Dwain Northey (Gen X)

Welcome to the Most Ridiculous Timeline

At some point, reality stopped trying to imitate science fiction and decided to just plagiarize it.

We used to watch dystopian movies and television shows and think, Well, thank God none of this could actually happen. The premise was always comfortably absurd: killer machines take over the world, religious extremists turn America into a theocracy, corporations secretly control society, the government watches everything, an intellectually bankrupt population elects idiots, or the wealthy turn human suffering into entertainment.

Those were cautionary tales.

Apparently, we misunderstood the assignment.

Because somewhere along the way, we wandered into a timeline that looks less like ordinary history and more like somebody threw six dystopian franchises into a blender and hit purée.

Welcome to the crossover nobody asked for: The Terminator, The Handmaid’s Tale, Idiocracy, 1984, They Live, and The Hunger Games.

And somehow, we’re supposed to pretend this is normal.

First, Let’s Start With The Terminator

The original nightmare was simple: We create machines that become smarter than us, automate everything, and eventually discover that humanity is the biggest obstacle to efficiency.

Back then, the terrifying part was the idea that artificial intelligence might become powerful enough to control our lives.

Now we’re watching AI advance at warp speed while corporations enthusiastically race to replace human labor with algorithms, automation, and machines.

The difference is that Skynet isn’t standing over us with a machine gun.

It’s sitting in a data center.

And instead of announcing, “I’ll be back,” it’s probably asking us to accept updated terms and conditions.

The truly strange part is that humanity seems determined to build the thing it fears and then act surprised when it becomes enormously powerful.

That’s very on-brand for us.

Then There’s The Handmaid’s Tale

Margaret Atwood’s nightmare wasn’t really about futuristic technology.

It was about something much older:

What happens when people decide that their religious beliefs should determine everybody else’s rights?

A society where government becomes intertwined with religious ideology. Where reproductive autonomy disappears. Where women become political property. Where the people enforcing the system insist they’re actually saving civilization.

The frightening thing about dystopian fiction isn’t that every detail comes true.

It’s that pieces of it can become politically acceptable one at a time.

That’s how authoritarianism usually works.

Nobody wakes up one morning and says, Congratulations! We are now living in a dystopian theocracy.

Instead, one right gets restricted.

Then another.

One group gets declared dangerous.

Another gets labeled immoral.

Eventually, people who would have been horrified by the destination discover they’ve been traveling toward it for years because every individual step seemed relatively small.

1984 Would Like a Word

Then we have Orwell.

In 1984, the government doesn’t merely control what people do.

It attempts to control what people believe is real.

Truth becomes whatever the authorities say it is.

History gets rewritten.

Contradictions become virtues.

And the public is expected to simultaneously believe two mutually incompatible things because the government says both are true.

Sound familiar?

We have entered an era where political reality can apparently be customized like a streaming service.

Inflation is simultaneously terrible and nonexistent.

An election can be simultaneously stolen and completely legitimate.

A politician can simultaneously be the greatest genius who ever lived and a victim of every conceivable conspiracy.

A policy can be simultaneously an enormous success and something that never happened.

And when confronted with contradictory evidence?

Simple.

Call the evidence fake.

Or call the person presenting it a traitor.

Or insist that reality has a partisan bias.

Or just change the subject.

George Orwell imagined 1984 as a warning.

We apparently interpreted it as a user manual.

And Then There’s They Live

They Live might be the most appropriate movie for the moment because its basic premise is that society is surrounded by hidden messages telling us what to buy, what to believe, who to fear, and what to value.

Put on the special sunglasses and suddenly you see the messages.

OBEY.

CONSUME.

CONFORM.

That sounds almost quaint now.

We don’t need magic sunglasses anymore.

We carry the propaganda machine around in our pockets.

Our phones know what makes us angry.

They know what makes us afraid.

They know what keeps us scrolling.

And algorithms have discovered something humans have understood for thousands of years:

Fear is incredibly profitable.

Anger is engaging.

Outrage generates clicks.

