For the longest time, I have been thinking about the second amendment and wanting to properly discuss it, and I can’t think of a more relevant time than right now.

It’s 2026. The streets of America are flooded with ICE performing clear acts of violence against innocent civilians. And supposedly, there’s nothing we can do about it if we want to avoid becoming victims of violence ourselves.

We have what is essentially a mini military force threatening Americans under the authority of an unchecked federal government, while our votes seem to count for less and less. Doesn’t this sound really familiar?

History of the Constitution

Pretty much every American child is taught about the American Revolution by the colonies against tyrannical British rule. Taxation without representation is usually the one thing kids remember from primary school social studies, and we all learned about George Washington’s trek from the Delaware River to the presidency.

At some point, however, students start to tune out the lessons. They forget about the Articles of Confederation, which was the first attempt at self-government for the newly minted United States. Because the threat of an over-powerful federal government still loomed in the distance, this governing document made the states much too powerful and the federal government too weak.

Uprisings such as Shays’ Rebellion and broader national instability revealed the federal government’s inability to respond effectively to the country’s structural failures, so the founders realized they needed a new framework. That new document became the Constitution, which remains our governing document today.

The Constitution laid out the groundwork for a federal government that would represent the people but have the power to actually get things done. In order to convince the states, and mainly New York, to actually ratify this document, the trio of Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay published the Federalist Papers, in which they explained to the public why ratifying the Constitution was a good idea.

However, there was a staunch Anti-Federalist movement that continued to fear an overly powerful government, and this is why we have a Bill of Rights. These include a list of ten amendments to the Constitution, particularly thanks to Madison, who understood the Anti-Federalists’ concerns and made a serious effort to address them.

That brings us to the second amendment, which reads as follows:

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

For the past two decades, as gun violence has gone insanely off the rails, the meaning of this amendment has been hotly debated. Many proponents of gun control believe that the amendment is simply referring to a national military to defend the people of a “nation-state,” while opponents believe that the Constitution grants everyone the right to literally bear arms, i.e. own guns.

But I don’t think either is the point of the original amendment.

Influenced by Thomas Jefferson, who wanted to make sure that the official governing document would account for rights that no government could take away, Madison set out to draft a list of such unalienable rights.

So if we want to evaluate the second amendment and its purpose, we have to take into account the context in which it was created.

Ask yourself, does it make sense for the Bill of Rights to specifically say you have the right to just own any and all guns willy nilly when the rest of the rights are about minimizing the risk of oppression by the government (such as freedom of speech, right to trial by jury, and states rights)?

Could the founding fathers have imagined the advent of assault rifles that would go on to end the lives of so many innocent schoolchildren, or were they more concerned about a repeat of the British monarchy?

Is it possible the Bill of Rights was ensuring that we had a national-level military to protect the people even though the whole point of the first ten amendments was to ensure protection against national government if that ever became a problem?

Frankly, we don’t need to speculate at all about the purpose of this amendment because the reasoning is already laid out by James Madison himself.

Federalist No. 46

In Federalist No. 46, written about a year and a half before the Bill of Rights, Madison explains why the federal government could never really become tyrannical because the Constitution and the States would be able to prevent it.1

Now before we dive in, it has to be noted that these papers were persuasive in nature. The goal was to convince the people to ratify the Constitution through persuasive rhetoric. However, we can still glean from this paper Madison’s thought process when it came to figuring out a governing framework.

In this particular paper, he confronted head on the idea that the federal government would crush the states by questioning its validity. He wondered if it made sense that the federal government could secretly make a massive military complex without the states and the people knowing over the course of a significant period of time when they voted for the representatives in the first place.

If by some imagination such a thing did happen, he thought, there would be no way the federal militia could be that big compared to how many people there were in the country who could actually take up arms and subdue such a force.

The framework for this conversation is important because he talks specifically about how if the federal government became like the British, then the thirteen states would become like the thirteen colonies, and all the constituents would be on the states’ side because the small number of federal reps would be in opposition to the larger number of state reps, elected by the people of those states.

In other words, he saw the people and the states as one entity in any possible fight against the federal government. This is key, because he wrote the second amendment.

Further in this paper, he expresses the following:

To these [a federal military of 25,000 men] would be opposed a militia amounting to near half a million of citizens with arms in their hands, officered by men chosen from among themselves, fighting for their common liberties, and united and conducted by governments possessing their affections and confidence.

In other words, if the federal government did decide to stick their military on the people to oppress them, bad luck because there’s about half a million guys with guns commanded by their state governments to fight for their rights.

He also gives a bit more context to the unique position of Americans:

Besides the advantage of being armed, which the Americans possess over the people of almost every other nation, the existence of subordinate governments, to which the people are attached, and by which the militia officers are appointed, forms a barrier against the enterprises of ambition, more insurmountable than any which a simple government of any form can admit of.

Essentially, he’s saying Americans have the advantage of owning guns unlike people of other nations, but they also have these subordinate governments (states) that they belong to, which would appoint military officers from their gun-slinging constituency in order to challenge an oppressive federal government. That, Madison claims, makes it pretty impossible for any overly ambitious federal government to suppress.

Furthermore, he says the following regarding other nations such as those in Europe:

Notwithstanding the military establishments in the several kingdoms of Europe, which are carried as far as the public resources will bear, the governments are afraid to trust the people with arms. And it is not certain, that with this aid alone they would not be able to shake off their yokes. But were the people to possess the additional advantages of local governments chosen by themselves, who could collect the national will and direct the national force, and of officers appointed out of the militia, by these governments, and attached both to them and to the militia, it may be affirmed with the greatest assurance, that the throne of every tyranny in Europe would be speedily overturned in spite of the legions which surround it.

This means that people in Europe don’t have guns because their governments are afraid, and while we can’t say that they couldn’t overthrow tyranny with guns alone, it would be a MAJOR asset if they had smaller local governments that they voted on who could then collectively represent the whole nation’s populace and appoint military officers that were attached both to the people and these local governments.

The paper basically ends by saying that the federal government would be stupid to go against its own constituents, and if it did, then it would be overthrown by the states, with the support of the people — and therefore, the federal government’s powers are more about carrying out what the Union needs than overpowering the states’ powers.

Given the content of this paper, we can now assert what Madison really meant when he wrote the second amendment.

Does The 2nd Amendment Still Apply?

When James Madison wrote, “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed,” he clearly meant a state-regulated military of citizens with arms in the context of the federal government challenging the state government’s ability to freely do its job and protect its people from tyranny and oppression.

So the right to bear arms is not about some organized national defense; nor is it about random people just owning guns for the sake of owning guns. It’s specifically about the power to overthrow a tyrannical federal government that no longer represents its people the way the British monarch did not represent its colonies and was subsequently overthrown via revolution and war.

Guns, to Madison, were a means to assert control and power in the context of the war he had lived through. He saw the states and their people as a united front that could resist via armed conflict, because he had seen Americans do just that quite recently in a way that other nations or colonies, such as those in Europe, hadn’t been able to.

In a modern context, when we see an entity like ICE going around and doing the bidding of the federal government, we can understand exactly what the second amendment was going for. However, the world has changed a lot since then.

Madison’s World vs. Our World

James Madison could not have conceived the society we live in today. He couldn’t have imagined the federal government’s massive military-industrial complex and surveillance network. He did not foresee that the average person would access the whole world and its many narratives at all, much less through curated media found on a small pocket device. And he certainly didn’t conceive of a world where school shootings were even a thing.

Had he known, what would he say? Would he suggest an amendment to the amendment? Would Madison allow assault rifles for the protection of citizens or would he deem them a danger to innocents and exclude them entirely?

The kind of resistance Madison intended to protect with this amendment doesn’t translate so cleanly into our world, especially since we haven’t seen war on our own soil since the Civil War. Would modern Americans be open to take up arms and march on Washington or stand up to ICE in their own very crowded neighborhoods under the command of their state governments?

How would states form modern day state militias? Or would they simply look to their police forces? How can state governments collaborate together outside of their federal reps in Congress so they have any real chance of challenging federal authority?

