Old Souls Die Hard

The older I get, the more I like old stuff. I think this is normal. It’s part aging, part nostalgia for childhood, and part fatigue with new stuff flooding our lives all the time.

I don’t care all that much about AI. I find it more annoying than useful on most occasions. There are few new TV shows I’m genuinely excited about. Most of the books I’m eager to read are over 50 years old. Whenever I have to update one of my apps, I grumble at them ruining a user interface that was perfectly usable before.

I don’t know if I’m an outlier in this regard. If “new” exhausts me more than the average person or not. But I do know we—perhaps now more than ever—live in a world that has made it a habit to move for movement’s sake alone.

So many people and companies are cranking out AI-generated social media content at lightning speed. Website designs, fashion outfits, news headlines—it seems we’re now changing these things every week just to change them, not because change is necessary. There’s so much momentum, yet so few of us seem to actually try going anywhere.

It feels as if we’ve collectively agreed to run the fastest time we possibly can—each in our own little hamster wheel that’ll never stop spinning. Meanwhile, the stuff that’s interesting, the art I want to make, the places I want to be, they’re mostly offline and hold little interaction. It’s almost as if real progress, joy, and meaning happen on the inside or in small circles, not on the big, loud town square where strangers and groupies alike yell while trying to grab a piece of you.

Technologists love to tell us we must adapt or be left behind. In reality, you can ignore 99% of what’s going on, and your life will run its course just fine—because what technologists conveniently leave out is how fragile new developments actually are. But books? Writing on paper? Sitting down in person with some coffee and cake? Those have proven durable for centuries. It’s likely they’ll last another and, in any case, long enough for you and I.

Old souls die hard. Here’s to the ones who refuse to get swept away by the tides of time.

Nik

Niklas Göke writes for dreamers, doers, and unbroken optimists. A self-taught writer with more than a decade of experience, Nik has published over 2,000 articles. His work has attracted tens of millions of readers and been featured in places like Business Insider, CNBC, Lifehacker, and many others. Nik has self-published 2 books thus far, most recently 2-Minute Pep Talks. Outside of his day job and daily blog, Nik loves reading, video games, and pizza, which he eats plenty a slice of in Munich, Germany, where he resides.