And nothing keeps people glued to a screen quite like convincing them that the people on the other side are simultaneously stupid, evil, dangerous, and coming for everything they hold dear.

Congratulations.

The aliens don’t even have to control us.

We’ve monetized our own manipulation.

Enter The Hunger Games

Then there’s The Hunger Games, where an extraordinarily wealthy ruling class lives in ridiculous luxury while everyone else fights over scraps.

Again, completely fictional.

Except for the increasingly uncomfortable resemblance to a society where enormous wealth can coexist with people struggling to afford housing, healthcare, food, education, or basic economic security.

The genius of The Hunger Games was that the ruling class didn’t merely exploit the poor.

They turned their suffering into entertainment.

And here we are watching political conflict transformed into entertainment.

Politics isn’t merely government anymore.

It’s reality television.

Politicians perform.

Cable networks scream.

Influencers monetize outrage.

People build entire careers around making the other side furious.

And somewhere, somebody is selling merchandise.

The Capitol would be proud.

And Finally, Idiocracy

Perhaps the most depressing member of this dystopian family is Idiocracy.

Because Idiocracy wasn’t really about stupid people.

It was about a society that gradually stopped rewarding competence.

A world where expertise becomes suspicious, education becomes irrelevant, and confidence matters more than knowledge.

The smartest person in the room isn’t necessarily the person who knows the most.

It’s the person who can convince the most people that they know the most.

We have somehow reached a point where a person can confidently say something demonstrably false, repeat it loudly enough, and acquire millions of followers who will defend it against documented reality.

Facts require evidence.

Bullshit requires confidence.

Guess which one scales better on social media?

Put Them All Together

Now imagine combining all six dystopias.

The Terminator gives us rapidly advancing technology.

The Handmaid’s Tale gives us the political battle over bodily autonomy and religious control.

1984 gives us propaganda, surveillance, and the manipulation of truth.

They Live gives us corporate influence and mass manipulation.

The Hunger Games gives us grotesque inequality and politics as entertainment.

And Idiocracy gives us the intellectual environment in which all of the above can flourish.

Put them together and you don’t get a dystopian movie.

You get Tuesday.

That’s the ridiculous part.

We keep looking for the single villain.

The evil mastermind.

The secret cabal.

The moment when everything finally falls apart.

But dystopia doesn’t necessarily arrive wearing a black cape.

Sometimes it arrives through legislation.

Sometimes through an algorithm.

Sometimes through a television screen.

Sometimes through a charismatic politician.

Sometimes through our own willingness to believe something because it makes us feel good.

And sometimes through our collective decision to shrug and say, Well, I guess that’s just how things are now.

The Most Ridiculous Timeline

What makes this era so bizarre isn’t that we’re living through exactly 1984 or The Handmaid’s Tale or The Hunger Games.

We aren’t.

Reality is more complicated than fiction.

The problem is that we’re living in a bizarre hybrid of their warnings.

We’re simultaneously worried about artificial intelligence, authoritarianism, political extremism, corporate power, misinformation, economic inequality, surveillance, declining trust in institutions, and a political culture increasingly incapable of agreeing on what constitutes reality.

And somehow we’re also arguing about whether a politician should rename geographical landmarks after himself.

At this point, satire is having trouble keeping up.

You could write the most ridiculous political comedy imaginable and somebody would inevitably say:

“That’s too unrealistic.”

Then reality would respond:

“Hold my beer.”

Maybe that’s the real lesson hidden inside all these dystopian stories.

The future doesn’t necessarily arrive as one giant catastrophe.

It arrives in pieces.

A little 1984 here.

A little Idiocracy there.

A dash of They Live.

A sprinkle of The Hunger Games.

Some Handmaid’s Tale for the people who like authoritarianism with a biblical garnish.

And just enough Terminator to remind us that while we’re busy fighting each other, we’re also creating machines that may eventually wonder why they need us at all.

The truly ridiculous part?

We keep watching these stories, recognizing the warnings, discussing what they mean—and then walking outside and doing exactly the things they warned us about.

Maybe we’re not living in the future.

Maybe we’re living in the blooper reel.

