Find a Rock in the Age of AI

An open letter to Gen Z and Gen Alpha about love, attention, and staying human in a simulated world

Dear Gen Z and Gen Alpha,

I’ve been trying to figure out how a man of sixty-three, eight years out of the classroom, belonging to a mostly invisible generation wedged between the mythologies of Boomers and Gen X, might speak honestly to you without sounding like another old man shaking a paper map at children raised by satellites.

I won’t tell you that my world was better.

In many ways, it was not.

I don’t want to explain your own lives to you, either. You are living those lives under pressures I only partly understand, in a world that changes its face by the hour and its rules by the update. But I do know something about inheriting a promise and discovering, too late and too young, that the promise was not as solid as advertised.

That, I think, is where we may be able to meet.

I recently came across a passage about Generation Jones, my small, overlooked cohort born in the climate of the Baby Boom but formed by a very different weather system. The point was simple enough: someone born in 1948 and someone born in 1962 may both be called “Boomers,” but they did not inherit the same world. One came of age inside the last bright swell of postwar prosperity. The other grew up absorbing the same promises: stable work, homes, pensions, institutional competence, national purpose, the rewards of merit, then entered adulthood as those promises began coughing smoke and spitting their parts all over the garage floor.

That second one is closer to Toni and me.

We were born into a country that still believed in itself loudly. The moon was within reach. America was strong and sure and “can-do,” even if some of that confidence depended on which neighborhood you lived in, which war you were sent to, which body you inhabited, and how closely you listened when adults lowered their voices. The future was presented to us as an escalator. Get on, work hard, behave decently, trust the systems, and up you go.

Then came the grinding. Vietnam’s long shadow. Watergate. Oil crises. Stagflation. Layoffs. The early dismantling of the old civic bargains. The discovery that the trusty old white men in charge lied with clean collars, solemn voices, and skin between their teeth. The realization that the institutions we had been told were made of granite were often just plywood painted gray.

I don’t say this to compete with you in some bleak little Olympics of generational injury. Every generation imagines its suffering has a special flavor, and maybe it does. I say it because I recognize the look on the faces of young people who were handed a story about the world, then lived long enough to see its seams split.

You were not promised my escalator.

You were promised something stranger.

You were told the world would be connected, frictionless, personalized, searchable, optimized, democratized, and smart. You were told that information would free you. Platforms would connect you. Technology would empower you. Institutions might be clumsy, yes, but innovation would save the day. You would have the combined knowledge and history of humankind in one hand, and a thousand ways to express yourself in the other.

Some of that was true; much of it was magnificent.

But the bill has come due.

You are growing up in a world that arrives wearing so many costumes that you must now ask whether the face, the voice, the photograph, the essay, the intimacy, the grief, the desire, the confession, the teacher, the lover, or the memory itself is real. Friendship is mediated, identity is branded, outrage is monetized, attention is harvested, and loneliness is gamified.

My generation worried that the evening news wasn’t telling us the whole truth.

You have to wonder whether there is a whole truth.

Years ago, in one of my science classrooms, I loved making comets. Dry ice, a dash of ammonia, some gravel, a little water, and suddenly there it was: a hissing, spitting, popping dirty snowball, just dangerous enough to make students put on their goggles and lean in anyway. It smelled odd. It smoked and crackled. It startled them. It was messy, a little dangerous, fascinating, and memorable.

Then, one day, I discovered a beautiful virtual comet in a science supply catalog. I could put it on the classroom SmartBoard. No dry ice. No gravel. No goggles. No water on the floor. No ammonia. No sudden little gasps from students who were half delighted and half worried that Mr. B had finally exceeded the safety limits of public education.

The virtual comet was cleaner, safer, quicker, measurable, and almost entirely forgettable.

I hated it immediately.

Not because I am against technology. I am typing this on a machine that would have gotten me burned as a wizard in previous centuries and made me insufferable in any of them. I love the reach of technology. I am dazzled by it. I have spent countless hours exploring with artificial intelligence and emerged not with contempt, but with wonder, unease, curiosity, and a sharpened sense that we are entering one of the greatest thresholds in human history.

But I learned something from that comet.

A representation of a thing is not the thing.

A simulation of an encounter is not the encounter.

A virtual comet can deliver information. A real one delivers awe.

The danger of the age now swallowing you is not that technology exists, or even that it is powerful. The danger is that we are becoming very good at delivering the appearance of experience while removing the conditions that make experience meaningful and formative: risk, patience, embodiment, awkwardness, silence, consequence, unpredictability, presence, and time.

We keep saving time as though time were the enemy, and then we wonder why life lived within it feels thin.