What about the fact that our politics is so driven by parties and an outdated Electoral College that we have a roughly equal number of red and blue states, which makes it more difficult to find common ground among these governing bodies and their career-driven representatives, let alone their people?

Or the fact that our representative bodies are so deeply intertwined with corporate spending, private donations, and gerrymandering? Would Madison, who warned about parties to begin with, see such a world and still believe in the power of states and citizens uniting together against tyranny?

Let’s also remember who Madison was during his own presidency. He assumed the role of father to “civilize” his “Red Children” (Native Americans) through schooling, Christian missions, and land treaties negotiated under intense pressure that overwhelmingly benefited U.S. expansion.

He also kept his father’s slaves despite supporting the end of the slave trade and being fundamentally unable to reconcile the concept of slavery with the concept of liberty. As someone who helped shape the now defunct Three-Fifths Compromise, he backed a system that counted slaves not as human beings with their own voices, but as a source of additional representation in government for slaveholding states.

So in all honesty, we have no way of knowing exactly how our 4th president and scribe of the second amendment would have approached either the original Constitution or any laws since enacted from the perspective of someone living in our world. But we can at least ask ourselves if this amendment still applies today.

States and Citizens United

The main point of Federalist No. 46 is that if all the states banded together, as did the colonies, then there’s literally no way the federal government could oppress its citizens. Madison believed that states and citizens could resist unpopular federal actions, and any attempt by the federal government to suppress even one state's authority would be met with concern from all states. Such resistance didn’t necessarily have to be violent but if it did, the second amendment would allow for that.

Does this concept, as suggested by Madison, work with modern society? And if so, how would it work? If our states were able to command and regulate militias to kick out ICE, who’s to say they wouldn’t get run down with tanks and have their budgets slashed in half? But if enough states did agree, might the amendment actually end up helping us as Madison intended?

What would state resistance even look like now? Can state governments and the people truly align or will states just cater to the feds? Do states and the people still have sufficient countervailing power in this day and age, or are we too far gone? Will our state governments exempt us from our jobs while we sit in the middle of our streets and command regional police to protect us from federal militias?

Minnesota has been the main state in recent news to disapprove of the federal government’s employment of ICE. The governor, the mayor of Minneapolis, even the police, are all regional governing entities that have made clear statements against the federal government’s actions. But what more should they do? Will other state governments be willing to step up and take significant action alongside them? And what does this look like in practice?

You or I might not have the answers to any of these questions, but simply being aware of our rights, history, and the purpose of our government is the first step.

The fundamental takeaway from our second amendment shouldn’t be guns — it should be the ability for states and citizens to unite against tyranny.

When we’re able to look at the amendment through that lens, as it was originally intended, then we’re able to ask how it translates into details that guarantee or endanger our freedom.

Laws Are Man-Made

It’s important that our government and our laws are set far enough in stone to not constantly be overturned or challenged. With cases like Roe v. Wade and same-sex marriage coming under fire, the last thing we need is to make it easier to lose our hard-earned rights and freedoms. But America has a history of agreeing to change laws based on what the populace wants. Civil rights, women’s rights, an end to slavery and segregation — these were all once legally impossible.

When Madison and the founders initially constructed the Constitution, they had much different ideas from us about who got to be represented, what the world looked like, and what rules were needed based on their own subjective experiences, biases, and often status-oriented priorities. But at the very least, they agreed that the point of government should be to represent the people and carry out their best interests.

So the best thing we can do now, centuries later, is understand that laws like the second amendment came about within a particular context — written for a world that no longer exists — and recognize that the rules and values of society are not fixed.

At the end of the day, laws are man-made. They are malleable and they depend on us, the citizens, and our chosen representatives. It’s our right and responsibility to continually re-evaluate them, decide what still serves us, and shape them accordingly.

The second amendment was written for its own time; understanding that context is how we decide what it means in ours.

In this relatively short time, we’ve entered what feels like a completely new world. And yet, our institutions for educating ourselves, understanding our reality, and governing our society are still the same — unchanging and refusing reform.

We’re officially closer to 2030 than to 2020, and over a quarter way through the century. It feels like we’re already late to the game, and there are some massive societal shifts on the horizon we haven’t caught up to. But whether that’s for the better or worse is entirely up to us.

2025 Word of the Year: Scapegoat

If 2025 had a word of the year, it might be scapegoat. But the current trends in our world aren’t necessarily new.

Tribalism has existed for more centuries than most people can imagine. Whether it’s racism, which was created to justify imperialism, or religious warfare, also created to justify imperialism, or even ethnic/regional/tribal division utilized to justify conquest, power, and yes, imperialism, humans have been choosing their tribes before thought and scapegoating each other forever.1

But how does this manifest in today’s terms? Before we dive into our institutions, let’s first take a look at three ways in which we’re trapped in the cycle of tribalism.

Generational Divides

Repeated Boomerization

Over the course of 2025, I saw a myriad of incendiary headlines meant to generate engagement above all else, and one of the most common threads was the generational divide headline.

Apart from your typical blame-game headlines about how “Gen Z Doesn’t Want To Work,” a lot of these headlines were geared at creating a gap specifically between Gen Z and millennials, such as:

“Gen Z thinks Millennials Should Stop Using Lol” — which successfully triggered masses of millennials in the comments claiming their right to say whatever they want, thus taking the bait set by the “journalist” that found a single random twitter user with 3 likes who was actually responding to a millennial on twitter attacking Gen Z;

And “Why Gen Z thinks Millennials are Cringe” — which was a video of millennials going up to their Gen Z coworkers and asking this for social media views.

Now, before I get into why this is actually important, I should preface this by saying I don’t like generational terms at all. This isn’t some defense of Gen Z from someone in that generation. In fact, I resent such an identification. When I think Gen Z, I think my high school age brother who grew up on screens. We are NOT the same.

But nor am I a millennial because of my birth year, and also because there really is some weird sort of boomerization going on with this group that I couldn’t possibly identify with (despite also growing up with VHS).

That’s because the cycle of the old system has begun again as millennials are currently falling for the age old “blame the wains” trope that they were once victims of themselves. And just as Gen Z criticizes millennials in return for having it easier than them, the same is said by and about every generation all the way back to the boomers.

This is because a tribal response is easy. Through social conditioning, people are used to these generational labels as definitive standards. We think of a boomer as someone in their 50s or 60s who had it easy, a millennial as a young and rebellious 20- or 30-something, Gen Z as the dumb kids still in school, and Gen X as their 40-something parents?

Even though the point of generations is to identify who went through what major societal trends, shifts, and events growing up, all they really manage to do is pinpoint some type of personality association (i.e. Boomers = old and out of touch, Millennials = young and cringe, Gen Z = younger and entitled).2

If anything, we should be going by what decade influenced us as kids, teens, young adults, and older. It’s much easier to conceptualize that a 90s kid lived in an analog world while a 2000s kid lived the transition from analog to digital.

It’s much more valuable to think about how different a 2010s high schooler and a 2020s high schooler might be experiencing education. And it’s undeniably more effective to note that a 2020s college grad is dealing with a completely unprecedented job market and economic shift that they were not prepared for.

Only when we organize it like this can we see the patterns and trends that collectively effect multiple groups all at once.

The Shared Economic Reality

The truth is, both millennials and their Gen Z coworkers are dealing with the same problems right now that the generations before them didn’t have because the world has completely changed since the 70s and 80s, before either generation was born.

This includes extreme difficulty getting and keeping jobs, finding affordable housing or even attempting to save up to buy a home, and in general building the life we were promised if we just committed to a strong K-12 showing and college education.

Meanwhile, Gen X did the thing — they got the jobs, they raised the kids, put them through college and held onto their houses. But no one talks about how they’re dealing with problems of their own that stem from the same place. They may not have to worry about saving up for a home, but job loss, retirement funds, and supporting kids who are getting screwed out in the world are all part of the typical Gen X day.

