn’t have bothered with otherwise, the way siblings usually ignore each other.

And we were unreachable.

Not dramatically. Not stranded-on-an-island unreachable. Just unreachable in the way that used to be normal. My grandparents had a flip phone somewhere in the front seat—a short list of numbers saved, service unreliable on the back roads. Our friends might have known we were headed to the beach from a message sent before we left, but they knew we couldn’t be reached. No one expected updates. No one waited on replies.

That was simply the condition of being there.

No one framed it as intentional or healthy. It didn’t need a name. It was just how the world worked. Certain places created distance from everything else, and that distance opened up a different kind of time. One where thoughts finished themselves. Where boredom deepened into something else—into imagination, into conversation, into staring out the window long enough that you stopped thinking about anything at all.

You weren’t skimming along the surface of time. You were submerged in it. Swimming through the hours instead of trying to skip past them.

At twelve, I didn’t think of it as freedom.

It was simply normal.

I have another vivid memory from the following year. My dad and I drove across town to see The Amazing Spider-Man. The sun was still in the sky as we walked into the cinema. The theater went completely dark when the lights went down—no glow from phone screens, no one scrolling during the previews. For two hours, nothing else existed. When we walked out into the parking lot, it was into the darkness of the night. The whole evening had passed inside that room.

Now, before the previews even start, the theater is already lit with blue light from dozens of phones. When the movie ends, phones come out before the credits roll. The movie recedes, replaced by whatever came through while we were supposed to be watching.

The darkness isn’t as dark as it used to be.

I saw a kid in the backseat of a car recently. Maybe eight or nine years old. iPad braced on his knees, headphones on, face lit blue. The car was stuck in traffic beside me, and I watched him for a moment at the stoplight. He didn’t look out the window. Didn’t shift positions. Just stared at the screen, swiping occasionally, completely absorbed.

His parents were in the front seat, also on their phones.

I couldn’t help noticing—he wasn’t looking for checkpoints. Wasn’t marking progress. Wasn’t aware of where he was or how long he’d been there. The journey had collapsed into the screen.

I think about that car ride to the coast more often now.

Not because it was perfect, or because I want to go back. But because I’m realizing how rare that condition has become. The unreachability. The edges. The built-in limits that forced us into the time we were passing through instead of trying to escape it.

The DS battery died, and we couldn’t charge it. The iPod ran out of songs we wanted to hear. The DVD ended. So we talked. Invented card games on the armrest. Watched the trees go by. Let the hours be what they were—long, sometimes boring, but also deep. Textured. Real.

We weren’t choosing to be present. We just were, because there was nowhere else to go.

I don’t know if that kind of space can exist the same way anymore. Everywhere is reachable now, all the time. The same apps, the same feeds, the same notifications. There’s no distance to cross. No condition that seals you off from everything else, even temporarily.

And maybe that’s fine. Maybe it’s even better.

But I wonder what it means to grow up without ever being truly unreachable. Without ever sitting in the back of a car for four hours with a dying battery and nothing to do but look out the window—when you’re never forced to swim through time instead of skimming along its surface.

I notice it’s not just childhood that lost its edges. It’s how I work now, how I spend evenings, how I wait for anything. The same condition that reshaped road trips reshaped everything else too. And I’m still learning what that means.

At twelve, I didn’t know I was experiencing something that would disappear.

I just thought the road would always feel that long.

Chairs line the walls. A small table sits in the center with a few magazines stacked unevenly on top. The covers are faded. A thin layer of dust has settled on them — not enough to be obvious, just enough to suggest they’ve been there a long time. No one really reaches for them anymore.

In the corner, an old black television with a rounded screen is mounted near the ceiling. It’s playing a local news station or a random cable channel — it’s hard to tell. The volume is low. Black subtitles crawl across the bottom of the screen in an outdated font, lagging half a second behind the anchor’s mouth.

Everyone else in the room is looking at a screen, but no one is looking at the TV.

Young, old, it doesn’t matter. Necks bent forward. Shoulders slouched. Thumbs moving in small, efficient motions. Each person absorbed in something happening somewhere else, while nothing happens here.

I’ve arrived early, so I have time to wait. I keep my phone in my pocket and try not to take it out. Not as a rule, or a statement — more of an experiment. I want to see what this room feels like without immediately ignoring it.

At first, the minutes don’t collapse the way I expect them to.

Time stretches in an uncomfortable way, like it’s resisting me. I notice the hum of the lights. Someone clears their throat. A notification buzzes softly from across the chairs, and I feel the reflex — that small internal pull to reach for my own screen, to follow it somewhere else.

The urge isn’t dramatic, but it is automatic.

Waiting rooms used to be places where nothing happened, and that was normal. You sat. You waited. You flipped through magazines you didn’t care about. You stared at posters on the wall. You watched the door and wondered when your name would be called.

Sometimes you brought something with you. A book. A handheld game. Something with edges — a beginning and an end. You could make progress. You could finish a task. You could set it down.

