Unraveling The Mess Of Our Own Making

"While You Were Sleeping" and charting a new path.

Last night, we brought out the snacks and watched the 1995 rom-com “While You Were Sleeping” with the older girls. It’s hard to find movies that are crowd pleasers and have some semblance of a plot, while also not being saturated with gender-confused scripts or characters who are insufferable. We’ve done our due diligence and exposed them to all the old classics, so we’ve started dipping into “newer” choices. When the image of Bullock and Pullman popped up as a suggestion, I said, “It’s meh, but clean.” I was 16 when I saw it in the theatres and remember thinking it was nothing special, honestly. Underwhelming but cute.

As the end credits rolled last night, I was almost ready to exclaim, “That’s one of the best movies I’ve seen in recent years!”

Let’s be honest…it’s not exactly Oscar-worthy cinema (although one could argue that’s a good thing). So, why the change? What happened in the last thirty years since I first watched Lucy pull Peter off the Chicago train tracks at the Randolph/Wabash station (which, by the way, doesn’t exist anymore - ironic given the rest of what I’ll be writing about)? What could possibly have made me fall in love with a movie that was rather boring to me as a teen - shouldn’t I have evolved in my tastes more?

I sat with it for about two hours, and then it smacked me in the face. To be honest, it’s pretty obvious.

When I saw the movie in 1995, it felt normal and boring because the lifestyles depicted were normal and “boring.” Watching it in 2025, it feels almost revolutionary! And honestly, this can be applied to so many movies from that bygone era - this just happened to be the one that was marketed to us first on our streaming service.

In the film, a CTA worker (Lucy) sits in her ticket booth at the train station and counts tokens as riders toss them at her without an acknowledgment of her existence. She has no phone to distract her, so she just sits. She just sits there! Hand resting on her fist, she waits for the daily visit from Peter, whom she is in love with (though they’ve never met or spoken to each other). After she saves him from being run over by the L-train, she finds herself in the middle of the lie that she is, in fact, his fiancée. She’s obviously not, but for Lucy, who is single and lives alone with her cat, the family who immediately embraces her is something she’s never had (both her parents are dead).

It’s less about the plotline of the movie, which is basically the same as every single Hallmark movie ever created. It’s more about the really wonderful aspects of living a life before the internet and how the technological advancements that have followed are devouring us all from the inside. And not just in our personal lives, but collectively as a human race. As fellow countrymen.

This is usually the point where the writer will layer on the caveats. Where we all might have a knee-jerk reaction and say, “Of course, the internet has provided us many wonderful things! I use it every day and benefit! Look! We have this wonderful community here on Substack.” And all those things are true. With almost every tool, there can be very real benefits and advantages. But with some creations, what is stolen leaves no room for what is added to flourish.

I’m afraid that might be the case with what we are watching unfold with the internet, artificial intelligence, and whatever the heck comes next.

In every scene of the movie last night (and as I’ve replayed it in my mind), I thought about how different each interaction would be if the characters were living in 2025. For starters, Lucy wouldn’t have even seen Peter fall on the tracks because she would never have noticed him in the first place - too busy on Instagram or Pinterest to routinely spot a handsome stranger. She would be able to completely avoid her hilarious but annoying neighbor Joe Jr. simply because everyone’s whereabouts are documented, not to mention she would never engage in conversation with him to begin with because….why? She definitely wouldn’t sit quietly and think in her apartment and share an Oreo with her cat because she’d be able to distract herself into oblivion between her phone, Netflix, Paramount+, and HBO. Not to mention, she would likely be on dating apps to cure her incurable loneliness issue.

I mean, the “lie” that allowed her to truly become part of the family wouldn’t have even lasted more than 2 hours, given how they knew virtually nothing about their son’s life, even though he lived down the street - it would be plastered everywhere online. They’d be able to know everything about Lucy’s entire life within minutes, just by handing a 16-year-old a smartphone and telling them to look her up on socials.

Lucy and Jack wouldn’t have awkward pauses in conversation, Lucy and her boss likely wouldn’t walk around downtown Chicago for hot dogs and conversation “just because,” and the family wouldn’t all be at everything together and actually talking because most, if not all would have a glowing screen in their hand. It can’t be missed, it really can’t.

What makes the movie great is that it highlights what so many of us parents are working so hard to achieve in our little worlds. Even with extreme dedication - no smartphones, limited internet access, quality friends, church community, and virtuous education - it still feels like we are fighting a losing battle. The question has become less of “How do I protect my children?” and more "Well, I protected them, but what will the world look like for them?”