Yet somehow society is trying to convince everyone that the problem is how young people don’t want to work or they complain too much or they spend money on useless things, instead of the fact that society has changed rapidly before our eyes, exposing structural issues that the most affected groups are speaking up about.

In other words, young people don’t like ridiculously low pay and workplace abuse normalized by previous generations.

But wait — it actually wasn’t normalized by previous generations.

American workers used to have much better collective bargaining power, much better unionizing, and much better political support against corporate lobbying and insurmountable CEO pay packages. That all changed in the 80s with the Reagan administration.

While the standards for work and workplace standards have undoubtedly continued to change as we defined new protections and expectations for the treatment of workers and human beings in general (this includes discrimination policies and workplace harassment, for instance), what has also changed is the power these workplaces and their CEOs have compared to the average worker to enforce or ignore these new expectations.

For one, it’s so difficult to get a job at all now that it doesn’t even make sense to speak out against a toxic work environment when you finally manage to secure one. When you don’t want to be unemployed, it’s too big a risk to ask your boss to stop making you constantly put in extra hours when you physically and mentally can’t handle it. At some point, even low pay is better than no pay.

For the current generation, many are tired of a highly imbalanced work-life day-to-day but can’t always do anything about it. One popular option is that many young people elect to move back home to save money from not having to pay ridiculous sums in rent while they work, look for jobs, attend grad school, and more.

But for older generations, they’re the parents with the homes their kids are moving back into, and as they themselves struggle to hang onto their jobs or are forced to embark on job hunts of their own while their finances deplete, what can they do but hope their kids will find stability and be set for life as soon as possible?

After all, they put these kids through college for that very reason.

Only, that Bachelor’s degree and the years of experience has become the standard because the rest of their generation did the same with their kids, so now everyone going out for such jobs has similar resumes.

And thus, they all remain unemployed.

It’s not the fault of young people for doing what they were told — studying hard in school and getting their degree only to come face to face with a world that looks wildly different than their parents’ world. They’re just unluckily in the hot seat as unprecedented change sweeps through society.

This inability to thrive the way previous generations did at their age reveals several extremely flawed and broken institutions that need a serious overhaul. The complaints about “kids these days” isn’t new, but somehow we’re still trapped in this cycle instead of finding a way to break it and actually move forward from what is just a distraction from having to reform old institutions that actually affect us all, regardless of age.

Politics

The Goal of Partisan Politics

As much as I don’t care for the generational divides, I care significantly less for political divides. Make no mistake — this is not a “both sides equally bad” sort of argument. (I think it’s pretty obvious one side is infinitely worse than the other.)

But why do we even have sides?

That’s a whole article unto itself, but when the founding fathers warned about political parties, even they couldn’t imagine the clown show it would eventually become.

Parties are the ultimate signals of identity and therefore scapegoats. If we specifically look at the right, it becomes very obvious why there’s comfort in such identification. Right-wing politics has a long history of scapegoating, particularly since the Nixon campaign’s 1960s Southern Strategy aimed at winning voters by turning lower class white Americans against their POC counterparts.

And we’re seeing it at new heights today, most likely because it’s seriously working. Currently, immigrants are to blame for economic issues, even though the truth is immigrants actually benefit this country and have done so for quite some time.3

But who among the target voting demographic of the right has done the research to see that this is the case?

When politicians offer such easy solutions by scapegoating either the other party or certain demographics to easily prejudiced individuals; when citizens of poor red states with a lack of education and a hard day’s work for little pay are offered a quick promise without having to dedicate time and energy they don’t have to studying history and economics; when corporations have the money to fund certain campaigns that can focus on hitting their opponents hard while hiding who’s in their pocket — then suddenly it’s not difficult to understand why the Republican party is so successful.

Keep in mind, however, that not too long ago, the parties were actually completely opposite to how they are now.

A Quick History of the Two Parties

In a post Civil War era, the newly minted Republican party behind Lincoln’s efforts not only kept the union together, but also grew richer as the winners of the war, and this led the party down a more conservative path with more pro big business politicians. Teddy Roosevelt was an exception, but even he had to eventually create his own party when successor Taft was too conservative for his liking.4

This famously split Republican votes, giving the win to Democrat Woodrow Wilson, a deeply racist man who hated civil rights. And yet, while Roosevelt, both a proponent of civil rights and extremely anti-trust, was actually pro-imperialism, Wilson was staunchly anti-imperialist in a way that most people today would actually appreciate. He believed in the self-determination of peoples abroad rather than US intervention to directly shape other nations.

The Democrats actually long held an anti-imperialist platform, most prominently exercised around the turn of the century, when the US colonized the Philippines.

While Republicans believed that imperialism would be good for the economy and Roosevelt himself convinced Americans that the war was justified because they were civilizing savages, Democrats didn’t want American dollars going abroad and wanted to prevent immigration and citizenship that would disrupt labor and corrupt the American identity, in their xenophobic eyes.

If you think about the origins of the Democratic party, this isn’t surprising. Founder Andrew Jackson wanted to champion the common man. As president, he cracked down on the Second Bank of the US because it would benefit the rich at the expense of everyone else.

Quite famously, however, Jackson is also responsible for mandating the ethnic cleansing of Native Americans after narrowly beating out the opposing party’s John Quincy Adams, who deeply criticized these actions as sinful. Yet even Adams wanted to move natives to a different land — he just wanted to do it “legally.”

As you can see, partisan politics have constantly shifted because parties are only defined as being in opposition to each other.

When Democrat FDR created the New Deal following the Depression, the pro-big business Republican party that had caused the crash to begin with pushed against his actions, leading many Americans to come scarily close to embracing fascism — ironically prevented by America’s entry into the second World War.

Yet, the Democratic party was still divided on the issue of civil rights, and despite FDR and Truman’s efforts, it was extremely difficult to get legislation past the their party full of segregationists. It was only when Republican Eisenhower came into office and appointed Earl Warren as Chief Justice did we finally start to see landmark cases such as Brown v. Board of Education.

Eisenhower wasn’t some massive proponent of civil rights or anything, and it certainly wasn’t a major platform for the party, especially after Truman and the DNC’s choice of civil rights as a major party platform led to a walkout by southern Democrats. But Eisenhower was caught between a war where many POC fought under the American banner as he did, and the threat of communism against democracy.

So once again, on an international scale, partisan politics didn’t really mean much. In fact, we eventually came up on the complete flip with the work of LBJ that angered white Americans, which then gave a platform to Richard Nixon, as he employed a campaign strategy known formally as the “Southern Strategy” and more colloquially as “racism” to win over such voters.

Additionally, through his heavy criticism of LBJ’s inability to resolve the Vietnam problem, he offered himself up as the new solution to Americans who were fed up with the situation, and when public pressure eventually contributed to LBJ choosing not to run again at the last second in order to preserve public peace and find a solution outside the political game, Nixon had damaged the reputation of the Democratic party enough to swoop in and take the win.

Of course, no one remembered that Nixon himself served as VP to Eisenhower, who was largely responsible for getting the US involved in Vietnam anyway, in an attempt to follow Truman’s doctrine of preventing the domino effect of communism (which Truman initialized with Korea), and to support their World War ally France, who had formerly colonized the region as French Indochina. Eisenhower himself had also planned the famous rescue operation of Normandy, France.

All presidents from Truman through LBJ followed the doctrine set down by Truman, and no president wanted to be the one to lose to communism until Nixon lucked out, when his (not first) campaign for the presidency lined up perfectly with the dissent of the American public.

This era really cemented the Democratic party as pro civil rights and the Republican party as…anti-war? Well, not exactly, but that’s why they call it political theater.

In fact, remember when we started digging through all this, we talked about Democrat Woodrow Wilson’s belief that America should promote democracy without directly interfering abroad while resenting civil rights, and yet external factors such as the depression, the second World War, and the rise of the Soviet Union would lead his Democrat successors to flip the two completely.

However, Wilson himself had not lived to see any of this, so who knows if his beliefs might have changed? And this is the point. Why are we still relying on parties to define our politics, when not only do they not represent us, but they also constantly change based on the world and each other?

