On Our Great Digital Reset

The elderly man sits alone at his table in the Northern Pacific Beanery, surrounded by the ghosts of a thousand morning conversations that once filled this space with the particular warmth of human voices bouncing off ceramic and chrome. I imagine him as he might have been thirty years ago. Unfolding his newspaper with practiced strictness, licking his fingertip to navigate the rustling pages while steam rises from his coffee cup like incense in this temple to simpler rhythms. The depot still carries traces of its golden age, when passenger cars slid into Livingston filled with families bound for Yellowstone, their excitement palpable as distant thunder!

But that’s not the scene unfolding behind me. Instead, I watch him scroll through his phone with the same mechanical repetition I’ve witnessed in teenagers, twenty-somethings, and middle-aged parents. That endless downward cascade of the thumb, pausing for nothing, absorbing everything and nothing simultaneously. When the monotony becomes unbearable, he sets the device down, fidgets with uncomfortable awareness of his surroundings, avoids eye contact with the world beyond his screen, and then inevitably picks his phone up again. The cycle continues with the inevitability of breathing.

This man lived the first seventy years of his life without this particular compulsion. Seven decades of looking up, looking around, looking into the eyes of waitresses and fellow diners, of finding entertainment in the texture of conversation and the rhythm of his own thoughts. Yet here he sits, as captivated by the glowing rectangle as any digital native, proof that whatever has happened to us transcends generational boundaries and cuts deeper than mere habit.

I was born in 1984, in California, before we moved to Japan and then settled in the Texas Hill Country, where my hair bleached platinum under endless summer skies. I was in the fifth grade in ’95, which meant being outside until streetlights called us home. Middle school meant mastering T9 texting under desks while teachers threatened to confiscate our phones in those transparent Tupperware bins that served as technological purgatory. We spent weekends shooting baskets and sharing chips and queso at Mexican restaurants, wasting afternoons with the particular luxury of undirected time.

September 11th, 2001, found me in an ACT prep class, sequestered in a trailer while history unfolded on screens we weren’t allowed to watch. By 2003, I was in college when a new platform called “The Facebook” swept across select campuses, requiring an .edu email address for entry into what felt like an exclusive club. We were vocal about the Iraq invasion, convinced that our generation possessed unprecedented insight and that every thought we shared carried the weight of revelation. Suddenly, we could broadcast every fleeting opinion to anyone, anywhere, anytime—and somehow, we believed this constant transmission was progress.

The original iPhone appeared in 2007, two years after I packed my ‘99 Honda Civic and drove west on Interstate 10, searching for something I couldn’t name. While I wandered the country on foot, others marveled at constant connectivity. The world shifted overnight, as if someone had thrown a switch that fundamentally altered the operating system of human consciousness. This was the beginning of what I’ve come to understand as the Great Reset. Not the conspiracy theorists’ nightmare, but something far more subtle and pervasive: the moment our species began rewiring its relationship with attention, presence, and the basic mechanics of being alive.

The conversations about technology’s impact: shortened attention spans, disconnection from immediate reality, and the gradual erosion of deep thinking. These concerns existed in real-time as the changes occurred. However, they were quickly buried beneath the avalanche of content generated by the new platforms. Facebook evolved beyond college campuses, outperformed Google’s search engine, and then became something our parents used before younger generations declared it obsolete. The years blurred together in a montage of accelerating change: 2009, 2010, 2012, 2015, each bringing new platforms, new forms of distraction, new ways of fragmenting consciousness into digestible bits.

The world contracted while simultaneously expanding. Physical distance became irrelevant while emotional distance grew vast. Our political atmosphere didn’t just become polarized; it atomized into millions of individual echo chambers. Parenting strategies were revolutionized by people who’d never raised children. Social dynamics were reinvented by algorithms designed to maximize engagement rather than genuine connection. Traditional rites of passage—those ancient ceremonies that marked the transition from adolescence to adulthood—were abandoned in favor of metrics: followers, likes, shares, the hollow validation of strangers.