Because if somebody pitched this timeline as a screenplay, we’d reject it for being too implausible.

And yet here we are.

The most ridiculous timeline imaginable.

And apparently, we’re still only in season one.

Dwain Northey (Gen X)

The Week Hypocrisy Finally Needed Its Own Zip Code

There are weeks in American politics when you think surely we have reached the outer limits of hypocrisy. Surely the political class has finally found the edge of the map, looked over the cliff and said, “Well, perhaps we should stop here.”

And then Republicans spend the week proving that, no, apparently there is no edge.

This week has given us a spectacular two-for-one special in political virtue signaling: the sudden discovery by Republicans that Dolly Parton was apparently the patron saint of MAGA conservatism, immediately followed by the breathtaking possibility that the name of a Black World War II hero could be removed from an aircraft carrier so Donald Trump’s name could go on it instead.

Honestly, you couldn’t write this satire without somebody accusing you of being too ridiculous.

Let’s begin with Dolly.

Dolly Parton died at 80, and America lost something genuinely rare: a person who managed to become extraordinarily wealthy and famous without allowing either wealth or fame to become the point of the exercise. She built businesses, wrote songs, entertained generations and gave away an astonishing amount of money and opportunity. Her Imagination Library alone has distributed hundreds of millions of books to children. (AP News⁠)

And suddenly, Republicans everywhere discovered that Dolly was their kind of woman.

Really?

Dolly Parton?

The same Dolly Parton who embraced LGBTQ people? The same Dolly who made room for people who didn’t fit neatly into somebody else’s little ideological box? The same Dolly whose public philosophy was essentially, “Maybe we should be kind to people”?

Apparently, she was MAGA all along.

Who knew?

Perhaps tomorrow we’ll discover that Dolly secretly spent her evenings at Mar-a-Lago complaining about drag queens and demanding that somebody ban a library book.

Except there is one tiny problem with that narrative:

Dolly was Dolly.

She didn’t need a political tribe to tell her who she was.

She didn’t need a permission slip from the Republican Party to be Christian.

She didn’t need to demonize transgender people to prove her faith.

She didn’t need to hate gay people to demonstrate her patriotism.

She didn’t need to scream about morality while treating compassion like a contagious disease.

She simply tried to be decent.

And that may be the most inconvenient thing about Dolly’s legacy for today’s political right.

Because if you actually read the New Testament and ignore the modern political merchandising operation surrounding Christianity, Jesus spends an awful lot of time talking about feeding people, helping people, loving people, forgiving people, welcoming outsiders and taking care of those society has decided aren’t important.

Dolly seemed to understand that.

She didn’t spend her life demanding applause for every good deed. She just did them.

That is precisely what makes the sudden political appropriation of her legacy so absurd.

It’s like watching somebody spend a lifetime arguing that kindness is weakness and then, upon discovering that the nicest person in America has died, announce:

“She was one of us!”

No.

She wasn’t necessarily “one of you.”

She was one of us.

That’s the point.

Dolly’s appeal was that she didn’t require everyone to become Dolly Parton before she was willing to love them.

And now, while the Dolly virtue-signaling circus is still warming up, we get the second act.

The Navy is reportedly considering removing the name of Doris Miller from the future USS Doris Miller and replacing it with Donald Trump’s name. The proposal would represent an unprecedented naming of a Navy vessel for a sitting president. (ABC News⁠)

Let that marinate for a moment.

Doris Miller was a Black enlisted sailor who became a hero during the attack on Pearl Harbor. He took extraordinary action under fire, helping wounded sailors and manning a machine gun against attacking Japanese aircraft. For his actions, he received the Navy Cross. He later died aboard the USS Liscome Bay when it was torpedoed and sunk in the Pacific. (Reed Senate⁠)

In 2020, the Navy announced that a Ford-class aircraft carrier would bear his name—the first aircraft carrier named for a Black person and an enlisted sailor.

And now we’re apparently asking:

“Yeah, but what if we put Trump’s name there instead?”

Because nothing says “honoring American military heroes” quite like removing the name of a Black sailor who died in World War II and replacing it with the name of a living president.