This same partisan narrative is baked into every racial, ethnic, regional, and nationalist tribalism, because it’s much easier to invent opposition than address the root problems that affect us all.

Art and Culture Discourse

After all that heavy political history discourse, you might wonder why the arts have any relevance or significance here. But I’d argue that this field is one of the most visible and important areas of tribal division we’re seeing right now.

The Value of Art and Culture

Culture is literally the social representation of humanity at a particular time in history. It is the vehicle through which humanity functions. Who are we without our culture? The arts — including literature, film, music, and beyond — have the power to inform, build empathy, and tell stories, which are fundamental to human beings. Telling a story is how humans communicate who we are, what we stand for, and what matters.

And yet, instead of being the foundation and representation of our humanity, culture has become another arena for tribal battle.

Remember in the first Hunger Games film when the districts were too preoccupied with rooting for their own tributes to win against the other districts’ tributes to notice that no matter how fancy their tributes looked on screen, they were still gonna die and the cycle would repeat again next year?

This is why it’s important to engage critically with art/entertainment/culture. In the context of that film, the actual Hunger Games was supposed to be entertainment and penance. No one took it beyond face value — it was simply accepted as the norm until our main characters came along and changed the game (literally).

In the context of our society, engaging critically with this film beyond simply the spectacle of this dystopian world and the survival games allows us to see how it represents our own world.

Unfortunately, people don’t understand that what they see on screen actually matters, or means something, or represents the state of our society at large. The same goes for any art or media they consume. We currently live in a society where the only purpose of art is to mark our identity with which tribe we associate with.

This influences how people engage with culture as a whole. Rather than taking the time and energy to think deeply about something, most people judge a piece of art based on their chosen tribe. They don’t even have to think about fitting in — it becomes second nature, a learned habit to think this way.

For some people, that means liking the popular thing their neighbors and colleagues are talking about. For others, that means only liking niche things, or “serious” things.

There are film fans and TV fans who care only about awards contenders, and music fans who only value the aesthetic of their chosen celebrity.

People are watching TV, reading books, and consuming art in a way where anyone who challenges their status quo must have “TikTok brain” or, conversely, “hates fun.”

And these are just two instances of rhetoric used in typical intertribal discourse.

Maybe the reverse is thinking that people only want “fun” and not “serious” art, or that anything “serious” must inherently be pretentious.

Such back and forth narratives on art really reveal a serious lack of media literacy across the board. Our relationship with culture is not about actually engaging with the material, and conversations about media are generally not more than defending your team, and therefore your status quo.

The False Meritocracy

This tribalism is reinforced by a false meritocracy that exists beyond just art. If a work wins an award, it must be good because experts said so. If a song tops the charts, it must be good enough to reach so many people. If this book is more popular than that book, then it must be better — or, conversely, it must be worse depending on which tribe you ask.

In fact, when our tribe isn’t winning, suddenly we become aware of reality — the campaigning that goes into awards, the marketing and other more questionable tactics that get songs onto the charts, and the social conditioning of readers that elevates certain books over others.

However, as the pendulum always swings from one extreme to the other, this can then convince people that something with merit actually has none, when really, it’s because that thing with merit isn’t part of their tribe.

There are also many social structures in place that support the meritocratic illusion, such as patriarchy and white supremacy, and when we can’t recognize the role these structures play in art and culture, we can’t recognize it in society either. Because art reflects society and society reflects art, there’s a responsibility to engage thoughtfully with media — and to create thoughtful media in return.

We can really see this in representation discourse. Often people can’t understand why representation in media, entertainment, and any other such field is important. They can’t understand why visibility matters because they don’t understand why art and culture matters.

If I were to mention, for instance, that Asian people are very rarely seen in Hollywood, the typical response is generally something like, “Well, there aren’t white people in Asian movies” or “just go watch foreign movies” or “there aren’t as many Asian people in America so representation doesn’t matter.”

Such arguments stem from an inability to see the stories of Asian people, in this example, and any other group of people unlike themselves as not relevant to them. When you choose not to engage in the stories of what you perceive as an entire tribe, that is inherently an act of dehumanization.

This is why representation matters, and this is why art and storytelling and media all matter. When people are simply exposed to other people who look different from them but are just as human as they are, when they recognize emotions in situations they’ve never lived, when they get accustomed to the existence of those outside their immediate circles — then their understanding of humanity can grow.

Art and culture are bridges that can build empathy, expand knowledge, and bring people closer together. They can also do the complete opposite. Most people don’t recognize either power because we are not taught to value art. More than anything, we’re actively taught not to value it.

We’re told it’s just entertainment, or aesthetic, not a vehicle for understanding and engaging with our world. And thus, our ability to engage critically with and navigate our own realities weaken entirely. When we can’t think about art and culture, how can we think about the narratives that shape our society when these are all intertwined?

This is an article for another day, but if there was ever a tribal discourse that changed the world for the worse, it’s the STEM vs humanities/arts divide. The push for STEM has led our society to internalize the idea of hard sciences, math, tech, engineering, etc. as the only valuable subjects (because they can get you jobs) while humanities and arts are considered useless.

That mindset has led us to a society that doesn’t value human beings beyond their productivity, one where critical thinking and empathy are no longer required.

Art and culture should help us expand our understanding of our own lives as well as the lives of others, but because these aspects of human society are so undervalued, they become yet another area for people to perform an identity rather than think.

Tribalism is a Symptom

What do tribal narratives such as generational blame games, modern politics, and the state of cultural engagement reveal about how our systems have been failing us for a long time? Across all areas of tribal discourse, it becomes clear that humans right now are not built to function in society, and we never have been. We’re only built to survive.

The Failing Institutions

The main institutions causing these issues today are education, media, and political economy. But these structures and all the problems that come with them didn’t just pop up out of nowhere. There have been some major changes in the world that not only exposed these failures, but also exacerbated them to unprecedented heights.

What Changed

The most glaring of these is obviously technology. Just twenty years ago, social media was barely a thing. Even the internet wasn’t that widespread. Sure, everyone used it, but now you can access the entire planet from your pocket.

Never before have humans been able to see so much of the world, and in such a disorganized, overwhelming way. There are so many circles and so much content, and I think it’s safe to say none of us is really equipped to handle and process this constant flood of information.

This reveals a lot about the communication and critical thinking skills we’re taught (or not) in school. We’re conditioned to crave the simplicity of mindless scrolling over thoughtful action, or as I mentioned before, tribal narratives over any thought, period.

Our problems really became clear at the turn of the decade when the mere political, economic, and social response to the pandemic exposed that the world, and especially the U.S., was not prepared to handle a problem of this scale.

It exposed our government’s inefficacy, a broken international supply chain, and downright ignorance and defiance from the public. It elevated the importance of social media in our lives to new heights. And it undeniably changed our relationship to work, revealing a world where we can actually better manage a work-life balance when uninhibited by commutes and office confinement.

We realized how our lives would be so much better and more productive if we could all get up from our home office to go to the doctor, make fresh lunch, pick up the kids, and even have the comfort of our own bathrooms in the middle of a work day.

Of course, not everyone had that luxury. I know that I was clocking in as a pharmacy tech at CVS for 30-40 hours a week, often running COVID tests. But now the advent of AI has also opened up our minds to the question of what kind of jobs and tasks we actually do and don’t want to be doing and how we want to be spending our time.

Unfortunately, because of how our society is structured, business models in the tech industry are geared towards jumping on trends and constantly innovating to win some race instead of thinking carefully about how new tech like AI can be genuinely helpful so that humans can progress further as individuals, and what skills humans need to hold onto or build for themselves.

But as we can see, our world is not built to handle new changes with effectiveness and thought. Right now, our economy is worse than it’s been in a long time. Everything is SO expensive — food, rent, gas, and everything else we can’t live without. Our lives revolve around work and saving money, and it feels like we’re going backwards.

However, none of this is surprising when you consider that this is exactly how our education system was designed in the first place.