You were still waiting. Still aware of where you were. Still inside the room.

Now, waiting feels like something we try to eliminate.

Phones make the escape effortless. There’s no friction anymore, no pause to decide what to do. The moment waiting begins, we disappear into something else. Not even because we’re bored, but because we’ve grown unused to letting time remain unoccupied.

What’s striking isn’t that everyone is on their phone. This is probably one of the most reasonable places to be on it. There’s nothing else to do. The solution makes sense.

What’s striking is how complete the withdrawal is.

No one looks around. No one fidgets. No one seems restless in the old way. The room feels thinner somehow, like everyone has stepped halfway out of it. Time passes, but it doesn’t register. Waiting no longer feels like passing through something — it feels like skipping it entirely.

I start to wonder if I’m the strange one.

Sitting there without a screen begins to feel mildly antisocial, like I’ve misunderstood the rules of the space. Like I’m refusing a convenience everyone else has quietly agreed to accept. The thought crosses my mind that maybe I’m overthinking it. Maybe this is just how things work now.

I take my phone out once, then put it back.

Not because it’s wrong to use it here, but because I want to see what happens when I don’t. After a few minutes, the discomfort fades. Thoughts surface on their own. Small ones at first. Unimportant ones. Then slightly longer ones. Nothing profound — just the feeling of being present with the time instead of racing ahead of it.

The magazines remain untouched.

They’re leftover from a different era, a different assumption about waiting. A time when these rooms weren’t designed to disappear into, but to sit inside. When unoccupied time didn’t need to be optimized, personalized, or entertaining to be tolerable.

Eventually, a name is called. Someone stands up, slips their phone into their pocket, and walks through the door. The room reshapes itself around the remaining chairs. Screens come back out. Heads tilt downward again.

Nothing about this feels dramatic. There’s not a right or wrong way to wait. This is normal. The phones are useful. The boredom is real and the solution makes sense.

But sitting there, watching how easily these small, empty spaces are erased, it’s hard not to notice what disappears along with them.

Not productivity. Not information.

Something quieter.

The feeling of inhabiting time instead of escaping it.

When my name is finally called, I stand up and walk forward. The television keeps playing silently in the corner. The magazines stay where they are — untouched, not because I didn’t notice them, but because they belonged to a kind of waiting I no longer seemed fluent in.

It was something you passed through.

Long stretches of nothing happening. Waiting without distraction. Wandering without a plan. Sitting still long enough for restlessness to soften into something else. Boredom wasn’t pleasant, but it was familiar — and it quietly shaped how we thought, imagined, and became ourselves.

I grew up during a brief overlap between two worlds: old enough to remember an offline childhood, and young enough to come of age inside an always-connected one. The shift between those worlds didn’t arrive as a rupture. It happened gradually, through conveniences that felt reasonable at the time.

Along the way, boredom stopped being tolerated.

As constant connectivity became the default, empty moments began to feel uncomfortable. Silence felt awkward. Waiting felt inefficient. At the first hint of restlessness, we learned to reach for stimulation — not because we lacked discipline, but because the environment made escape effortless.

What disappeared wasn’t just time or attention.

It was the doorway.

Boredom used to be a passageway into interior life — the space where thoughts wander long enough to deepen, where imagination wakes up, where identity forms without an audience watching closely enough to remember every version of you. When boredom disappeared, that interior space began to collapse quietly, without ceremony or alarm.

I didn’t fully notice the loss at first. Most of us didn’t. The tools were useful. Life felt faster, smoother, more efficient. But years later, the cost became harder to ignore: difficulty staying with a thought long enough to finish it, discomfort with silence, the strange feeling of being constantly occupied yet inwardly thin.

The problem wasn’t technology itself. It was the disappearance of the conditions that once protected interior life — unreachability, privacy, friction, and time left unfilled.

This Substack is where I try to notice those conditions carefully.

Here, I write narrative cultural essays about boredom, attention, and the transition from an unwatched life to a performed one. These pieces aren’t arguments or instructions. They’re observations — scenes and reflections meant to name what changed, how it felt to live through it, and what might still be protected in a digital world.

I’m also working on a book that explores this transition in depth: a cultural memoir and critique about what happens to human creativity, attention, and meaning when boredom disappears — and why reclaiming space for interior life may be one of the most human acts left.

This space exists alongside that project.

If you’ve ever felt that life became thinner without fully knowing why — if you sense that something essential was lost not through collapse, but through optimization — you’re in the right place.

— Garrett Fowler.

For a brief moment, nothing can be done. The doors haven’t opened yet. The work hasn’t started. There’s no task to complete or problem to solve.

Phones come out.

Maybe a few people are responding to emails or reviewing notes, but let’s be honest—that’s usually not what’s happening. The workday hasn’t really begun yet. We’re still half-awake, waiting for coffee, waiting to sit down, waiting to arrive.

What used to be a normal silence now feels uncomfortable.