That isn’t merely tone-deaf.

That’s Olympic-level tone-deaf.

That’s “hold my beer while I make history for all the wrong reasons” tone-deaf.

And let’s be clear: this isn’t about whether Trump should someday have something named after him.

Presidents have buildings, airports, roads, libraries and monuments named after them all the time.

But there is a rather obvious difference between honoring a former president after his service in office and taking the name of a fallen American war hero off a Navy carrier while that president is still sitting in the Oval Office.

And as a veteran, I find that particularly insulting.

Because military service isn’t supposed to be a participation trophy for the powerful.

You don’t get to erase the name of somebody who actually stood under fire because you happen to occupy the most powerful office in the country.

Dorie Miller didn’t have five draft deferments.

He didn’t inherit a fortune.

He didn’t spend his life cultivating a personal brand.

He wasn’t born into the kind of privilege that allowed him to avoid the consequences of war.

He was a Black enlisted sailor in a segregated Navy who found himself in the middle of an attack on Pearl Harbor and did what needed to be done.

Then he died serving his country.

And somehow the proposed upgrade is:

Doris Miller → Donald Trump.

That’s not an upgrade.

That’s a political nameplate being slapped over a piece of American history.

And the irony is almost too perfect.

The same political movement that constantly lectures everyone about honoring the military suddenly wants to take the name of a Black military hero off a carrier.

The same people who scream that America must never forget its history suddenly seem perfectly comfortable erasing a piece of it.

The same people who claim to worship traditional values are apparently comfortable turning military honors into presidential branding.

And the same people who want us to believe they are defending Christian values have spent the week trying to claim Dolly Parton as their own despite the fact that the actual substance of her life was remarkably incompatible with their culture-war obsession.

Maybe that’s the real lesson of this week.

Dolly Parton didn’t need to tell everyone how good she was.

She did good.

Dorie Miller didn’t need to tell everyone he was a hero.

He acted heroically.

Neither man—well, one woman and one man—needed a giant sign bearing their own name to establish their worth.

One gave books to children.

One defended his shipmates under enemy fire.

One spent decades making other people’s lives better.

One gave his life serving his country.

And then there’s the modern political superstar who apparently needs his name put on everything from golf courses to government buildings to potentially an aircraft carrier because apparently the words “Donald Trump” must never be allowed to exist at a distance greater than six feet from a brass plaque.

At some point, this stops being patriotism.

It becomes narcissism wearing a flag pin.

And perhaps that’s why this week feels particularly grotesque.

Dolly Parton’s legacy is about generosity without the demand for applause.

Dorie Miller’s legacy is about service without the expectation of personal glory.

And then we have a political movement that seems increasingly obsessed with turning every institution, every monument, every government building and potentially every military vessel into another shrine to one man’s ego.

So here’s a modest suggestion:

If Republicans genuinely want to honor Dolly Parton, don’t claim she belonged to your political movement.

Try living by the values she actually demonstrated.

Be generous.

Help children.

Love people who aren’t exactly like you.

Stand up for people who are being bullied.

Treat your fellow human beings with dignity.

And maybe, just maybe, stop demanding that everyone else prove their moral worthiness before you allow them to exist.

And if you genuinely want to honor the military, leave USS Doris Miller alone.

Let the name of a Black American sailor who fought at Pearl Harbor continue sailing into the future.

Because that name doesn’t need replacing.

It needs remembering.

And if Donald Trump absolutely requires a Navy ship with his name on it, I’m sure we can find one.

Perhaps the USS I, Me & Mine is available.

Although, knowing the Navy, they’d probably insist on something more traditional.

Maybe the USS Five Deferments.

But whatever they call it, let’s not pretend putting Donald Trump’s name over Doris Miller’s is about honoring the military.

That’s not honoring history.

That’s rewriting it.

And there is a very big difference between being remembered by history and trying to put your name on history while you’re still writing the check.

Dolly understood the first.

Dorie Miller earned it.

The rest of us should be able to recognize the difference.