Education

Education is at the root of it all. For decades, society has pushed a direct correlation between schooling and employment. At one point, certain kinds of jobs for the average person started requiring a high school diploma. As graduating high school became the norm, the bachelor’s degree became the new baseline, supposedly ensuring that jobs would come knocking.

But now, even specializing in one field since tenth grade, doing several internships, and getting your degree isn’t enough to qualify for a decent paying full-time job anymore. The struggle to find or keep work today, even for those in their 40s and 50s, reveals that our education system has always been flawed.

The American K–12 education system is structured first and foremost to funnel students into college or work. Current American schooling is not structured to help students learn and understand more about themselves, their society, and the world around them. People are only learning to pass the class, get the grade, and move onto the next level.

But once they reach that final level and they have that job, suddenly the real world starts to catch up. The education system requires over-specialization in particular fields, which only leads to a surplus of workers, not citizens.

Most importantly, students are not being encouraged to even want to think. This past year, I’ve seen a lot of headlines about students using AI, and after complaining about it online, many teachers and college professors are implementing tools like AI detectors, in-class hand-written essays, and oral exams.

This kind of solution, unfortunately, is just putting a Band-Aid on a burst pipe. Back in my day, I remember drowning in homework and extracurriculars with no time left to figure out who I was because I had to get the grades and get into college and eventually get the job.

I would use tools like SparkNotes in place of actually reading an assigned book if it didn’t seem interesting to me — which was certainly more work and more accurate than plugging a prompt into a chatbot — but the problem was the exact same. I didn’t want to do it, and usually, I didn’t have the time.

Only on the rarest of occasions did I actually feel engaged in an assignment, and that includes college. While most of college, again, was about meeting the requirements and moving on, the classes that ultimately had the most impact were those where the relevance of the material was clear.

These were the courses that actually make me want to show up because the professors actually knew how to make the topics engaging and designed lectures, discussions, and assignments in a way that made me want to participate and feel like I was actually getting something out of them.

That is what education is supposed to be about. It’s supposed to be engaging, not a requirement to get employed. If people aren’t growing up wanting to learn, they won’t want to think either.

Forcing students to give an oral history about the American presidents so they’re not using AI is about as useful of an assignment as my 10th grade presidents’ assignment, where we had to list 4 things each president did in each term by looking it up online. It left absolutely no impact on any of us, and everything I know now about American history is either basics from previous years (like the Articles of Confederacy) or my own studies.

That’s not to say all schooling is useless. Strangely enough, some of the most useful things I remember were from elementary school: the concept of sample size; independent, dependent, and constant variables; and the three branches of government. Some classes are able to at least teach students to participate in discussion and maybe the basics of analyzing a text.

But if we ask ourselves why students are using AI, it’s because society puts major pressure on getting grades and passing in schools over actually wanting to think and learn. An inability to think critically leads to a lack of media literacy, which leads to people holding tightly to tribes so they don’t have to think at all — the same way students use AI to do their work for them. This is all because society teaches us not to value thought, but to value motion.

Disinformation, echo chambers, and bloated 9-to-5 schedules keep people from engaging thoughtfully with society as adults, and no one cares or has the time to re-educate. How many people are even thinking about what they learned in school if it doesn’t have any connection with their college major and current job?

Not only is it important for everyone to have a base level understanding of reading comprehension, history, human biology, and so on — in addition to fostering creativity and critical thinking — but it’s also important for people to recognize why they need to learn any of these things, and how they apply in the real world.

This is probably where we lack the most. Education should never have been about job prep, but always about how to function as a human being in the current world. That includes thought, interdisciplinary knowledge, and empathy, but above all, the ability to put all of that into daily practice.

Without good education, everything else falls apart. If we don’t have the skills needed to navigate modern reality, then we are not fully functional human beings that can engage with media, with society and other individuals, and with the world at large in a meaningful and thoughtful way.

Media

The next failing system is media, which includes news media, social media, books, TV shows, music, movies — literally anything that allows us to communicate with each other and the world or perceive each other and the world is part of this group.

Media is the primary lens through which we understand reality and experience the world around us beyond direct human-to-human interactions. But when that lens is warped, exacerbated by a lack of media literacy, we end up with a society trapped in narratives, propaganda, and performance. And therefore, we lose the ability to really understand each other.

This creates the perfect breeding ground for tribalism.

Again, the issues with our media landscape didn’t just become a problem in the modern age. If you remember the days of “yellow journalism,” for instance, sensationalism has always been the priority for media. But the overwhelming access to information in the age of the internet and social media reveals that humans were never prepared to digest this and that our media systems don’t work to help society.

They’re only designed to grab attention, just like newspapers and headlines. Attention is the most important currency right now, and it has trained people to be reactive and quick instead of deep thinkers.

Just as education is not about learning, media manufacturing and consumption is not about the media. It’s about fast output and high engagement. Beyond simply getting someone to click your article or buy your music, the goal is also to generate discourse that makes you stay in people’s heads longer than they can scroll past.

Books are written to satisfy the TikTok trends celebrated by anti-intellectual readers or cater to the pseudo-intellectuals who build their brand through the seriousness of what they read. Movies and TV shows are crafted to appeal to social media users who will spread the content and to awards show fanatics who will debate merit into the dust. And music is made as part of an artist’s branding to garner a fandom that buys products and tickets.

Media works by catering to or dividing tribes, and if you understand how fandom works, then you understand how media is made. In fact, most people will rely on other people to tell them how and what to think.

Influencers, reviewers, news platforms, popular posts on social media, and even their own friends and family — who themselves are subject to external influence — are now in charge of how people interact with the world.

Media consumption has essentially become identity-based, and it leads to people genuinely living in completely different realities from each other. Exacerbated by social media, everyone is constantly overstimulated with all sorts of content, and at that point, what is easier than sticking with what you already know?

Beliefs, opinions, and thoughts are all learned from tribal status quos and not developed through actual contemplation. People perform deep thought, often very publicly to prove their point, but there’s really nothing underneath the surface.

And because of the way media works, it’s a never-ending cycle of the blind leading the blind.

When education prioritizes climbing ladders, people can’t read the news, understand a TV show, or evaluate the content of a YouTube video — and they certainly can’t explain why any of this is actually important. They can’t see how news travels or that TV shows represent society at the time or that YouTube content is made for clicks.

All media should help us better understand and engage with the world, connect with others, and navigate reality, but instead they contribute to confusion, outrage, and exhaustion because people haven’t learned how to engage with these things and what to do once they have.

The only way to force all kinds of media to be better, to fix a system that rewards terrible content or attention-seeking behavior and drives the production and consumption of incendiary content, is to be aware of it in the first place.

If we can’t spend even three seconds thinking about whether that headline is misleading, whether that show missed the mark (and why it’s important), and whether that video is literally wrong, then the modern institutions of media and education have failed the public.

And nowhere is that failure more visible, or more dangerous, than in our government.

Government

If education isn’t teaching us how to think, and media is telling us what to think, then politics is about making sure we don’t think.

The whole point of our political system is to make sure that we can elect trusted government servants that will properly represent us, their constituents, across a variety of issues that affect us because we don’t have the time, power, or expertise to solve every single issue ourselves. This then translates into the laws that conduct our labor and living and manage our economy.

Unfortunately, politics is called political theater for a reason.

Because of the failures of education and media, politicians have the power to shape public opinion. They have to campaign for votes to convince people they’re right, and the easiest way to do that is by simply choosing a tribe. Who will best represent the Democrats and who will best represent the Republicans? It’s the candidates who best suit the status quo of their constituents, which their own predecessors shaped.

Then most people vote red or blue — red voters generally vote based on lifelong ties and blue voters generally vote blue because they’re thinking it’s better than red. No one is really voting in their own interests because they either don’t know what that looks like or their interests aren’t up for consideration in either camp.

This system is made worse by the way our media structures work. Clicks, outrage, constant discourse — these are the priorities. Everything becomes content, and those actually trying to come up with solutions are ignored in favor of blatant satire for entertainment, reaction-based social media responses, and incendiary news cycles.