The elevator ride, once an unremarkable pause, has become “boring.” An empty space that needs filling. A moment that feels wrong simply because nothing else is happening.

When everything goes still, we itch. We feel the urge to do something, anything. And we carry the solution in our pockets.

But silence was never a problem. It wasn’t broken. It was just space.

A small window of time with no immediate demand. A moment where thoughts could surface on their own. Where you might remember something you’d forgotten, replay a conversation, notice how you were actually feeling, or let your mind wander without direction.

Those moments used to exist everywhere. Now they rarely last.

We fill them almost automatically. Not always because we want to, but because we’ve grown unused to letting them remain empty. We scroll, check, refresh. We trade unstructured time for content made by someone else, shaped somewhere else.

In the process, we quietly give away time that once belonged to us.

These moments seem insignificant on their own—a minute here, two minutes there. But they add up. They used to be places where reflection happened. Where ideas formed. Where something personal could emerge without effort.

Even remembering something small—a grocery item you forgot, a thought you meant to follow, a message you meant to send—often required nothing more than a moment of uninterrupted silence.

Now, when that silence appears, we rush to replace it before it has the chance to become anything else.

I’m reminded of the movie Click, where the main character fast-forwards through the boring parts of his life. At first, it feels efficient. Convenient. Harmless. But eventually, he realizes he’s skipped the very moments that made his life feel like his own.

That’s what these small silences were. Not wasted time, but small opportunities. They stitched moments together. They gave shape to thought. They made room for a self that wasn’t reacting, performing, or consuming.

Silence didn’t disappear because it lost value.
It disappeared because we stopped trusting what it might contain.

Now, when unclaimed silence shows up, we treat it like something to escape.

And most of the time, we do.

As kids, we used to leave the house and disappear for hours, sometimes for the entire day. There were no iPhones in our pockets, no way for our parents to track us, no constant check-ins. If they needed us, they yelled our names from the porch or drove around the neighborhood hoping to spot us.

And somehow, this was enough.

We rode our skateboards and bicycles everywhere, and we explored the world around us. Through neighborhoods, down dirt paths, into woods and along creeks (maybe doing a little bit of innocent trespassing in the process). We made forts out of sticks and pieces of scrapwood. We scraped our arms and legs from climbing trees. We came home muddy and exhausted, just as the sun began to set on the suburbs and the streetlights lit up the neighborhood for the night.

An entire day of adventure, and nobody was recording any of it.

There were no photos, no videos, no proof that these moments ever happened beyond the memories we carried with us. If something funny or embarrassing occurred, it lived only in the minds of the people who were there to witness it. Mistakes were not revisited forever. Childhood wasn’t performed. It was just lived.

It was inherently more mindful, living in the current moment, because it had nowhere else to be.

Looking back now, the biggest contrast to today is how unreachable we were.

Being unreachable wasn’t anxiety-inducing – it was freeing. No ringtones or alarms going off, no buzzing in your pocket. No sense that someone might need you at any given moment. No pressure to respond, explain, or update. Time stretched out. Days felt longer. Moments felt fuller.

When we were bored, we didn’t reach into our pocket for something to fix it. We either sat in the boredom until something happened, or we had to take it upon ourselves to make something happen.

Boredom forced creativity. It pushed us to invent games, make up stories, explore places we’d already been a hundred times just to see if we could see them differently. In those quiet, empty moments, our imaginations turned on by default. We didn’t call it mindfulness or presence – we were just there.

Today, that kind of childhood feels almost unimaginable.

Kids grow up reachable at all times. Locations are shared. Messages are instant. Moments are documented before they’ve even finished happening. When boredom shows up, it’s quickly killed by a screen designed to make sure nothing ever feels empty for too long.

Life is easier now. Safer. More efficient.

But it also feels thinner.

I don’t think technology ruined childhood. I’m not interested in that argument. I love technology. I was fascinated by it from a young age. I remember when the internet felt magical – like a doorway to something new and exciting, not something that demanded constant attention.

This societal shift didn’t happen all at once. It happened slowly, gradually. An iPod for music. A phone for safety, connection, and convenience. A TV for entertainment. A camera to document memories. Each product made sense. They solved simple problems and made life a little easier. But once every tool was combined into one digital Swiss Army Knife, it became surprisingly distracting – and even cumbersome – to focus on any single thing.

We didn’t just gain convenience, we lost a certain kind of depth.

When every quiet moment can be filled, when every experience has to be captured, when boredom is treated like a problem instead of a passageway, something important gets drowned out. Not intentionally, but gradually.

I don’t think we need to reject the modern world or pretend we can travel back to that time. That’s not the point. The point is remembering what it felt like to grow up in a world where attention wasn’t constantly being requested and pulling us away from our own selves. When life unfolded without an audience, and where boredom was simply part of being human.

That “old” world shaped us more than we realize.

Before it fades into history, it’s worth remembering what that world felt like – not to go back, but to understand which parts are worth carrying forward into a more human tomorrow.