There’s a certain quiet thought a lot of millennial dads are having these days that doesn’t always get said out loud: part of us wants to burn it all down—not in a destructive way, but in a reset-the-defaults kind of way.
Because we are the first generation to clearly remember life before the internet… and also the first to fully live inside it.
We watched the shift happen in real time. We went from bored summers outside until the streetlights came on, to dial-up tones, to AIM away messages, to smartphones, to now living in a world where everything is always on, always notifying, always optimizing, always asking for attention.
And if we’re honest, a lot of us look around in 2026 and think: I’m not sure this is better.
Not across the board. Not for our minds. Not for our kids.
The generation that saw both worlds
Millennials sit in a strange historical pocket. We had a childhood that was still analog enough to be quiet. We remember landlines attached to the kitchen wall. We remember getting lost and it just meaning you were late—not instantly trackable. We remember boredom that had no algorithm ready to solve it.
And then we also became the early adopters of everything that came next. We helped build the attention economy, even if we didn’t realize it. We normalized the always-connected life.
So now we’re raising kids in the full saturation point of it.
And it’s creating a tension that’s hard to ignore.
The oversaturation problem
There’s no clean villain here. Technology has real upside: connection, learning, convenience, creativity, access. But there’s also a growing awareness that the current state of things feels… too much.
Too many inputs.
Too many comparisons.
Too much noise.
Too much childhood happening through a screen before it happens in the world.
A lot of parents today don’t look at that and feel neutral. They feel resistance.
Not because we’re anti-technology—but because we’ve seen what it does when it becomes the default environment instead of a tool.
The quiet return to analog
You can see the pushback everywhere if you look closely.
Landlines showing up again—not because they’re necessary, but because they create boundaries.
Parents delaying or limiting cell phones—not as punishment, but as protection.
Family computers returning to shared spaces instead of bedrooms.
Even the small cultural signals matter. People buying film cameras again. Writing more by hand. Keeping “dumb” devices around on purpose.
It’s not nostalgia. It’s correction.
It’s a generation trying to reintroduce friction into a world that removed all of it.
Bringing kids into a “remembered” world
For me, part of this has become intentional inside the home.
I’ve started bringing in more analog objects—not because I expect my son to use them in a practical sense, but because I want them to exist in his world as normal things.
A typewriter sitting in a room isn’t about productivity. It’s about curiosity. It’s about showing that communication didn’t always mean glass and screens and instant feedback loops.
It’s about letting him grow up with a sense that technology has a history—not just an app store.
Because one of the quiet risks of modern childhood is not that kids use too much technology… it’s that they never see anything else as real.
We don’t want to go backward—we want balance
Most of us aren’t trying to reject progress. We’re not fantasizing about living without modern medicine, connectivity, or tools that genuinely improve life.
But we are questioning the default environment we’re handing to kids.
Because there’s a difference between:
- Technology as a tool you pick up
vs - Technology as the air you breathe
And right now, it often feels like our kids are being born into the second one without ever being shown the first.
What this really comes down to
This “burn it all down” feeling isn’t about destruction.
It’s about discernment.
It’s about a generation that lived through the transformation asking a very simple question:
What parts of this do we actually want to pass on?
And maybe more importantly:
What parts do we need to slow down before they define childhood completely?
Because a simpler 1990s-level vibe doesn’t mean rejecting the future. It means protecting space inside it.
Space for boredom.
Space for imagination.
Space for friction.
Space for real-world discovery that isn’t optimized, filtered, or monetized.
And if that means keeping a landline plugged in… or putting a typewriter on a shelf… or delaying the inevitable smartphone a little longer…
That might not be regression at all.
It might just be remembering that childhood doesn’t need to be upgraded every year.
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