With all this noise, people end up consuming politics the same way they consume everything else: through performance of an identity for their tribe. And I don’t just mean parties.

This includes performative activism on social media for followers because validation from unknown strangers that you’re a good person is more important than actually doing anything useful. This includes the development of subconscious thoughts against another ethnic group because enough people on social media complained about them taking your jobs.

More than anything, this cycle of political scandal and subsequent media outrage has desensitized people. Now violence from our own government is simply the norm, and welp, there’s nothing we can really do about that.

Every day it’s the same: something crazy or horrible happens related to government and politics, people on social media go crazy, and nothing further happens. Even those of our citizens or reps who are trying to do something are often trapped by systems like blacklisting and outright physical harm, and a political system that is married to the electoral college, gerrymandering, and Wall Street.

And this last one is the most crippling of them all.

Wall Street and Washington

For a long time in American history, politicians have been able to hold the rich accountable and prevent them from gaining too much power. From Jackson targeting the Second Bank to Teddy Roosevelt’s heavy anti-trust action, the government has generally been able to keep corporations and the financial sector in check.

That all changed in the 1980s during the Reagan administration. After significant government actions that left the populace divided and wary (like civil rights, Vietnam, and Watergate), Reagan was able to come in on a platform of less government that appealed to many. This led to mass deregulation that gave unprecedented power to corporations and left workers, consumers, and the public with less.5

This paved the way for a deep partnership between Washington and Wall Street, and corporations in general.

With millions spent on political campaigns, corporate lobbying, and positions in one sector guaranteed to members of the other, the American government became entangled with corporations in a way that couldn’t be better exemplified than by the 2008 crash, when the government used taxpayers’ dollars to bail out the banks.

But most Americans don’t understand this. All they know is what their tribe thinks about “capitalism” and “socialism,” and discourse has skewed this vocabulary beyond all original meaning and contexts. This turns into a discussion of taxes and whether or not the government should be involved in the private sector, but such a question is irrelevant.

If we can’t trust our government enough to both regulate large corporations while also not exercising so much control and influence over these sectors that they become propaganda machines, then we have a big problem.

When political campaigns funded by corporations keep voters focused on arguing over surface level details of issues instead of laying out problems and solutions in depth, people don’t notice how corporations are in the pockets of both parties, and therefore many of our reps.

Again, this is not a “both sides bad” argument, but if both parties meant to represent its citizens are actually representing external interests before us, then that means that our ability to participate in government is broken, and it always has been.

Only now, because of everything that has happened since the 80s’, things have gotten worse to where the vast majority of us are faced with the same socioeconomic realities and concerns about rising costs, the job market, and getting harassed over our identities. Yet we still can’t find solutions because our political system is about keeping us divided to support political careers and concentrate power.

Gone are the days when politicians could lay down the law against anti-trust and union busting because of the tight Washington-Wall Street coil. Our own system of government does not serve us, and thanks to failures in education and media, we don’t have the tools to fix it.

This isn’t the first time in history we’ve seen such economic crisis, but the last time it was not only bad, but actually worse than this, our country came so close to fascism that it, ironically, took Pearl Harbor to snap us out of it.

Just over 96 years ago, with only a couple months left in the year 1929, America’s stock market collapsed so catastrophically it sent the 1930s into a crippling depression, caused by greedy businessmen. FDR tried to fix it with his New Deal, but this made those businessmen and their politician friends encourage the exact same type of blame games that were going on across the Atlantic so they could regain power and control.

Sound familiar? Obviously, we don’t want to wait until something drastic happens before we start trying to fix our issues. So what can we do to break the systemic cycles and move forward without having to go to war?

Learning to Think

Thinking about how large and deeply embedded our institutions are can feel overwhelming, like we’re never be able to fix everything. And like we’ve talked about so far, the 2020s have brought unprecedented changes. We’re going on centuries of institutional failure and social conditioning, and there are billions of people on the planet. How can we ever hope to change anything?

It all comes back down thought; personal education, general awareness, and practicing critical thinking on the day to day. When there’s so much to do like paying bills and taking care of family, the easiest way to make change is to just start thinking. Ask questions, examine the status quo, build empathy. It sounds both simple and also like it won’t do anything, but by trying to find the happiness in your own life and community, you’re already helping.

The system wants us to feel crushed and powerless. They want us to feel like every single day, we just have to wake up and worry, and when we do, it has already won. Maybe it feels considerably privileged to even be able to wake up, but then use that privilege. You can’t be helpful if you’re angry and rage tweeting all the time.

Ask yourself what small part you can play to improve your own community, raise your children or talk to your friends, make work better for yourself and your team, and so on. When you learn to think, you can spread that to the people around you.

We all wish the world would change instantaneously right now, but we all must play our part, no matter how small. Remember in Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit when every single person, creature, or species had to play their part in order to defeat evil? That concept doesn’t just apply to hobbits, elves, and dwarves.

The most important tool in our arsenal is thought — deep thought, not reactive thought. We’re not as powerless as we think we are. You don’t need to move mountains or save the day; you can start at home with family, your local community efforts, or your daily commute. What matters is that you don’t ever stop thinking and caring about people at large.6

But I hope not.

The Incident

See, I typically hit the same places, with a few swap-out options, and Wendy’s is pretty much not on that list. There are plenty of fast food places near me to the point where I have multiple options per chain, and this definitely comes in handy so that the very real non-AI human beings at any one location don’t think I’m there every single day (more on that later).

But all my typical haunts and backups were not on the table that day because of a very human problem called Feeling Sick.

I’d spent the whole day trying to figure out this blogging thing and what I might write about on top of doing some work, and I’d barely eaten so my stomach didn’t feel great. I was also coming off of days of burritos and fried chicken so I needed a place that would feel completely different. Not greasy, not too seasoned, but still filling.

So I head out to Wendy’s — not just any Wendy’s, but one we never go to even though it is technically the closest. It’s just out of the way of anywhere else we would go, and there’s never any reason to go to Wendy’s at all if not coming back from some store where a Wendy’s happens to be the only viable nearby place.

(Don’t worry, there’s a reason for all this extraneous detail.)

I head to the drive through, and there’s a car in front of me so I take this time to figure out my order. On my mind is a baked potato with cheese, but if the person at the drive through tells me it’ll be a while, then I’ll instead get the 10-piece spicy chicken nuggets. If it’s a yes on the baked potato, then we’ll go back down to a 6-piece. And fries maybe, if it’s the 10-piece.

I’m thinking of all this, trying to get my options straightened out as I pull up to the window, and I hear this AI voice asking me about whether I’m using the app or something. Believe it or not, this isn’t the weird part.

I wasn’t really paying attention because there have been several drive throughs that usually have some auto-voice (AI, recorded real person, Siri’s twin) ask about the app or some other promotional thing before the actual person shows up to take the order.

So I’m waiting for the actual person to show up, but instead, this same robot voice tells me to order whenever I’m ready.

And I wish I could convey to you just how caught off guard I was in this moment.

Truly baffled — like imagine a Modern Family style sitcom scene with a camera zoom in. Every coherent thought escaped me. I almost pulled out ChatGPT to help me respond (just kidding, don’t text and drive).

I managed to mention the baked potato first. I wasn’t sure if the AI was getting this because there was no display showing me my order and no human reading it back to me. No response or acknowledgement at all, in fact, so I just kept going.

I said the chicken nuggets, and I added on the fries, even though I wasn’t gonna get both fries AND the baked potato because that’s just too much potato for one meal. I also mentioned honey mustard once after the nuggets and then again after the fries.

At this point I was just so confused what was going on that my brain sort of just tried to move forward even though it was still stuck. Did the AI ask me what else I wanted before I said the fries? Or did I say the fries anyway? I have no idea.

I wish I could remember if the AI asked me if I was done. I feel like it didn’t, but I don’t want to misrepresent anyone — sorry, anything. Regardless, it did tell me something about how my order would be ready at the window and so with complete befuddlement, I just pulled ahead.

