There were several people lining the Main Street of my town this morning painting buildings on canvases. We have a cool town square with an old theater, a college, and many small businesses – it’s a perfect place to paint and a better place to live. I like it here.

Anyway, immediately following these artists at work, on the outdoor chairs in front of the coffee shop were 2 kids, maybe 10 or 11 years old, both gazing at phone screens inches from their faces.

Sadly, I’m becoming an old man shaking my head about “these kids today.” I never wanted to be that guy, sweating through the crust on my face shouting from the porch to “Get off my lawn!!!” And yet here I am… I guess every person since the beginning of time swore they weren’t going to be their parents and then woke up one day with ear hair, wrinkly eyes and unreasonably strong opinions on underwear and weather.

Now that I have shamefully admitted to this condition, I can embrace it. It certainly looks like “these kids today” (like my own) are satisfied to consume, so what happens when there are no more producers? What happens when the painters are gone? What happens when the filmmakers are replaced by TikTok-ers?

Obviously, I love the blog format – it’s immediate and timely, perfect pictures and commentary of our rapidly changing culture. But will the things we create here last longer than a cycle? I wrote one called Echo 2 weeks ago that I was very pleased with, posted on both of my sites (!!), and it was well-received for a few days…and not read since. Will people be reading our heads & hearts in a year? In a month? Next week? Will the middle-schoolers in 2053 still be reading To Kill A Mockingbird and The Outsiders?

I know it’s not like no one under 25 is writing, it’s just an exaggeration. I’m just wondering out loud how much of an exaggeration it is. We wanted to write the Next Great Novel, now my boys and their friends want to be the next YouTube Fortnite sensation or Influencer (which is a legitimate thing to aspire to.) Or maybe they don’t. Maybe they just want to watch the next YouTube Fortnite sensation or be influenced.

I don’t know what that means for the poets and performers, but maybe COVID has already gutted that community anyway. Maybe it’ll be ok, just different. This is probably what our grandparents said when The Beatles were on Ed Sullivan, isn’t it? On some level we all think the things we like are better than their replacement, and I should just chill out about it.

I just wish that kid I saw would’ve been painting, too.