To Be Determined
What the last wave taught me about the one that's already here
Every generation has its signals.
For my grandparents, it was the radio in the living room. The one that the whole family gathered around to hear the world come through a single speaker. Then it wasn’t.
For my parents, it was the telephone on the kitchen wall. The cord stretched as far as privacy would allow. Then it wasn’t.
Not every signal is a device.
For me, it was bikes on the lawn.
That’s how you found your friends.
No app. No location sharing. No notification that someone had arrived. You went outside, spotted the pile of bikes in front of someone’s house, and that’s where you went.
The bikes were the signal. The lawn was the map.
For the generation coming up now, the signal is a notification. A ping. A location shared in real time on a screen.
They’ve never known anything else.
To them, the bikes on the lawn sound like a history lesson.
To me, they sound like last week.
The signals keep changing. The need they serve never does.
And every generation watches its version quietly disappear.
Nobody announces it. Nobody asks if you’re ready. The thing that always just was becomes the thing that used to be, and the new thing takes its place before most people notice the exchange.
That’s not a technology story. That’s a human story. Technology is just the current vehicle.
And right now the vehicle is changing again.
I watched the last transition from the inside.
It took twenty-five years. It started with a dial-up connection that dropped every time someone picked up the phone. Two worlds sharing the same wire, neither ready to let go.
Then the pager on the hip. Then the smartphone that never left the hand.
I felt each wave arrive. Slow enough that I barely noticed. Fast enough that by the time I looked up and caught my breath, everything that always just was, no longer was.
I watched it reshape everything around me. How people work. How they connect. How they consume information. How they show up at a dinner table.
Twenty-five years to complete. And most people didn’t fully feel it until it was already finished.
That wave is done.
I saw where it landed on my 51st birthday.
Around the table were the people closest to me. Twelve years old to eighty. Every decade of a life represented in one room.
For most of those people, that table had one thing in common. The only thing in the room was the people in the room.
Then something else arrived. It didn’t knock. It didn’t ask permission. It just became part of every table, every room, every moment.
And at some point during the meal, every single one of us reached for it. Not out of rudeness. Not out of disinterest. It was simply there. And once something is simply there, it changes the gravity of everything around it.
Not a disruption. Not a decision. Just the quiet way the world folds something new into itself until you can’t remember the table without it.
That’s where the last wave brought us.
Now I’m watching the early signals of the next one.
The conversations happening around me. The commentary flooding every platform. The news about what AI will do to the world is being delivered through the last technology that changed everything.
This time, I know what I’m looking at.
And this wave will not take twenty-five years.
Not every wave announces itself the same way.
The last transition arrived like the tide shaping a shoreline. Gradual. Persistent. One slow wave at a time, each one moving the sand a little further than the last.
You don’t watch a shoreline change. You look up one day, and it’s different. That’s how twenty-five years felt.
Not a single wave. A thousand of them, each one barely noticeable on its own.
What’s coming is not that.
A tsunami doesn’t build gradually. It begins with a withdrawal. The water pulls back from the shore, further than it has any business going, exposing the ocean floor in a way that catches your attention before you understand why.
Most people stand and stare. Some take pictures. A few recognize it because they’ve felt this before.
The water pulling back is not the event. It’s the signal.
By the time most people understand what they’re seeing, the window to move has already started closing.
That window is open right now.
The younger ones at that table don’t have a before. This is just their world. No reference point for what the pulling back of the water actually means. It’s just where they’re standing.
But some of us have a before. We lived through one world becoming another.
We watched the wire change its purpose in real time.
We built something while watching. A muscle of observation. An eye trained to read the signs before most people feel the ground move.
That’s not nostalgia. That’s a credential.
But preparation without humility becomes assumption.
See the pattern. Know it never repeats exactly.
Will all of this come to pass exactly as predicted?
Will the wave arrive on the timeline the signals suggest?
To be determined.
But the signals are real, and the pattern is familiar.
The window is open right now, but it will not stay open forever.
The question isn’t whether the wave is coming. It is.
The question is whether you’re determined to be ready when it arrives.