Dirty Boots: Irregular Attempts at Critical Thinking and Border Crossing offers a Deep Southern, Generation X perspective on the culture, politics, and general milieu of the 21st century.

Back when I was a teenager, we listened to a new song by REM called “It’s the End of the World as We Know It.” That was in the late ’80s, and the sentiments were basically euphemistic. Today, in the mid-2020s, they aren’t. The sentiments are real. Born in the 1960s and ’70s, GenXers knew thirty or forty years ago that we were living at the fin de siecle. The 1900s were drawing to a close, and a range of myths about the new millennium abounded. There were people who said the computers would all crash on New Year’s Day, and there were some who thought that Jesus would come back. Now, we know that it was far less cataclysmic; it was just that an era in the history of mankind was coming to a close.

Just as people in the early 1900s must have realized that cars were changing everything, my generation has come to understand what was unleashed when the personal home computer connected to the internet became a thing. When we were growing up, having computers and networks all around was the stuff of space travel, tech and telecoms companies, or science fiction. We knew that NASA and IBM and AT&T had big, powerful computers. In school, we read 1984 about a society that had surveillance cameras everywhere and Fahrenheit 451, which had people watching 24-hour reality TV on huge in-home screens. On re-runs of Star Trek, which originally ran on TV from 1966 to 1969, they carried around cordless devices so they could talk to anyone from anywhere. At the movies, Terminator showed us automated, unmanned machines that flew around looking for people to kill. About the only things we’re lacking these days are the light sabers.

It turned out that we really were seeing the end of the world as we knew it. There was the world before the internet and smart phones, and there’s the world since. We had no idea that our children, born between the 1990s and the 2010s, were going to prefer an endless scroll of entertainment tidbits over talking to each other. We didn’t foresee that knowing the people around us would be replaced by an über-filtered worldview provided by email, Facebook, neighborhood apps, and Ring cameras. We wouldn’t have believed that shopping in physical stores would give way to online retailers, curbside pickup, and home delivery. And now it seems as though artificial intelligence is patting down the last shovel-full of dirt on the twentieth century’s grave. For last decade or two, computers and networks have made it less and less necessary to answer the door ourselves, shop for ourselves, clean up behind ourselves— or even commune with other people as ourselves!  Now, with AI, we won’t even have to think for ourselves, if we don’t want to.

But we still can. If we want to. And we should want to.

I hear people say that AI is everywhere. Not if you put down your phone and get off your computer. When I talk to my next-door neighbor across the fence, AI is not involved. The birds and squirrels that swoop and skitter around my yard in the morning, hunting for worms and seeds and crumbs, don’t even know that AI exists. And though AI recalibrates my phone’s clock twice a year, the sun has yet to yield to our ideas about what time it is. When I hug my wife or my kids, I don’t need AI to make any suggestions. So no, it actually isn’t everywhere. Here’s the simple, yet uncomfortable truth: AI is everywhere that we hand our minds and our lives over to a machine.

Thinking back to that REM song, those who know it will remember the second part of the title: “(And I Feel Fine).” The irony is on full display— “It’s the end of the world as we know it . . . and I feel fine.” Do I feel fine, now that it’s really happening? I don’t think I do. Because it’s clear that we’re not moving toward something better. I’ve considered the idea that I’m being curmudgeonly in late middle age . . . but I don’t think so. I think that Generation X’s mistrust of authority, and especially of corporations, was well founded and that history has proven our skeptical perspectives to be right on. In the ’90s, we thought that corporate leaders wanted to control our lives to maximize their profits, to feed us mediocre bullshit until we didn’t know the difference, and to convince us that we can’t live without their products— and we were right!

As an old liberal-arts major, I know that I should provide my supporting evidence. Here’s one piece. When I did a simple internet search of “Gen Z doesn’t read” earlier this year, here were the first four results:

“Gen Z is Reading Less. What that Means in the Age of Ready Answers” (Forbes, August 2025)
“Are Books Dead? Why Gen Z Doesn’t Read” (Generation Tech, March 2024)
“How Gen Z Came to See Books as a Waste of Time” (The Atlantic, November 2024)
“Gen Z are arriving to college unable to read even a sentence— professor warn it could lead to a generation of anxious and lonely graduates” (Fortune, January 2026)

Reading has been proven, scientifically, to be the best mental exercise there is. The multiple cognitive processes that go into reading keep brain activity thriving. People who read are, measurably, smarter just as someone who jogs or swims is fitter. But these devices have given our youngest generation the sense that reading is not relevant or useful. Yes, it actually is. A plethora of news stories share the dismal facts – declines in intellectual skills and the rise in depression – and point us to obvious conclusions. Declines in whether people value reading prove that we have the passed the point where we are using computers— they are now being used to use us.

I know, I know . . . the guy writing this has you reading it on a computer screen. And I just cited an internet search in my rationale. I’m not a neophobe or a luddite, and I’m not suggesting that screen media or computers be abolished. I am suggesting that we – each of us individually and all of us collectively – should re-evaluate our use of digital devices, screens, etc. and be honest about the gains and the costs. Especially about AI. I guess what I’m saying is: it has already been the end of the world as we knew it, and now it is up to us make sure that we do actually feel fine.