I can try (and I do) to make our homelife look much more like something out of a 90s romcom than a 2025 Netflix modern family sitcom. We swim upstream in many ways, and thankfully, we have stuck to our guns in some of the most pivotal and challenging tests of parenthood. I’m glad for that - incredibly grateful. Even still, our culture is swiftly moving to an abyss of AI-generated augmented reality, and it’s consuming everything. Kids are no longer reading for enjoyment or educational purposes - who needs to when ChatGPT can write your paper for you? They won’t learn to sit with a thought for a few days and draft an essay. People struggle to make conversation, and who can blame them when all they have to do is “swipe left” if the dating profile picture isn’t satisfactory. Some churches in a post-COVID era have moved to live stream or outdoor settings, almost encouraging the separation of the act of attending church from the life of a believer - even worse, some are incorporating AI and virtual reality into their sermons and worship. Families are balls of confusion because children are being aggressively manipulated on their screens, and parents are glued to theirs for both answers and an escape. The art of debate and disagreement has been lost, and in its place we now have keyboard rage, thanks to the anonymity of the screen.

People are lost, lonely, being replaced by chatbots, being consumed with the superficial nature of the algorithm, and completely addicted to legacy news, pornography, horrible entertainment, and truly below-average music because they have been numbed to the point that they don’t even know what alive feels like - to breath and feel inspiration and sit with a thought without having to look away and scroll scroll scroll.

But why do those of us trying so hard for another way often feel this sense of unraveling, too? Shouldn’t we be able to rise above it, born from the hope that comes from knowing we are charting a new course for a new generation of people?

I think it’s because we live with one foot in both worlds, and I don’t know how to detangle that. I’m trying to figure it out, honestly. How can I translate my 1990s nostalgia into my digital work? It hasn’t been enough to refrain from using AI to generate my content. It’s not enough to give myself screen time limits. I’ve been putting restrictions on my use for over 18 years, and I still let myself down sometimes. I’m not sure it will even be enough to restrict my children from social media until they are 18, though I will. They’re still going to have to navigate a new future where the VAST majority of people use a computer to generate thoughts, ideas, emotions, results, words…" reality.” How does one prepare a child for that?

Even if AI and the internet were to freeze their advancements at the stage we are in, there will still be hell to pay. The damage has been done in so many areas of communal life, but I don’t need to list all those - you already know. You feel it, see it in your families, places of work and worship, and in the greater society and culture.

What do we do?

Since we won’t be able to turn back the clock, no matter how badly we might think we’d like to, we need to deal with the real threat of what is happening to our minds and hearts through the advent of the tech behemoths we now have in our hands and on our desks. We have to be clear-eyed and honest about the dangers and actively work to decouple ourselves from their grasp. For some, that may mean downgrading to a dumb phone. For others, it might mean a family pledge not to use AI. For others, it may mean strict guidelines about how much tech can be used inside their homes, for both adults and children. For others, it will include all of the above.

You know it, and I know it - something is off. Very off.

We are watching a fractured and broken culture try to digest rapid changes in technology while also attempting to understand the current fall of the American “empire.” It feels like we are collapsing under the weight of dynamic shifts, and despair can sometimes feel inevitable.

It doesn’t have to be that way.

We aren’t in charge of Sam Altman or Anthropic or Congress. What we do have dominion over is our small communities. Our children, the sanctuaries of home and church. Our bookshelves and garden. Our friends and time. Reduced to a lackluster metaphor, life is a bit like a buffet, and we have the option to pick Porterhouse Steak or park it at the chemically-laden soft-serve machine. We can pick the instant or we can pick the best - each day, little by little.

Nothing I’m saying is all that prescriptive. I suppose I’ll leave that for the scholars and philosophers amongst us. What I am saying is that you’re not lacking trust in the Lord if you’re noticing the tectonic shifts in the world. You’re just noticing. Things are moving at an unsustainable pace, and no one really knows where we are headed.

Well, no one except the One who sustains us. He knows. He is faithful. When we call to Him for wisdom and help, He will answer. Even when we approach Him with an “I have no idea how to navigate this” prayer of desperation, He is there.

The other day, I was reading about one of the fastest-growing software companies in the world, and I realized their company was named after one of several indestructible crystal balls from J. R. R. Tolkien's epic-fantasy novel The Lord of the Rings. The word comes from Quenya palan 'far', and tir 'watch over', and I thought it was such a perfect sign of our times. Man will always try to reach God. To become a superpower of some sort. Rising to the level of having the ability to see, do, and watch everything. Of course, we know that mortals will never achieve that feat - only the Lord can. And yet, we continue to try.

I suppose that’s where I’ll leave this. No 10-step list of what to do to fix this problem we are watching bubble to the surface. Just a stream-of-consciousness from one mom who is trying to unravel the technological knots of her own making, and doubling down on turning back to a time where it truly was the “good old days.”

All because Netflix suggested “While You Were Sleeping.”