You are a member of the most fortunate generation in the history of mankind, and you don’t even know it. And, it’s not just because of what you have now, but because of what you didn’t have when you were a kid.
Creators of Worlds
As children, we climbed trees, took things apart, and fell down a lot. We grew up in a time when our play radius stretched for miles. We looked at hills and forests, wondered what might be on the other side, made up stories, and ventured out there to places that represented possibility and personal expression. Our parents pushed us out the door and told us not to come back until dinner, or until we were bleeding. We’d swim great distances, build things with our dirty hands, and give our own unique meaning to things we’d discover.
We had TV, but we couldn’t sit too close to it, and we certainly couldn’t take it with us. Sure, we also had Gameboy, dial-up, and Oregon Trail to entertain us and spark our sense of imagination for a time, but they were novelties; sideshows, really. We, ourselves, were the main event in our lives each and every day. We were not the mere observers of the world; we were the creators of worlds! That’s all because we didn’t have access to constant, ever-changing content, unless it was the content we created within our own minds. And, in there, it was endless!
When nothing was happening, it was our sole job to make something happen. Boredom was a spark, not a call for our phones to entertain and distract us. It was a momentary stretch of the unknown, and the mind responded by filling it. We imagined, observed, and experimented. We made something out of nothing because nothing was often all we had.
The End of Empty Space
Thankfully, the human mind is constantly trying to organize experience. We naturally look for patterns, assign motives, invent explanations, and build stories that help the world make sense. We create meaning through the interaction of what happens around us and what already exists inside us. It’s our memories, expectations, identities, emotions, and experiences shaping what we notice and what we believe it means.
Now, nearly every empty space has been filled. A line at the grocery store becomes an opportunity to check email. A quiet walk becomes a podcast listen with earbuds. A delayed flight becomes three social feeds, a few junk emails, a couple Slacks, and a quick look at whatever fresh disaster everyone has agreed to care about today. We rarely allow experience to remain unexplained, unstimulated, or incomplete. The moment uncertainty appears, we reach for something capable of resolving it instead of just being, wandering, wondering. We became scared of ourselves!
It’s because now we live in a world of near-constant innovations, developments, and breakthroughs. We now have AI and are witness to the great transition into a fully digital age where information and content are commonplace. The sad fact is, despite this flood of inspiration, so many of us have become numb to the things that could once fascinate. Uncertainty creates friction, and technology has become exceptionally good at removing friction from our everyday. But, sometimes friction is where thought begins. Sometimes it was exactly what made us and life itself wonderful.
So, here we are, standing across the great wonderful past and the fast-paced present. This might be the perfect time to ask if we’re wondering enough about where we’re going.
The Psychology of Wonder
Wonder lives inside the distance between encountering something and deciding what it means. It requires us to remain inside a question long enough for imagination, memory, emotion, and intuition to enter the chat.
Psychology has language for part of what happens in these moments. Researchers studying awe describe an experience that begins when we encounter something too vast, surprising, or unfamiliar to fit neatly inside the mental model we already have. The mind is forced into what psychologists call “Cognitive Accommodation,” in which we have to adjust our understanding to make room for what we’ve experienced. That is an important distinction. Wonder isn’t simply being impressed by something. It’s the recognition that our current explanation may be insufficient to describe it. It makes us work harder!
In “Awe as a Scientific Emotion,” researchers Sara Gottlieb, Dacher Keltner, and Tania Lombrozo connected wonder and awe to scientific thinking because both require a willingness to revise what we believe when reality refuses to cooperate with it. Across six studies, they found that people who were more prone to awe also demonstrated a more accurate understanding of how science works and were less likely to accept simplistic explanations for complicated phenomena.
Your brain says “there’s something happening here that I don’t yet understand,” and instead of immediately forcing the experience into an all-too-familiar label, it creates enough psychological space in the ol’ cranium for a different explanation altogether to emerge. That human experience matters because the first available answer is rarely the only possible answer or the right one. When we eliminate uncertainty too quickly, we may gain information but lose interpretation. We end up knowing more, but understanding less.
When we searched, struggled, guessed, wandered, and occasionally failed to find the answer, we weren’t simply wasting time before arriving at knowledge. We were creating context around it. We were activating associations, forming predictions, and deciding why the answer mattered. The information entered a mind already working to receive it. Today, the answer often arrives before curiosity has fully developed, helping prove that, while intelligence is abundant, understanding can be scarce.
AI, Passivity, and the Business of Awe
When information lives outside us, our advantage can no longer be merely possessing it. We have to interpret it, connect it, question it, and understand when it matters. When we outsource too much of the interpretive process, we risk becoming spectators to our own minds. We receive language before discovering what we want to say. We receive conclusions before experiencing the confusion that might have led us somewhere more original.
AI isn’t the enemy here. Passivity is. Technology should extend human capability, not excuse us from using it. AI can be the engine, but we still have to be the driver.