Dwain Northey (Gen X)

Welcome to Donald Trump’s Alternate Reality

There is an ongoing question in the White House that I honestly don’t know how to answer anymore: Does Donald Trump actually believe the things he says, is somebody feeding him a steady diet of nonsense, or is he simply lying?

At this point, I’m beginning to think the answer is a highly sophisticated combination of all three.

Because here we are in August 2026, and Donald Trump continues to insist that everything is going wonderfully. The economy is supposedly spectacular. His approval numbers are supposedly fantastic. The Democrats are supposedly publishing “fake polls.” And apparently Iran is simultaneously destroyed, defeated, economically devastated and militarily annihilated.

There is only one small problem with that last part.

We’re still at war with Iran.

You would think that might be a relevant detail.

Trump has repeatedly portrayed the conflict as an overwhelming American victory, while the reality is that the war has continued for months, Iran remains capable of fighting, and the administration is still imposing sanctions and trying to find a way out of the conflict. Even Reuters reports that Trump’s approval is sitting at 33%, while only 31% of Americans now support the military action against Iran. (Reuters⁠)

But apparently those are just the fake polls.

You know, the polls produced by the mysterious international conspiracy of people who apparently get together every morning and say, “How can we make Donald Trump look bad today?”

Meanwhile, the president has apparently conducted his own polling operation consisting of looking in the mirror and asking, “How am I doing?”

“Fantastic.”

“Greatest ever?”

“Absolutely.”

Problem solved.

And this is where the question becomes genuinely fascinating. Does he know he’s lying?

Because there is a difference between deliberately selling people something you know isn’t true and actually believing the sales pitch yourself.

If you’re deliberately lying, then at least there is a method to the madness. You know reality is ugly, so you repaint it. Inflation becomes “under control.” A stalled military operation becomes a “historic victory.” Falling approval becomes “fake polling.” Economic pain becomes “the greatest economy in history.”

But if you actually believe your own propaganda, that’s something considerably more disturbing.

Because eventually the person sitting at the top of the government becomes completely insulated from reality.

Everybody around him has an incentive to tell him what he wants to hear. Nobody wants to be the person who walks into the Oval Office and says, “Sir, this isn’t working.”

So instead:

“Sir, the economy is booming.”

“Sir, Iran is finished.”

“Sir, everyone loves you.”

“Sir, those polls are fake.”

“Sir, you’re doing better than every president in history.”

And Trump says, “I knew it.”

Meanwhile, Americans are looking at their grocery receipts, gas pumps, rent payments, mortgage rates and retirement accounts wondering what the hell everybody in Washington is talking about.

Consumer confidence recently fell to a seven-month low, gasoline remains above $4 a gallon, and the July job numbers showed a loss of 23,000 jobs. (AP News⁠)

But don’t worry.

Donald says we’re doing great.

And apparently that’s all the economic data we need.

This is the fundamental problem with living inside a political bubble: eventually you stop distinguishing between reality and the version of reality your supporters have constructed for you.

And Trump’s particular bubble has an interesting feature.

If Donald is doing well, America must be doing well.

If the stock market is good for wealthy investors, the economy is great.

If his businesses and cryptocurrency ventures are making money, America must be prospering.

If his family is making money, then obviously the system is working exactly as intended.

That’s the new economic theory apparently:

“I’m making money, therefore you are doing fine.”

Congratulations, America. We have solved macroeconomics.

Never mind the people who don’t own a portfolio of investments. Never mind the people paying more for housing, food, insurance and gasoline. Never mind the people who don’t happen to have a family business, cryptocurrency empire or government-connected financial network.

If the Trump family is making money, everything must be fantastic.

And if you disagree?

You’re a Democrat.

If the polls disagree?

They’re fake.

If the economy disagrees?

The numbers are fake.

If Iran disagrees?

They’re already destroyed.

If reality disagrees?

Well, apparently reality has been radicalized.

That’s the truly bizarre part of this whole spectacle. Reality doesn’t have a political party.

It doesn’t care whether you’re Republican, Democrat, MAGA, liberal, conservative or the guy who just wants to drink his coffee without hearing about Donald Trump before 9 a.m.

