2025: out of touch
A few things came together in 2025 that finally certified something I’d not quite realized: I’m officially out of touch. With pop culture, that is. With pop culture that is popular with teens and twentysomethings, to be precise.
First, I turned forty. Second, I deleted the web browser from my phone. Third, I’ve not been on Twitter or Facebook in years, and I’ve never been on Instagram or TikTok. Fourth, I don’t have YouTube on my phone—I did not, until a couple years back, realize that YouTube “was” an app to have on one’s phone, akin to email or ESPN or Spotify—and on my laptop I don’t power-use it for videos, news, podcasts, or entertainment. For men my age I’m probably in the bottom ten percent of YouTube users: I go to it for how to fix something in my house or car, or to watch a new movie trailer. Occasionally a friend sends a link. That’s about it. Besides those incidental uses (not even purposeful, just the fact of the matter), YouTube might as well not exist for me.
On top of all that, even though I’m fairly well versed in movies in general, and in TV to an extent, I don’t actually watch that much newly released material. I know more about David Lean or David Lynch than I do the latest prestige HBO or Netflix series. And if it’s an arthouse film, nine times out of ten I’ll see it, if I ever do, months or years after its release date.
Although all this is a wonderfully welcome development—being out of touch is a happy place to inhabit—it’s relatively new for me. Growing up, I was always “in the know.” I subscribed to magazines and read pop culture websites with religious zeal. I hated to feel out of the loop.
Now, because my children are Gen Alpha, my students are Gen Z, and a few of my Millennial friends aren’t out of touch, I find more and more that I have to respond to references, allusions, and topics of conversation with a simple “I don’t know who that is.” And I love it. I’m fading ever more out of any kind of active awareness of “youth” popular culture, somewhat by choice, mostly by circumstance. It’s purging me of silliness by the day.
Just this year, for example:
I saw the name “SZA” and, in front of in-the-know others, pronounced it phonetically by saying each letter in a row. I was swiftly corrected.
I was also educated about who Sydney Sweeney is, since I (still) have never seen her in an actual film or TV show. That wasn’t intentional, but maybe I should see how long the streak can last?
A friend referred to someone called “Theo Vonn.” Never heard of him. Another mentioned someone called “Michael Knowles.” Ditto. Neither friend could believe my ignorance. It’s sincere! They filled me in, but I’ve already forgotten what they said.
I’ve never listened to Joe Rogan. I do know he’s popular. Good for him!
Just this week I asked a room full of adults: “Who is ‘Ms. Rachel’?” They looked at me with astonishment. The question was honest! Never heard of her.
I’m told there are members of the Kardashian clan—I do know who they are—whose last name is not Kardashian. I did not know who they were, or that they existed. I also did not know what was most important, namely, who they were dating.
What TV shows have I not watched, am I not watching? The Bear, House of the Dragon, Fallout, Industry, Bridgerton, Task, White Lotus, Paradise, The Last of Us, Hacks, The Studio, Shrinking, Presumed Innocent—and all the others I don’t know enough to list. I do not intend to give time to these shows.
If my life depended on identifying even one under-thirty female pop star I would almost certainly die on the spot.
Even in the realm of politics, with which I keep up mostly through reading and somewhat through podcasts, I find myself increasingly adrift. Reading Rolf Dobelli’s Stop Reading the News had a lasting impact on me. Friends are referencing “breaking” news items—names, events, scandals—and I’m discovering the pleasures of a blank face in response.
In sum, the circumference of my world is contracting significantly, and I’ve never felt better. All our knowledge has limits, and I’ve been been one of Tyler Cowen’s so-called “infovores” for far too long. It’s not good for you. It’s not good for me. It’s not what any of us were made for. I have a wife, children, friends, neighbors, parents, brothers, nephews, nieces, godchildren, mentors, students, and colleagues. I read and write books and essays for a living. My chosen field is theology, than which nothing could be further from Zoomer pop culture relevance. Given a choice, I’d rather know more about Saint Irenaeus or Nicholas of Cusa or Homer or Confucius or Fr. Huc or Pascal or P. D. James or Second-Temple Judaism or Hesychasm than about (let me Google real quick) Olivia Rodrigo, Olivia Dean, Billie Eilish, or Chappell Roan.
My life is full, in other words, and its fullness is threatened, not expanded, by taking time I lack to snack on pop culture’s perpetual empty calories.
The danger for the old (for those getting older) is that this loss of organic in-touch-ness is felt as a loss. It’s not. To be sure, the lie of our culture is that “everyone” of a certain age is intimately familiar with pop culture, when that notion is far from the truth. Plenty of home-schooled and religiously conservative Zoomers have no idea who any of these people are: they don’t watch them on TikTok or YouTube, they don’t listen to them in the car, they don’t stream their shows or movies. And others, who do engage in all those media, don’t care. Instead, they like sports, or epic fantasy novels, or restoring old cars, or playing endless hours of MMORPGs. There is no generic default Gen Z twenty-five-year-old. We do not have a monoculture, if we ever did.
Nonetheless it can feel like we did, and we do, and that it is therefore a loss to be out of touch with it. But as I say, it is not a loss, for three simple reasons. First, you can’t know everything, and it isn’t worth trying. Second, you should like what you like, what seems good or desirable or beautiful in itself, not to an imaginary younger digital neighbor. Why outsource your enjoyments to the undeveloped tastes of the immature and foolish? Chasing relevance is an exercise in the worst kind of Zeitgeist swift-widowhood.
Third and finally, youth-obsessed pop culture is intrinsically and necessarily superficial. It’s good to be released from its appeal, even if against your will. It’s good not to know. It’s good to be out of touch. It’s a kind of freedom. The easiest way to achieve it is technological: the more apps, platforms, and devices you delete or remove from your life, the less likely “the latest thing” will find you. You’ll move, ever so slowly, from faux knowledge to happy ignorance.
It happened to me. I woke up and I … just … didn’t know what was going on around me. Like a man startled out of a coma, I was delivered into a sort of ambient cultural apophasis. And from now on my aim is to keep it that way.