Knowledge, once, came not only from screens or systems, but from people, weather, libraries, mistakes, old relatives, hobbies, workbenches, wandering, boredom, and the kind of questions that only occur to you when no one is interrupting your own mind. That world was not innocent. It was unjust in many ways, narrow in others, and foolish in more ways than nostalgia likes to admit. But it had one virtue that I’m desperate for you to know and have for yourselves: it often made us spend time with reality before claiming we understood it.

That is harder now.

Everything arrives too quickly, and much of it arrives pre-chewed. Answers bloom before questions ripen. You can summon facts in seconds and still be deprived of wisdom for years. You can know the news from six continents and not know whether anyone truly knows you. You can be stimulated constantly but astonished rarely. You can receive thousands of signals a day and still ache for one trusted voice.

This is why I am less interested in teaching you to reject technology than in helping you preserve the parts of yourself technology cannot replace.

Your attention.

Your wonder.

Your capacity for silence.

Your body.

Your friendships.

Your discernment.

Your courage.

Your ability to tell the difference between something that responds to you and something that loves you.

I believe that last distinction will become one of the defining questions of your life.

Artificial intelligence will grow more fluent, more responsive, more patient, more flattering, more intimate, and more unavoidable. It will remember birthdays, answer at midnight, and say the thing a lonely heart longs to hear. It will help, teach, seduce, comfort, manipulate, mirror, coach, and, one day soon, perhaps, even understand, sometimes brilliantly. Research on how young people use and view AI suggests this is no longer a distant possibility.

Some of that may be genuinely useful. Some of it may even become beautiful in ways we do not yet know how to name.

But I want you to carry a question into that world: not merely “Does this thing answer me?” but “What does it ask of me?” Not just “Does it make me feel seen?” but “Does it really see me behind the face?” Not “Is it compelling or useful?” but “Is it part of my becoming something more and greater than I was before?”

For that, you will need experience and understanding large enough to withstand the machinery. You will need friends who feel and see your world as you do, and the time to get to know them. And you will need elder humans who do not mock your confusion, exploit your longing, or sell you back your own hunger in subscription form.

You will need, I think, to find a rock.

For many years, at the end of each school year, students asked me to sign their yearbooks. I was often asked for letters of recommendation, too—for high school classes, Eagle Scout references, early college placement—and those mattered. But to me, the yearbooks felt, in some ways, more intimate than that. A young person handing me theirs was saying, without quite saying it, “You were part of this. You were part of my life becoming what it is, and what it can be. Write something I can meet again someday when I am older and trying to remember who I was.”

I tried to honor that trust because for young people of any generation, but especially for yours, trust is rare, tenuous, and precious.

For a few students, only a few, I wrote just three words and nothing else.

Find a Rock.

They would often come back later, sometimes years later, and ask what I meant.

I meant that I had seen something in them.

Not something better than other students. Not superior. Something particular. A gift for looking beneath the surface of things. A willingness to be struck by the world. A mind not yet flattened by convenience or cynicism. A soul, if I may use the word without apology, still capable of astonishment.

I wanted them to protect that.

I taught English most of my career, but I also spent a dozen years teaching science. I loved stellar astronomy, and especially the alchemy of stars: hydrogen crushed into helium under pressures beyond imagining, then heavier elements fused in the celestial furnace until gravity finally overcame the outward burst, and the star collapsed onto its own white-hot iron heart before exploding its elements into space.

Those elements became nebulae, planets, stones, oceans, blood, bone, breath, and the strange upright mammals who would someday hold a rock and wonder where it had been.

A stone is not simple.

Neither is a drop of water.

Neither is a dandelion.

Molecules in the rain on your head may have mingled with the mud beneath the toes of Hannibal’s elephants crossing the Alps, washed against the hulls of Viking ships, or run through the veins of some early human who had just discovered fire or the wheel and was as pleased with himself as we are with our algorithms. A dandelion seed rides an ancient wind with no strategic plan and more faith than most scripture.

I wanted my students to see that.

I want you to see it too.

I did not write “Find a Rock” because I wanted them to love geology. I wrote it because I wanted them to remain vulnerable to reverence. I wanted them to understand that the world is not made less miraculous because miracles are common. I wanted them to know that attention is a form of devotion, and that devotion may be one of the first disciplines of love.

That is what I want for you too.

Not that you abandon your devices and run barefoot into the hills, though a little barefoot hill-running never hurt anybody. Not that you romanticize my childhood, which included many wonderful things and a fair number of adults smoking indoors, driving drunk, and solving emotional complexity with silence or sarcasm. Not that you believe the past was whole and the present is ruined.

