The Listicle Era
Ten animation software every animator needs. Five AIs you cannot live without. Seven steps to better health. Everywhere you look, everyone has guides and procedures that promise to get you wherever you want to go.
Step one. Step two. Step three. Success.
Except life doesn’t actually work that way. Not everything comes in a clear one-two-three list. The steps you take will be different from what someone else takes. The biggest thing is always just the next step.
Being a little older affords me a different perspective on the world. I was listening to a breakdown recently of the way Gen X approaches life, and I didn’t realize what a unique period we were afforded. We’re the last of the digital immigrants—a term that gets thrown around, but it matters more than you might think.
There’s a lot that gets talked about with the generations. Boomers. Millennials. The new Alphas. Gen X is stuck with a name now used as the replacement for Twitter.
But we witnessed something nobody else will: the last moments before the algorithm decided what we should do next.
What Gets Lost in the Digital Native World
A couple of things stuck out to me as skills that need to be taught and passed onto younger generations. Not because we’re better—we’re not. But because we had to learn certain things the hard way, and those hard lessons built muscles that don’t get exercised anymore.
Boredom: The Lost Skill of Doing Nothing
This just doesn’t exist anymore.
Gone are the days where there is genuinely “nothing” to do. The time to sit and think isn’t forced on anyone anymore. If a baby cries, they get given a device and they’re distracted, rather than learning how to work through whatever their issue is. The issue gets pushed to the side and doesn’t get dealt with.
This is showing up in the amount of mental health challenges within youth. Dealing with your own issues isn’t something that gets practiced anymore. Working through issues together is a great thing to do, but a reliance on digital connection takes away the connection to yourself.
We learned to be bored. To sit with ourselves. To figure out what to do with empty time. That muscle—the ability to tolerate discomfort, to sit with your thoughts, to create something from nothing—that’s atrophying.
Conflict Without Escape Routes
When you were playing outside in the street and you had to play with everyone in the street to make up the numbers for a team, you learned to tolerate people. You had no choice. The kid you didn’t like? Still on your team. Figure it out.
When you left the street and went home, home was a safe place. There was no way for anyone to get to you in your own bedroom or safe space.
Now there’s no separation. No time or space to sit with yourself and analyze what happened through the day and how to handle something differently next time. The conflict follows you home through every device, every notification, every group chat.
We learned conflict resolution by necessity. We had to sit in the discomfort until we figured out how to get past it. There was no block button. No mute option. Just you and the problem, working it out or avoiding each other for the rest of the game.
Practical Self-Reliance
When you took your bike for a ride and it broke down, you had to fix it. There was no mobile to call someone to come pick you up. If you were out riding with friends, maybe they helped. But more often than not, you flipped the bike over and fixed it yourself, or pushed it all the way home and explained why you were late.
You learned to problem-solve in real time. With no backup plan. No GPS to reroute you. No phone to call for help.
That practical reliance on yourself—the confidence that you can figure it out, even if you’ve never done it before—that’s a different kind of skill. It’s not about being handy with tools. It’s about the belief that you’re capable of solving your own problems.
Navigation Without Maps
Finding your own way around without a map is a skill that’s quickly vanishing. It takes a lot of restraint now to just “go and explore” somewhere. That basic exploring thrill is very minimal now.
Parents want to know exactly where their child is. Kids need to have a map of where they’re going. Kids don’t get the time to explore, and they don’t want to go outside to explore.
We learned spatial awareness. We learned to pay attention to landmarks. We learned to retrace our steps when we got lost. We learned that being lost was temporary and manageable, not a crisis requiring immediate intervention.
The Algorithm Doesn’t Know Everything
Here’s what I’m getting at: the digital native generation is incredibly skilled in ways we never were. They can navigate complex software intuitively. They understand social dynamics across platforms we’ll never fully grasp. They can learn anything with a quick search.
But what they’re not being taught—what the algorithm can’t teach—is how to sit with uncertainty. How to solve problems without immediately searching for the answer. How to be bored and create something from that boredom. How to navigate conflict without an escape route. How to rely on themselves when there’s no backup plan.
These aren’t better skills. They’re just different. And they’re fading.
For the most part, parents are raising kids the best way they know how. The world has changed. The tools have changed. But some things—boredom tolerance, conflict resolution, self-reliance, spatial navigation—those things built resilience in ways that structured digital experiences can’t replicate.
Your Turn
If you’re from Gen X, you know this feeling. That strange awareness that we witnessed the before and the after. The analog childhood and the digital adulthood.
If you’re from a younger generation, this isn’t about romanticizing the past. We had our own problems. Plenty of them. But maybe—just maybe—there are skills from that pre-algorithm era worth learning, even if you have to learn them differently now.
The wastelands of creative problem-solving don’t need perfect directions. Sometimes you just need to be willing to get lost and figure out the way back on your own.
The work continues. With or without the map.