And as I’m sitting there, trying to figure out what just happened, this actual person comes out, takes my money, then tells me AFTER the payment has gone through that I’ll need to pull up to the door to wait for the baked potato.

Hello????

This is exactly what I wanted to avoid in the first place. I just wanted to be in and out, then back home. I didn’t sign up for this! If a real person had been taking my order, then they could’ve told me I’d have to wait on the potato and I would’ve said no.

That’s not to say I’ve never been in a drive through where I had to wait longer because they needed more time to make something, sometimes with my telling them that I’ll wait and other times with no choice because things are taking much longer than they anticipated. Human beings aren’t perfect, after all, and who am I to complain as long as I get my food? These are busy people.

But this was such a strangely concocted set of events. I was specifically thinking about how I’d leave something out of an order since I knew Wendy’s didn’t always have a cooked baked potato on hand just ready to go. I’ve had experiences where I’m told, by the way, it would be 45 minutes on that, after which I’d say never mind.

Yet I have to end up waiting like twenty minutes because an AI wouldn’t have the ability to account for what’s actually going on in the store. Because it’s not a real person experiencing a rush or checking on food availability. It’s an automation.

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The Chaos of Being Human

The crazy part is if I just had an AI take my order and it didn’t have a consequence like that, I would probably not be so weirded out. Don’t get me wrong, it would still be ridiculous, but maybe it would just make me more appreciative of the humans I interact with and no more.

But the irony of me literally hoping to avoid a problem and then having to face it anyway…no wonder I sat in the car too baffled to even turn the music back on. On the upside, I took those twenty minutes to vent into my notes app to turn this experience into this first post.

Plus, I got a free frosty. It was vanilla, which I hate, so I had to give it to my mom who’s trying to cut down on sugar, but I’m not gonna make the Wendy’s lady go back inside and swap it out for just trying to be nice.

Admittedly, the complimentary desert also being wrong kinda killed me but it’s not like she could’ve asked me before coming outside. It’s just the cherry on top of an already awkward situation (I hate cherries, too).

In fact, it’s the cherry on top of an insanely specific chain of events no AI could ever come up with — feeling sick on the very day I needed an idea, going to a Wendy’s I never go to, the AI, the baked potato, even the tiny little frosty.

This, my friends, is the chaos of the human experience.

The unpredictability of life, the intensity of our reactions, and how that leads to new thoughts, ideas, and experiences to then share.

The very nature of the human experience seems to be underestimated by all these tech bros who insist AI needs to be in every corner of our lives and pretty much everyone else, especially in today’s fast-paced world. Not only is the human experience misunderstood, but it’s completely undervalued.

And why is that? Because it’s impossible to really explain.

The human experience is something that happens in real time. It can’t really be captured by AI because an AI can never go through the minute day-to-day motions that we go through. Any little thing can trigger any other thing. Any experience or thought can lead to another. This is chaos theory in practice.1

What exactly humanity is, that’s something that can’t be explained, it can’t be replicated, and it sure can’t be imitated.

It can only be experienced.

Surprise! It Happened Again

Either the universe wanted me to drive home this point, or this world is truly ridiculous and loves to move fast on trends because days later, it happened again.

We usually never go to Donato’s, but to make a long story short, one day my brother wanted some and I was in the car so we got some. The location itself wasn’t unfamiliar either as there’s a fast food place across the street I would go to occasionally (this becomes relevant later).

That first time we ordered in person, but a couple days later, I figure I can pick up some pizza on the way back from dropping my brother off ‘cause it was pretty tasty last time and I was annoyed my brother ate most of it before I could even breathe. Of course, given the distance, I want to call ahead so it’ll be ready by the time I get there.

So here I am, calling Donato’s. Once again I literally knew exactly word for word what I was going to say — large thin crust pepperoni pizza because that’s what we got last time, and I’ll pick it up in 15 minutes because I knew that I was 15 minutes from the location. But what could have taken two seconds if an actual person answered the phone, instead led to a five minute back and forth with a robot.

This AI kept asking me my order, and I would repeat it, then asked to confirm by repeating my order, and I would confirm, then ask me to wait a minute, then confirm it again — and this went on for like five minutes. If I had known that it would take that long, I wouldn’t have pulled over and parked the car. I would have just made the order in the car via Bluetooth while stuck in the traffic I knew I’d have to sit through anyway and even accounted for in my 15 minute countdown.

And while the Wendy’s thing was weird, the Donato’s thing actually pissed me off, ‘cause why are you making things harder for me? Who does this help? It certainly doesn’t help the workers, and plus it’s going to be done too early which is why I called instead of doing an online order because I figured I’ll just tell them when I’ll be there based on what the GPS says.

Also, I thought it would be faster than having to put all my info in the online order thing but because it’s an AI it’s just like “okay, your order is going to be ready at this time which happens to be 10 minutes from now and you literally can’t do anything to change it.” Even though you asked me a million times if my order was correct, you couldn’t let me tell you how long.

And when this was all finally over, I wasn’t even sure if my order actually went through because there’s no real person to say “we’ll see you here shortly” and hang up. I had to awkwardly hang up myself because the AI just stayed on the line after confirming my order yet again.

I then got to the store and of course, they didn’t have my order. I told the girl at the counter I had to talk to some weird AI thing so she just put in my order again, and as she did that, I realized the truth: I actually sent my order to the wrong location.

But look, I was already confused since I know the location in my head and I know what big street it’s off of but I didn’t know what the actual address was. In fact I again had planned to ask during my order hey, is this the such-and-such location? But I got so caught off guard, and I couldn’t have asked the AI anyway.

This isn’t to excuse my own idiocy. I could’ve pulled up the map and figured out if it was the right place. However, just as AI makes mistakes, so do humans. Only our mistakes become a part of our experience and impact us in some way that we might even share with the world.

But the story doesn’t end here, because after that realization, I called the original location, sidestepped the AI to talk to a real employee, told them I made a mistake and needed to cancel my order, and done! Just like that!

(And if anyone cares, there was something off about the pizza so my brother got to eat the whole thing again anyway.)

The Value of Human Interaction

See, it’s not just about our own individual experiences — humanity is also about connecting with other humans.

Honestly, I’m the type of person who would rather schedule an appointment online than speak to an actual person. I prefer the self-checkout at the grocery store, I don’t mind in-store fast food kiosks with the whole menu accessible, and I would much rather work remotely.

But I love the part of my day when I go out driving and hit up my usual food spots rather than ordering online or getting delivery. Besides the benefit of not paying more when you can literally just drive there in 10 minutes, you also get to be more precise about exactly what you want.

In fact, I used to go to a few places enough that they recognized me. Sometimes I would even try to switch between different locations of the same franchise so they wouldn’t look at me like I was crazy, though that wasn’t always feasible based on cost or quality sometimes being vastly different across locations in the same region.

So I just had to accept that these people would remember that I showed up in the same jacket every day per season. But this leads to some really unforgettable moments.

One time, this new guy at one of these places was confused about something, and the lady who was processing my check out told him something like “Don’t worry about it; she’s a regular.”

Me? A regular? You know me?

Of course by then, a couple other employees had also referenced seeing me a lot because, to quote one of them, I was in there every day “tearin’ up that brisket.”

Good to know these random strangers whose names I’ll never know who also don’t know my name have such a strong impression of me. I don’t even go that much, to be honest, and if I ever build up my rewards, I’ll generally go to the other location because it’s closer and the price won’t matter since it’s free.

But even the fact that I’m out here playing a game of don’t-go-to-the-same-location-too-much is kind of a fun experience. There’s just something amusing about these private experiences, minor interactions, silly thoughts that contribute to your overall being in this overly chaotic world.

I mean, you wanna talk about getting caught off guard at the drive through, here’s an interaction that really got my goat.

There are two places near me that I switch between, but one day I was picking up my brother from practice so I went to this third one, near his school. I roll down my window, preparing for the person to ask me to order whenever I’m ready, and instead, I hear a voice telling me my order.

Hello????? Who’s there???

I did a double take and told them yes, then pulled ahead. And at the window was an employee from one of the other locations — an employee I only ever interacted with once, by the way.

