I Lived in the Before Times

The Boomer shaking his fist at the television while denouncing the stupidity of the world—or standing on his lawn, arms akimbo, broadcasting his bitter displeasure with the neighborhood’s rapid decline—is an archetype of a particular kind of pathetic old-timer. He cannot accept his growing misalignment with the world. His rage is fundamentally rooted in fear: he is living in a world he no longer understands and increasingly lacks the ability to navigate. Unable to adapt, he acts out. He is a man sinking in quicksand with no rope within reach.

Understood this way, retirement and old age are partly about misalignment and the primal terror of becoming isolated by it.

It is tempting to dismiss the Boomer accordingly. He is simply curdling in old age and knows there is nothing he can do about it. Like the Wicked Witch screaming, “I’m melting!” he is slowly disappearing from the world.

But we oversimplify the Boomer’s demise at our own peril. Two seemingly contradictory things can be true. On one hand, the Boomer really is misaligned with the world and may lack some of the adaptive skills necessary to flourish in it. On the other hand, some of his roots in the past point toward a superior way of being.

I’m talking about reading.

I’m talking about reading a paragraph containing complex ideas and understanding it.

Not just a paragraph, either. A long essay. Even a book.

The Boomer has lived in the Before and After Times. In the Before Times, his brain was trained for sustained reading. He processed the world through text, made sense of his place in it, and constructed a worldview by reading enormous amounts of material. Through reading, he learned to identify patterns, cycles, sophistry, trickery, deception, charlatanism, and occasionally authenticity.

He was literate.

The After Times are considerably less hospitable to literacy. We now spend large portions of our lives inside engagement farms, euphemistically called “social media platforms,” where fragmented attention is not a design flaw but the business model. The platforms compete to keep us clicking, swiping, gawking, raging, desiring, and returning. Sustained thought must compete against an industrial apparatus designed to interrupt it.

The Boomer terrified by his misalignment therefore confronts an uncomfortable paradox. He legitimately fears his own growing ineptitude while also witnessing a different kind of ineptitude spreading around him: people losing their tolerance for sustained attention.

Living in a post-reading society and knowing the difference because you lived in the Before Times is a peculiar privilege of age. I have students who were in sixth grade when the pandemic denied them anything resembling normal schooling for nearly two years. They spent much of their adolescence with TikTok, Instagram Reels, Snapchat, YouTube, and Roblox. Reading rarely occupied the center of this world. When assigned, it could feel less like intellectual discovery than community service for toilet-papering somebody’s house.

Short video clips engineered to deliver immediate stimulation became the staple product of the engagement farms young people carried everywhere in their slender glass bricks. Childish Gambino captured something about this condition in “This Is America.” Violence and social breakdown erupt throughout the video while dancing, spectacle, and entertainment continually hijack our attention. The catastrophe is happening right in front of us, but something more stimulating keeps wandering into the foreground.

If someone as young and culturally fluent as Childish Gambino can suggest that we are losing ourselves inside spectacle and distraction, the old Boomer ranting on his lawn suddenly deserves another hearing.

There really was a Before Times when sustained literacy occupied a larger place in ordinary intellectual life, and its erosion has consequences. This is the subject of James Marriott’s The New Dark Ages: The Death of Reading and the Dawn of the Post-Literate Society. As part of his research, Marriott contacted senior academics who told him that it was becoming increasingly difficult to assign a novel and expect students to read it within a week.

I can attest to the larger problem. Assign long books and many students won’t read them. Some will drop the class. Eventually word spreads that you assign books, and students may avoid your section unless circumstances force them into it. You can assign one short book and give students the entire semester to read it. Even that is no longer a surefire proposition.

I saw the accelerated decline of books in my own classrooms around 2012, almost exactly when smartphones reached critical mass and became mandatory accessories. Around that time, the lavish visits from textbook representatives began disappearing. No more kiosks and catered food. No more giant boxes of composition readers, essay collections, and grammar books arriving at our offices for inspection. The hundred-dollar composition textbook began its long march toward extinction. Even the used-book buyers vanished—the cheerful scavengers who once wandered into our offices and handed us cash for unwanted textbooks gathering dust on our shelves.

College is a business. The business model had changed.

Students were finding cheaper alternatives to outrageously priced textbooks, which was often a welcome development. But something larger was changing at the same time. We were increasingly creating classroom content for students living inside an information environment that competed directly against sustained reading.

To my credit, I have adapted. I now break reading and writing assignments into shorter visual components using Google Slides. I make the concepts visible. I map arguments. I isolate terms. I provide examples.

But sometimes I wonder whether adaptation has quietly become accommodation.

I find myself hand-feeding information more than I did in the past. Instead of asking students to wrestle with a difficult text until they extract its argument, I increasingly extract the argument, put it on a slide, define the terms, provide the mapping components, and lead them through the analysis. The very skills I want reading to develop are sometimes the skills students need before they can tolerate the reading.

There is the trap.

So yes, I am misaligned.

I am the aging man standing on the lawn wondering what happened to the neighborhood. I lived in the Before Times, and part of me will always remain there.

But misalignment does not necessarily mean error.

Sometimes the old man yelling from the lawn really is yelling at a fire.