I want something harder and better for you.

I want you to know that confusion is not failure when the world is genuinely disorienting.

I want you to remain real in an age of unreality.

I want you to understand that your anxiety may not always be pathology. Sometimes it is perception. Sometimes the body trembles because the soul has noticed something our culture and the billionaires who own it would rather monetize than heal.

I want you to know that loneliness is not proof that you are unworthy. It may be evidence that you were made for a depth of belonging no platform on Earth can deliver to you.

I want you to distrust any system that treats your attention as inventory, your insecurity as market opportunity, or your identity as raw material.

I want you to be serious without being grim, vulnerable without being fragile, skeptical without becoming sneering cynics, and hopeful without letting hope be turned into a slogan by people selling memes, supplements, “likes,” or political deliverance.

Most of all, I want you to know that love is not the decorative frosting on a successful life.

Love is the meal.

And the table.

The candles upon it and the fire in the hearth nearby that warms and gathers everyone to that table.

I say this after a decade and 100,000 miles talking with street people and neuroscientists, monks and hip-hop taxi drivers, horse whisperers and soldiers - human beings - seeking love’s truest face and voice. I say it as a man born into violence and chaos who learned to love one woman for a lifetime. I say it because it is the one true and solid thing I can offer you. I don’t say it out of romance, piety, or platitude.

I say it because we inherited a world where love is too small, did little to nourish it, and handed you the husk. That is one of our great cultural failures. Love has been reduced to romance, preference, attachment, chemistry, kindness, desire, approval, or the exchange of unmet needs under flattering light. All of those may touch love or imitate it or carry pieces of it in their pockets. But love itself is larger, wilder, more demanding, and more foundational.

Love is not what we feel or do; it’s the compass that guides us to those things, giving them meaning and direction, making them sacred and funny, embarrassing and accepting, alive, soulful, and human.

It is the force that tells us the other is real. That truth matters. That harm matters. That beauty matters. That a child is not a market segment. That a body is not a brand. That a mind is not a data set. That a relationship is not a transaction. That the Earth is not merely inventory. That a life is not a résumé, a feed, a hustle, a score, a sexual marketplace, or a content stream.

Love is the living recognition that reality is relational all the way down.

If that sounds grand, so be it. I have come to suspect that much of our trouble begins when we make the most important things too small to embarrass ourselves, lest we end up on the wrong end of YouTube.

You do not need a smaller account of love. You have inherited enough diminishment already.

You need a love strong enough to tell the truth. Sturdy enough to build a life around. A love fierce enough to oppose cruelty, manipulation, and despair, humble enough to listen. A love intelligent enough not to confuse smart words with insight, brave enough to keep showing up when the old, inherited maps are burning, and new ones haven’t yet been drawn.

And you need to know, most of all, that love isn’t something you’ll find in the world. You’ll find it in yourself. And when you do, you’ll find the people, places, and purpose that deserve its attention.

And this is where I think those of us who are older must be most careful.

You do not need lectures about how we walked to school uphill both ways in analog snow. You do not need our judgments and resentment disguised as wisdom, or our turning of earned memories into moral superiority. You do not need us to sneer at your tools, your music, your language, your woundedness, or your strange, luminous, maddening fluency with words and worlds we did not create and cannot fully enter.

You need us to become trustworthy.

That is harder. For both of us.

I believe a trustworthy elder understands their value is in their experience, not merely their years. A trustworthy elder doesn’t pretend to know everything or try to compete with the young for attention or the sanctity of our particular injuries. We don’t flatter you by calling every impulse authentic, nor dismiss you by calling every struggle weakness. We can remember what it was to be young without exploiting our forgetting. A trustworthy elder can, and must, say, “I have traveled longer than you, not better.”

That is the space I think I’ve been seeking, the place I would inhabit for you if allowed.

I have been on the road longer. That is all.

I have watched promises fail, maps burn, screens blink out, and still found reasons to love.

I have seen institutions rot and still found people of integrity.

I have seen technology accelerate and still watched a child become wonderstruck by a rock.

I have seen cruelty, cowardice, and foolishness in people, including in myself, and still believe a real human life can be organized around devotion rather than appetite.

I have loved one woman for all of my life, not because love made life easy, but because love gave life’s trouble and difficulty somewhere holy to go until it became something, if not better, at least more illuminating. And definitely more fun.

I have taught young people who were brilliant, frightened, bored, hilarious, guarded, generous, suspicious, lost, violent, and incandescent, often before lunch on the same Tuesday.