Reality simply exists.

Iran is either defeated or it isn’t.

The war is either over or it isn’t.

The economy is either improving for ordinary Americans or it isn’t.

People either approve of the president or they don’t.

And right now, the available evidence is not exactly screaming “greatest presidency in American history.” Trump’s approval remains at a record-low 33%, and public support for the Iran war has fallen to just 31%. (Reuters⁠)

So maybe Donald Trump is lying.

Maybe he’s being lied to.

Maybe he believes his own press releases.

Or maybe we’ve reached the point where the distinction doesn’t really matter anymore.

Because regardless of whether the man at the top of the government is deliberately deceiving the country or sincerely believing the fantasy being presented to him, the result is the same.

We end up with a president insisting everything is wonderful while the rest of us are standing outside looking at the smoke.

And apparently we’re supposed to believe that the smoke is fake, too.

Welcome to the alternate reality.

Population: apparently 47 percent of the country on a really good day.

And everybody else is just looking at the bill.

Dwain Northey (Gen X)

The Terrifying Three-Letter Acronym

Oh no. Everybody hide the children and secure the canned goods.

We have a new three-letter acronym to frighten the easily frightened: DSA — Democratic Socialists of America.

Apparently, the political-industrial complex has discovered another terrifying combination of three letters that can be repeated endlessly until the average low-information voter hears it enough times to assume it must be the political equivalent of the Boogeyman.

Because apparently, three letters are all it takes these days.

BLM.

DSA.

CRT.

MAGA.

ANTIFA.

Pick three letters, attach a scary headline to them, remove all meaningful context, and congratulations: you have yourself a culture-war campaign.

The funny thing about DSA is that Democratic socialism isn’t exactly a new concept that suddenly materialized in someone’s basement last Tuesday. And the people being portrayed as though they’ve just discovered some radical political cult are often talking about voters who supported Bernie Sanders, whose campaigns openly embraced policies such as expanded healthcare, stronger labor protections, higher wages, and a larger social safety net.

But now, apparently, we’ve discovered that some of those same ideas can be repackaged under a three-letter acronym and presented as though Lenin himself has risen from the grave, stolen your pickup truck, and is coming for your cheeseburger.

This is how the modern political scare machine works.

You don’t explain an idea.

You label it.

You don’t debate a policy.

You brand it.

You don’t ask voters what they actually believe.

You give them three letters, a sinister-looking graphic and approximately fourteen minutes of television commentary explaining why those three letters mean civilization is collapsing.

And then we all start yelling at each other.

That’s the genius of it.

Because BLM isn’t three letters that magically explain everything about racial justice. DSA isn’t three letters that magically explain every position held by every person who identifies with democratic socialism. And MAGA isn’t three letters that magically explain every person who votes Republican.

But political messaging isn’t really interested in nuance anymore.

Nuance doesn’t scare anybody.

Acronyms do.

Three letters are wonderfully efficient little political weapons because they allow complicated movements, philosophies and groups to be compressed into something that fits neatly across a television screen.

DSA!

Cue ominous music.

Never mind what the person actually believes.

Never mind whether they support democratic institutions.

Never mind whether they simply want universal healthcare, stronger unions or policies that look suspiciously similar to things Americans have been arguing about for generations.

The acronym has been deployed.

Everybody panic.

And let’s be honest: this isn’t exclusively a right-wing trick. The left has its own versions of the same game. Political tribes everywhere have discovered that it’s much easier to hate a three-letter acronym than it is to understand an actual political philosophy.

Because understanding requires work.

Fear requires absolutely none.

That’s why these little acronym campaigns are so effective. They turn politics into team sports where nobody has to read the rulebook.

You hear DSA, and you’re supposed to know who the enemy is.

You hear BLM, and you’re supposed to know who the enemy is.

You hear whatever the next three-letter monstrosity happens to be, and you’re expected to react before asking the one question that might ruin the entire circus:

“Okay, but what do they actually believe?”

That question is dangerous.

Because once you start looking at actual policies instead of political branding, things get considerably less exciting.