Somewhere between 2010 and 2015, the voices of reason—those traditional regulators of prudent change who might have helped us navigate this transition—found themselves overwhelmed by the reactivated mob. They surrendered their talking sticks, abdicated their pedestals, and faded into the noise like Homer Simpson backing into the hedge, disappearing from conversations that desperately needed their perspective.

Everyone over twenty-five experienced a behavioral and cognitive reset. Everything we feared might happen to younger generations happened to all of us. We were caught in the bandwagon effect of a technological renaissance that promised connection while delivering isolation, efficiency while creating chaos, and knowledge while fostering ignorance. We became unwitting participants in a psychological experiment whose parameters no one fully understood and whose consequences we’re still discovering.

Instead of experiencing the natural evolution toward emotional maturity, we collectively got stuck in post-adolescence, that liminal space between the certainty of childhood and the responsibility of adulthood. Unlike biological evolution, which strong-arms us through necessary developments whether we’re ready or not, this psychological evolution requires conscious participation. We must choose to cross the precipice that stretches before us, because the alternative—remaining suspended in perpetual digital adolescence—threatens to make us strangers to ourselves and each other.

The elderly man’s behavior at the Beanery represents more than personal addiction; it’s a glimpse into our new reality. Here is someone who lived the majority of his existence without this compulsion, yet he finds himself as captivated as any teenager. I observe this same phenomenon everywhere: elderly people in parks, overlooking remarkable landscapes while staring at screens; middle-aged parents walking beside ponds, rivers, oceans with their children, their attention divided unevenly between the miracle of nature and the constant ping of notifications.

What frightens me most is how behaviors that would have been considered pathological twenty years ago now pass for normal. We use our phones to share and “like” posts about the importance of being present, apparently blind to the contradiction. This isn’t merely addiction in the traditional sense; it’s a global shift in behavioral and psychological norms so profound that we’re essentially living in an alternate reality, one where the primary relationship is between individual consciousness and algorithmic stimulation rather than between human beings.

The internet has become a remarkably negative space, yet we struggle to maintain any separation between our digital and physical lives. Even when we seek positive content, we lack the emotional intelligence to process it meaningfully. We’re too secular to engage with ancient wisdom introspectively, too fragmented to recognize that Gandhi’s famous observation about Western civilization— “I think it would be a very good idea”—wasn’t a political or cultural critique but a comment on awareness itself.

We’re trapped inside the story of our personal and cultural experiences rather than developing the capacity to observe them from outside. We lack the conscious distance that would allow us to see the play we’re performing in rather than being consumed by our roles. The very difficulties we protest most vigorously might be more bearable if we could accept their inherent presence in human existence. The problems out there feel overwhelming primarily because of our perspective in here.

Many people will resist this observation, but two absolutes seem undeniable: first, if you’re fueled by anger, however justified, you’re contributing to harm rather than healing. Second, our societal differences aren’t universal truths, but compartmental disagreements about specific issues. We’ve become too tribal, too focused on our narrow interests, too easily triggered by perspectives that challenge our certainties.

Learning to work together despite our differences—to consider others before ourselves—represents a desperately needed evolution. The me-first ideology masquerades as personal strength while actually revealing spiritual poverty. True growth: emotional, mental, and spiritual—requires moving beyond the narrow confines of self-interest toward something larger and more meaningful.

We find ourselves in collective adolescence, without our traditional sources of guidance. The path forward requires calming our minds and hearts enough to rediscover how to live with each other. Meaning exists in the process itself—whether spiritual growth, artistic expression, or physical development—in the work, the service, the willingness to dive inward rather than constantly projecting outward.

We won’t find peace in our devices or in the minds of those we disagree with. We won’t discover emotional intelligence in our past grievances or future anxieties. The reset has already occurred; we can spend our energy lamenting what we’ve lost or accepting where we find ourselves and beginning the patient work of conscious evolution.

The choice, as always, is ours. The elderly man in the Beanery will continue scrolling, caught in patterns he never chose but now can’t escape. The question is whether we’ll join him in that endless digital drift or find the courage to look up, look around, and remember what it feels like to be fully present in the world that exists beyond our screens. The reset is complete. Now we begin.