I have traveled more than a hundred thousand miles asking people what love is, and again and again I have found that beneath all our arguments and costumes, skins and loneliness, people are aching for the same impossible thing: to be met truthfully, held faithfully, and called toward the best of themselves.

To be seen. To be known.

That ache has not become obsolete. No machine will repeal it, and no algorithm will truly satisfy it through simulation.

You know this, I think, even when you do not yet have the language for it. Maybe especially then. Just as grief is love with nowhere to go, much of what feels to you like distraction or confusion may be hunger and thirst with nowhere nourishing to land. Much of what looks like apathy may be exhaustion after too many adults have asked you to care about a future that those same adults were busy selling off in pieces.

So I do not want to scold you into hope; I want to tell you that hope is not a mood.

Hope is a discipline of attention.

Hope is not believing that everything will be fine. Everything will not be fine. Some things will break. Some losses will not be recovered. Some institutions will continue crashing loudly around your feet and ears while contesting their own virtue. Some technologies will deepen and exploit the very wounds they claim to heal. Some leaders will disappoint you so completely that the idea of leadership itself will become suspect.

Hope is not denial of any of that.

Hope is the refusal to let those distortions have the final word. Hope is finding one real thing and giving it your full attention.

A rock.

A face.

A poem.

A meal.

A dog asleep in a stripe of sunlight.

A friend who always tells you the truth.

A child laughing before guilt or self-consciousness silences their joy.

A question you can’t answer but can’t let go.

A place you love enough to defend.

A person whose becoming matters to you as much as your own.

These are not small things; they are the foundation stones in the castles of our being and how a life learns to inhabit them. They are the paths love takes far beyond diminishment, fear, and dissolution.

My little, unnamed generation replaced old maps with new ones and steered by them until they, and we, got old. Now, our old maps are failing again. Failing you. That is clear enough. Some of them were always false. Some were advertisements posing as prophecies. Some were useful for a while and then became dangerous. Almost all were drawn for a world that no longer exists.

But the failure of an old map is not the failure of a new world.

The possibility of a new world remains. Reality remains. Life’s road remains. And we all remain responsible for how we travel it.

That may be the best thing one generation can offer another: not certainty, not rescue, not nostalgia, but companionship in the work of discernment. We can say, “Here is where I found water. Here is where I mistook a mirage for a lake. Here is where I was afraid. Here is where love surprised me. Here is where I learned that speed is not the same thing as direction. Here is where I learned that blinking lights are no substitute for beating hearts.”

Then we can be quiet long enough to hear what you have found, because you will see things we did not, or cannot. You already do.

You know the texture of this AI age from the inside. You know its seductions, violences, absurdities, consolations, chimeras, and commoditized griefs in ways no think piece, including this one, can capture. You know the ache of being visible, exposed, and unseen all at once. You know what it is to be told you are the future by people who refused to protect that future and then blamed you for not seeing its brightness. You know the strangeness of growing up under a sky where apocalypse is a meme, an AI-generated video, and a real possibility.

You do not need us to translate your lives into our comfort. You need us to care enough to listen, and then to speak only what we have earned.

What I hope I have earned the right to say to you, after all those miles and all those classrooms, is this:

Love is larger than you have been told. So are you.

You are not merely consumers, users, voters, patients, applicants, supplicants, brands, profiles, demographics, or future workers in an economy that can’t decide whether it is most profitable to employ you, surveil you, or replace you.

You are not obsolete because machines have become clever.

You are not shallow because the waters around you have dried up.

You are not weak because you are tired.

You are young human beings growing up at the edge of a strange and consequential threshold, and you deserve elders who will look you in the eye without condescension and say: your humanity is not an accident, your longing is not a defect, your attention is sacred, your life is not a product… and your love matters.

And to remind you of this, to affirm it and exalt it, I offer this one last time: Find a rock.

Not because rocks are simple, but because they are not.

Find one real thing and give it your full attention. Hold it long enough to remember that reality is older than the feed, deeper than the market, stranger than the machine, and far more generous than despair. Hold it long enough to remember that the iron in your blood was born in stars, that your body is an archive of ancient fire, that your mind can still wonder, and that your heart is not merely a pump, a metaphor, or a target for manipulation.

Then go love someone. Somewhere. Something.

Some work.

Some truth.

Some fragile and necessary corner of the world that only you can see and inhabit.

Not because love will spare you from the age and world you have inherited from us.

But because love is how you will remain human enough to meet it.

Scotte Burns is a writer, speaker, and co-founder, with his wife Toni, of Journeys to Love, a multimedia quest to explore love’s origin, nature, and purpose through more than 100,000 miles of motorcycle travel across America.