Meaning has always been the human advantage because it isn’t contained entirely within the thing itself. A chair isn’t simply a chair. It can represent authority, comfort, exclusion, childhood, status, safety, or the place where your grandfather sat every evening to read the paper. A company isn’t simply a legal and financial structure. It can represent identity, belonging, ambition, disappointment, pride, security, or proof that someone’s life has mattered. That’s why wonder matters in business as much as it matters in childhood.
Research on wonder and awe offers an overarching reason why it all matters: they’re both associated with a diminished focus on the individual self, greater generosity, greater humility, and even a subjective sense of having more time, which means that when something wonderful expands our frame of reference, our immediate problems can temporarily occupy less of it.
That’s valuable in leadership, strategy, and creativity because many bad decisions begin with a frame that’s too small. We see the brief instead of the business. The customer’s action instead of the psychological need beneath it. Our own contribution instead of the system that made it possible. The urgent demand instead of the larger consequence.
Wonder disrupts the obvious explanation. It asks why a customer behaves for one reason while claiming to believe another. It notices the hesitation before someone answers. It questions why a team keeps recreating the same problem despite repeatedly agreeing to solve it. It sees that a conflict supposedly about process may actually be about status, control, identity, trust, or fear. Data can show us what happened. Wonder makes us curious about the invisible forces that made it happen.
There’s great value in our growing access to technology, of course. Zoom meetings and Slack chats save us and our employers time and money, but you know what I truly miss? Getting to the airport early during business trips, disconnecting, and having a beer while watching the strange mix of people passing by, and wondering about their stories. By being present, and not using devices to connect ourselves to our everyday life, we can instead use our sense of wonder to connect to new people, places, perspectives, and possibilities — ones AI could never “imagine”.
As Martin Lindstrom references in his study of Small Data, Disney revolutionized its parks by simply observing how people wait in line at a church in Rome. Nothing fancy. No tech. Just eyeballs, being present, a dose of wonder, and the ingenuity of the human mind, and it helped transform Disney Park lines from horrendous to just horrible.
The Advantage of the Wonderful Generation
That capacity will matter more as machines become capable of producing competent answers to nearly everything. The advantage will no longer belong entirely to the person with the most information or even the person who can execute fastest. It will belong to the person who notices what others miss. The person who asks the more interesting question, who can separate what is measurable from what is meaningful, and who understands that people don’t experience the world as data. They experience it through emotion, memory, language, identity, and story.
This is the strange advantage of the Wonderful Generation. We remember life before constant answers. We know what it felt like to want information, search for it, wait for it, occasionally fail to find it, and invent our own explanation in the meantime. We are the last to grow up without the internet, so only we truly know the awesome power of those little information machines we carry with us everywhere we go. We’ll be the last to have gotten lost without GPS, discovering a sense of adventure and accomplishment in finding our way home. And, we’ll be the last to experience the power and emotion of a developed photo, rather than 100 digital options easily captured — and just as easily forgotten.
We have access to nearly all of the world’s knowledge, put it in our pockets, and even attach it to our wrists, but we risk forgetting how exciting it all is without something to compare it to.
We shouldn’t try to return to the past. Much of it was inconvenient, inefficient, and wildly overrated. Nobody needs dial-up internet again. Nobody misses printing MapQuest directions and trying to read them while driving at night. But, we should be careful about allowing technology to remove every moment in which the human mind might have been required to participate. We may be the last generation to remember a world before the answer was always available. That memory gives us a responsibility to carry something forward: the understanding that knowledge and meaning are not the same thing.
We can use AI to expand ideas, identify patterns, accelerate execution, and explore possibilities that would once have remained trapped inside our heads, but only if we retain the human capabilities that make those tools worth using: Curiosity, observation, interpretation, imagination, and judgment. We need to access the ability to tolerate ambiguity and stay with a problem before demanding that it become simple.
The more information and innovation are made available to us, the less we experience and the less we wonder. So, never forget your device-free youth and your sense of imagination. Never forget the power of childlike perspective. Never forget what it’s like to make up your own stories.
We are the Wonderful Generation, a fortunate flicker in existence with the ability to experience two great ages in human history. Don’t let those last remnants of a forgotten analog past disappear without letting them influence your eager view of the future. Unplug whenever possible, wander, wonder, and maybe listen to your soul more. Let it inspire you and your work, every wonderful day.
James Dowd is Chief Creative Officer and Chief Operating Officer of Rebellion Group, a brand marketing agency based in Connecticut. His work explores the intersection of creativity, psychology, human behavior, language, leadership, and artificial intelligence, with a particular focus on how people create meaning, make decisions, and connect in an increasingly automated world. He is also the author of Write Dumb and writes regularly about creative leadership, behavioral intelligence, psycholinguistics, organizational culture, and the human advantage in business.