Something has shifted in American culture, and most of us can feel it without being able to name it.
My wife showed me a screenshot the other day from a friend of hers in Los Angeles—someone she genuinely loves. The friend had posted on Instagram about struggling to connect with her parents over the holidays, describing them as being on “the wrong side of history.”
My wife stared at the screen. “What a sad thing,” she said. “To go home to your family and feel like they’re permanently wrong.”
She wasn’t commenting on the politics as much as she was commenting on the disconnect. The permanence of the judgment. The sense that understanding was no longer possible—that the gap between parent and child had become unbridgeable.
I see that gap everywhere now. And I think it’s time we talked about what’s actually creating it.
In 2000, David Brooks published “Bobos in Paradise,” showing how 1960s counterculture had merged with 1980s capitalism to create a new elite class—“bourgeois bohemians” who valued both achievement and self-expression. Brooks argued that this fusion became the dominant cultural tone in America. What was once rebellion became the new normal.
Fast forward. The 1990s gave us grunge—the last cultural gasp before the internet changed everything. By 2010, everyone had a smartphone. Social media became the primary stage for performing identity. Then 2020 hit, and we fractured more than ever—not in some new way, but just more visibly obvious, because the internet turned every disagreement into a public performance of who we are.
Is there big money being sent to groups to protest on the front lines of certain social-political hot topics? Yes. It seems largely obvious when you follow the money and look just a tad bit more closely than the mainstream narrative. But that doesn’t mean real people aren’t also protesting. And that’s where it gets sticky and tricky: throwing the baby out with the bathwater on tribal discord and the decay of harmony across multiple planes of social infrastructure.
Whether accidental or engineered, the result is the same: Many young people are looking around, asking: Where is the ground? When will normal return? Where is the shared foundation?
I’ve been asking that question since I can remember. I grew up straddling worlds that supposedly can’t coexist. I won’t bore you with too much of the details—but I’ve spent enough time in rooms on both sides of America’s cultural divide to tell you this: The people on either side aren’t monsters. They’re disoriented. And disorientation, left unresolved long enough, turns into disconnection.
Then comes the argument, or the shutdown, and near-permanent judgments are made—judgments out of attempts to make meaning of that which we don’t understand. And this goes for monsters under the bed we can’t see, as well as family members at the kitchen table.
But this isn’t new. Every time humanity has encountered a technological or cultural leap—fire, the printing press, electricity, the automobile, the internet—there has been a period of chaos while we adjusted. When I see all the tribal uproar spewed from screen to screen, that’s where my meaning-making mechanism goes. I notice a voice internally, curiously trying to understand. “What is this? What am I looking at? What’s happening to us?” Some people grip harder to what they know.
Others accelerate into what’s coming. Both responses are valid. Both are necessary for the organism to survive.
But something else happens in these moments, too. Something quieter. Something that doesn’t make headlines. People build bridges.
It’s not easy. In fact, it might be the hardest thing culture asks of us right now. But it’s also the most necessary.
I think about my son, who’s 5 months old at the time of this writing. What am I building for him? Not just a home or a life—but a way of being in a world that’s accelerating beyond recognition. I didn’t inherit a perfect road map. I’m assembling one, piece by piece, from everything I’ve learned about what holds and what doesn’t.
And I think that’s what young people are actually being called to do now. Not to reject what came before. Not to rebel for rebellion’s sake. But to build—with gratitude for what was given, and with curiosity about what’s needed. Not everyone is choosing to be part of the solution. But some are. As a great wise man once said, “Don’t know no better, can’t do no better.”
Not all of us have models for how to be the change we wish to see. Sometimes you see the change, and it makes you angry, or sad, or apathetic, and which side of the fight you happen to be on is some kind of cosmic coin toss. Meanwhile, some of us are doing our best to find ways forward that solve as many problems as we can.
If your family handed you a tradition, honor what works in it. If they didn’t, build it yourself—not out of resentment for what’s missing, but out of a genuine desire to create something that serves.
Because here’s what the patterns of history tell us: We’re OK, and we’re going to figure this out. That is, unless we are the new dinosaurs and God Almighty is about to send a comet our way. I believe humanity has survived every leap by having some people move forward and others anchor backward. The chaos is real, but it’s not permanent. It’s the disorientation that comes with being on the leading edge.
What’s permanent is the need for people who can stand in the gap—between family members, between generations, between ideas—and say: I see both sides. And I’m not going anywhere.
There’s a saying I’m sitting with: “If you bring forth that which is within you, it will save you. If you do not bring forth that which is within you, it will destroy you.”
We don’t need more people screaming from opposite sides of the valley. We need more people willing to climb down into it and listen to what’s already been said.
So here’s my question—and it’s not rhetorical: How are you showing up as a bridge in your world?
Not on social media. Not in arguments. In the small, quiet moments no one sees but you. At your dinner table. In your family group chat. In the way you listen to someone you disagree with.
That’s where bridges get built. One conversation at a time. One pause at a time. One question at a time. So let’s all say it together now, in a grand-chaotic-Marvin Gaye-inspired-sincerity choir: What’s going on?