That’s insane. Like you really remembered me!

She even commented on the fact that I was at a new location, which was amusing, but over time, the frequency with which I visited that location I originally saw her at led to many of them definitely recognizing me, with another person learning my order, too, and inputting it on the screen when as I drive up.

Though most people don’t say anything about “oh, it’s you again,” and that’s fine, because there’s definitely a level of awkwardness when people at the window feel like they have to converse with you, and you gotta start coming up with extremely profound comments like “It’s gloomy today, isn’t it?”

To which one person actually said, “Oh, I wouldn’t say gloomy.” Like I’m just trying to answer your question. But I don’t resent such interactions. They may be awkward, they may catch me off guard, but they’re ultimately amusing and short and they don’t actively ruin my day. It’s also awkward, of course, when they don’t close the window so now you can’t roll up your window and you have to just sit there and hope they don’t ask you anything, but it’s still weirdly amusing as it’s happening.

Eventually, I started favoring the other location of my original two, and guess what? They started recognizing me there, too!

And I got yet another casual acquaintance for a short while, and occasionally when I would pull up, she’d be like, “You want your usual?” and I immediately know who’s there.

We don’t know each other outside of seeing each other a couple random times per week. But that’s what makes it fun! The fact that there are other random people in the world living their own lives, and you cross paths from time to time, and it’s a pleasant experience, that can be pretty cool. I haven’t gone back there in a while anyway, so I probably won’t ever see these people again, but that’s okay.

It’s a reminder that even though we may live in a world that can seem kind of bleak sometimes — with a lot of uncontrollable chaos, horrible and unbelievably stupid people all over social media and in positions of power, and yes, some nasty in-person experiences as a result of all that hate — there are still so many real, living, breathing people out there in the world who are genuinely good, kind, friendly, and care about other human beings.

And that’s something AI can never truly grasp — connection.

Because AI doesn’t live in the real world, doesn’t have experiences, doesn’t have actual thoughts. It can’t magically and singularly help us solve the problems of a world made up of humans, problems created by humans, problems that only exist because of a lack of real interpersonal connections.

It’s why I wanted to be in the business of storytelling, because the ability to reach people through stories is undeniably powerful. Humans connect with other humans. It is the ultimate way to bring about change.

I mean, why else would I give you so much irrelevant information about my fast food excursions? Who cares about the exact circumstances under which all this went down and the minute details? Why do I need you to know I’m a grown adult just in case you read this thinking I’m in high school because I mentioned living with my family?

But that’s the human experience.

I might be a little more fixated on that stuff than the average person, but maybe it’ll make you think about the weird or not so weird and seemingly small interactions you’ve had before.

Have you also been at a Chipotle where you asked for a little hot sauce and they threw in the entire ladle? Or you were too awkward to ask for more rice because you didn’t realize how little they gave you until it was already down the line?

We’ve all had uncomfortable or awkward or weird experiences and interactions with other people on the daily, even outside of lunchtime. But what are you gonna do? Complain? Let it ruin your day? Or just take from the experience something valuable and move on with your life? (Exceptions apply, like we’re not talking horrific experiences here — just awkward moments.)

So the idea that we’re being pushed to accept AI for the sake of maybe eliminating such interactions, it’s quite ridiculous, to say the least. As of writing this, I recently saw an Instagram reel that was surprisingly relevant (and made me question once again if Meta was spying on me). This girl got offered some Meta glasses, and in this video, she expresses her own experience with the loss of human connection.2

Imagine a world where we’re all secluded in these high tech rooms that are customized to give us every experience we could ever want while we’re optimally productive. We get our food delivered, strap on a VR headset to “walk outside” in some distant country, and chat online with strangers we’ve never met who are curated for minimal conflict. Who would ever need to leave?

But why wouldn’t we want to?

Why Human Thought Is Unique

I think there are two different aspects of the human experience — one that is the collective human experience that manifests in our legacy as a species, as a society, and one that is the day-to-day experience of being human.

Neither aspect should be taken for granted. It is a privilege to think and drive around and talk to others and create something out of nothing. It’s a wonder to look back through history and speculate on the future, and think not just about technology or geopolitical shifts, but specifically about how these affect human civilization. It’s crazy to think about what people in the future might think about us, and how different they might be, and what we should leave behind for them.

Why would we want a world that doesn’t value our humanity? What would be the purpose of that?

Even the mere act of me starting this whole blog thing (?) is so human. I have so many problems and complaints and normally, I just keep them to myself or develop a whole project idea not meant to see daylight for who knows how long.

I’m sure as hell not gonna post every little grievance or major analysis on my one social media which I barely use myself. So what am I supposed to do then? Throw my feelings into ChatGPT and let it validate me? What would be the point of that? It doesn’t ultimately impact the world in any sort of way.

But I can put them here, let random people find it, and maybe that’ll be my contribution to my own human experience and the minute experiences of others.

Even the writing of this post is taking a lot longer than I hoped because I’m coming up with new things to say and incorporating other ideas as I go and I have a life outside of this. So even though all this fast food chaos actually happened weeks ago, I’m still building on that experience just by trying to communicate something about it.

This whole chaotic thing turned into a story to capture a lot of ideas that have been swimming in my head for a while because the very essence of humanity is turning the chaos and vastness of reality into a story to communicate to others.

And it’s not just the mere ability to communicate with others. I could brain dump into a chatbot and generate an article, but it wouldn’t be anything more than just what I’ve already thought of in a specific paragraph order. An AI can’t get up and go live life and come back to the article days later and think of a new idea to add. Sometimes all you need is a good night’s sleep to allow your brain to process and reinvigorate itself.

Plus, who wants to just consume content for the sake of it and not know there’s a real personality behind it? Why do people watch certain content creators or subscribe to certain writers? It’s because they want to show up for the person, not the content.

Even the fact that I feel compelled to let you know every extraneous detail and remind you about the timeline yet again and how this all happened way before you’re reading it, even though said timeline doesn’t affect you at all, that’s the weirdness of humanity.

It’s the ability to communicate who we are — and to have something to communicate in the first place. Otherwise, what’s the point? You can have AI generate a bunch of topics for you to discuss, but if you don’t care and you haven’t lived life, then what exactly do you have to say? And to whom?

This is the value of human thought.

Reactions to the real world based on your own life experiences, the instinct to connect dots that have never before been connected, a fighting urge to put your imperfect voice out into the world — even the most polished piece of prose can’t capture this lived experience.

I’m not saying you’ll never need AI for anything ever. In fact, I’d love to see if AI can help out in the world of medicine and healthcare, for instance (though that might come with its own issues to sort out).

Yes, the world is changing and there are new technologies on the rise. Maybe this tech can help us do things we’ve never done before.

But let’s not underestimate our own capacity for thought, the value of our experience, and our ability to connect with others. We need to think intentionally about what these new technologies should be used for rather than using it to replace what makes us human.

In that case, maybe this AI craze is actually a good thing.

Just as it took a pandemic for us to realize we’d rather be home with friends and family than stuck in a cubicle or classroom 40+ hours a week, maybe we’ll now learn to better value human thought, experience, connection, and communication.

Because no computer in the world can ever go outside, take a short drive to Wendy’s, and in a series of chaotic events, have to pawn off the spicy nuggets to its brother because an automation forgot to write down honey mustard.

Update

I had to order Donato’s again for my brother and I got so fed up with the system, I just hung up, called back, and bypassed directly to the in-store person.

On the other hand, I had to go to that Wendy’s again (also for my brother, I sense a pattern here), and it actually went well? This time I was prepared, there was a display where they were transcribing my order, and when the AI asked if there was anything else I could say no and move ahead.

My concern with this though is again, you can’t exactly ask stuff or interact with it if you have questions about the menu. Also, it might have trouble picking up non-American accents, and it obviously still has the capacity to make mistakes. But again, it remains to be seen whether this will actually become a usefully incorporated tool that alleviates stress for the workers, or if it’s just another burden both employees and customers have to deal with.

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