I was born in a house with one television and a telephone that was locked. Not metaphorically — actually locked, a little padlock through the rotary dial, so none of us could make a call we weren’t supposed to make. That was the technology of my childhood. That, and about four hours of television a day, starting in the evening, with a short morning transmission tacked on almost as an afterthought.
Growing Up With Five-Minute Cartoons
The best part of the day was five minutes long. A cartoon, once in the morning, once in the evening. Five minutes. I remember waiting for it the way you wait for something enormous — sitting close to the screen, not wanting to blink through it, because it would be gone soon and there was nothing to do but wait for tomorrow’s five minutes.
The Nineties: When Entertainment Cracked Open
Then the nineties happened, and everything cracked open. A new channel arrived, and with it, a cartoon that ran a full half hour, every day, six to six-thirty. I still think about that half hour as one of the most exciting stretches of my life — not in spite of how small it sounds now, but almost because of it. We didn’t know yet that entertainment could hold you like that. There was a comedy show we were allowed to watch, a drama the whole family gathered for, and one by one, the outdoor games got left behind. We had found something that could keep us still.
Dial-Up Internet: A Door Swinging Open
By the time the internet arrived, late nineties into the two-thousands, it was expensive, and slow, and utterly magnetic. Suddenly you could search for anything. Reach anyone. It felt less like a tool and more like a door swinging open into a world we’d only had glimpses of before.
From Cable to Streaming to AI: The Doors Keep Opening
And then it never really stopped opening. Every year after that was a new door. Cable, then satellite, then Netflix, then Prime, then IPTV boxes and Apple TV and a dozen ways to watch a hundred thousand things whenever you wanted. Social media stitched us to people we’ve never met and somehow now call friends. And in just the last five or six years, a different kind of door entirely — AI. ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, tools that write and draw and think alongside you, tools my daughter’s generation will simply grow up inside, the way I grew up inside a five-minute cartoon.
Learning AI as an Adult: Privilege, Exhaustion, and the Fear of Being Left Behind
I am forty-seven years old, and some days this feels like the great privilege of my life — to have lived through all of it, locked telephone to language model, and to still be curious enough to keep learning. Other days it feels like standing at the bottom of a hill that keeps getting taller. I open an app and there are eleven new features. I hear a term I don’t know and by the time I’ve looked it up, three more have appeared. There is a very particular kind of exhaustion in wanting to keep up with a world that was never designed to be kept up with — a tiredness that has nothing to do with age and everything to do with velocity.
And underneath the exhaustion, if I’m honest, there’s something quieter and less flattering: a fear of being left behind. Of watching twenty-year-olds move through this world the way I once moved through the analog one — without translation, without effort, like it’s simply the air they breathe. AI comes naturally to them. It does not come naturally to me. I have to learn it, deliberately, the way you learn a second language as an adult instead of absorbing your first one as a child.
What the Girl Waiting for Cartoons Taught Me About Change
But I keep coming back to the girl who waited all day for five minutes of cartoons. She didn’t have much, and she didn’t know she didn’t have much, and she was, somehow, completely content. Maybe the answer isn’t to catch up to the hill. Maybe it’s to remember that I’ve done this before — crossed into an unfamiliar world and made a home in it — more than once, actually, across five decades of doors opening faster than anyone could walk through them.
I don’t know that I’ll ever stop feeling a little breathless about it. But I’d rather be breathless and curious than closed. So today, I’m learning one more thing. Tomorrow, I imagine, one more after that.
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