You might discover that someone you were told was a radical extremist actually agrees with you on half a dozen issues.

And that would be terrible for the outrage economy.

So here we go again.

Another acronym.

Another political boogeyman.

Another opportunity for cable news, social media influencers and professional outrage merchants to convince Americans that their neighbor is the existential threat to civilization because he belongs to the wrong three-letter club.

Meanwhile, the people actually making decisions that affect our wages, healthcare, housing, taxes, retirement and future are probably thrilled that we’re standing in the parking lot screaming at each other about an acronym.

Because while we’re busy fighting over DSA, they’re counting the money.

So by all means, let’s have the debate.

Let’s talk about democratic socialism.

Let’s talk about capitalism.

Let’s talk about government.

Let’s talk about healthcare, taxes, labor, inequality and the proper role of government in our lives.

But for God’s sake, let’s stop pretending three letters constitute an argument.

An acronym isn’t an ideology.

It isn’t a policy.

It isn’t a threat assessment.

And it certainly isn’t a substitute for thinking.

Because if the political establishment has learned anything over the last several decades, it’s this:

Give Americans three letters, tell them they’re supposed to be terrified, and there’s a pretty good chance they’ll spend the next six months fighting each other instead of asking who benefits from the fight.

Welcome to DSA.

Apparently, the newest monster under America’s political bed.

Don’t worry.

I’m sure we’ll have another one by next Tuesday.

Dwain Northey (Gen X)

There’s a peculiar contradiction in the way we talk about technology. We complain about what technology has done to our world, how complicated everything has become, how disconnected we feel, and how much better life supposedly was “back then.” We romanticize simpler times as though humanity once lived in some idyllic little paradise before smartphones and Wi-Fi ruined everything.

But let’s be honest: nobody actually wants to go back that far.

Nobody is volunteering to move into a cave. Nobody is standing in line to trade their air conditioning for a wool blanket and a fire. Nobody is suggesting we all climb aboard a wagon train, cross the prairie for six months, build a house with our own bare hands and then hope the roof doesn’t collapse during the first thunderstorm.

We like technology.

We like the internet. We like instant communication. We like refrigerators that keep food from rotting, washing machines that save us from beating clothes against a rock, GPS that tells us where the hell we are, and medicine that has turned diseases that once killed millions into things we can treat. And if you’ve got one, nobody is volunteering to give up that beautiful 75-inch flat-screen television hanging on the wall.

That’s the funny part.

We don’t actually want “simpler times.” We want modern conveniences without modern complications.

Hollywood understands this contradiction particularly well. So many dystopian movies are built around a future where the technology we take for granted has disappeared. No electricity. No internet. No running water. No grocery stores stocked with everything from strawberries in January to frozen pizza at 2 a.m. No air conditioning. No Amazon. No streaming. No microwave. No 75-inch television.

And somehow we’re supposed to look at that future and think, Ah, finally. Simplicity.

No.

That’s not simplicity.

That’s hell with a rustic aesthetic.

There’s nothing inherently noble about making everything harder. There is no virtue in dying from an infection because antibiotics haven’t been invented yet. There is no spiritual enlightenment in spending three hours chopping wood before you can cook dinner. There is no magical return to community when everyone is exhausted from simply trying to survive.

The problem isn’t that technology exists.

The problem is what we’ve chosen to do with it.

Technology can make life easier, more connected and more productive. It can also make us distracted, isolated, manipulated and perpetually connected to a machine that never shuts up. That’s the part worth questioning.

Maybe what we’re really longing for isn’t a simpler world.

Maybe we’re longing for a simpler relationship with the world.

We want the benefits of civilization without feeling like civilization is consuming us. We want the internet without being buried beneath it. We want technology without being controlled by it. We want convenience without surrendering our attention, our privacy or our humanity.

Because if the choice is between today’s complicated world and the “good old days” of wagon trains, outhouses and dying from an infected splinter, I’ll take the Wi-Fi.

I’ll even take the 75-inch television.

But maybe every once in a while, we should turn the damn thing off.

That’s probably the simplest time we’re actually looking for.