The Older I Get, The More Complicated It Feels, But the Loops Are the Same

I didn’t set out to think about any of this.

I actually stumbled into it by accident.

I don’t think the world has become more chaotic.

I think it has become more layered.

The older I get, the more everything feels complicated—college football, culture, music, even the shows that grab my attention. Things feel disjointed, anachronistic, strangely familiar and unfamiliar at the same time. Traditions still exist, but they feel thinner. Rituals still happen, but they don’t land the way they used to.

And yet, when I step back, I realize something unsettling and oddly calming: the loops are the same.

College football is where this first hit me. The pageantry is still there—the bands, the rivalries, the chants—but something underneath has shifted. Conference realignment, NIL deals, transfer portals. The game looks the same, but it no longer answers the same questions it once did.

It used to be about continuity: alma mater, region, identity passed down. Now it feels more transactional, more optimized, more like entertainment than inheritance. The ritual remains, but the obligation has faded.

That’s when I started noticing the same feeling elsewhere.

When people say this is nostalgia, I don’t think that’s quite right. Nostalgia is often dismissed as sentimental longing for the past, but what I feel is closer to recognition.

It’s the sense that something real has been lost—and that what replaced it hasn’t fully learned how to carry meaning yet.

That’s why the shows and music that resonate with me lately are often anachronistic.

A good example is Fallout. I came across the series on Prime almost by accident, knowing nothing about the video game history behind it. What struck me immediately was the tone—the 1950s optimism, the cheerful slogans, the anachronistic music layered over institutional decay. It felt strangely honest.

Then my son-in-law mentioned that he had played the Fallout games for years, and that the show was remarkably faithful to the source material. That surprised me. What I thought was a modern commentary turned out to be a long-standing cultural diagnosis that had finally caught up to the present. They mix eras. They feel disjointed. They use old aesthetics to say new things. Fallout does this perfectly—1950s optimism layered over institutional collapse. It isn’t about the apocalypse. It’s about what happens when systems keep running after belief is gone.

That feels familiar.

That realization sent my mind backward.

I started thinking about Saturday Night Fever—another piece of pop culture that felt like entertainment on the surface but was really about pressure underneath. The film traces back to a 1976 New York Magazine article, often remembered as Rituals of Saturday Night. Its reporting was later disputed, but like most powerful cultural artifacts, factual precision mattered less than emotional truth.

The article captured something real: the streets of New York were tough, work was constraining, status was limited, and Saturday night became ritualized escape. Disco wasn’t frivolous—it was endurance with a beat.

That idea even shows up subtly in the music. In Stayin’ Alive, there’s a lyric often misheard or overlooked: the reference to media pressure and the weight of the city—you see clearly in the opening verse:

Music loud and women warm, I've been kicked around
Since I was born
And now it's all right, it's okay
And you may look the other way
But we can try to understand
The New York Times' effect on man

 Whether literal or symbolic, the meaning lands the same: information, expectation, and environment pressing down on the individual.

What article or post is having that effect on man today?

History keeps showing us the same pattern.

After the Great Depression and World War II, people wanted order. The 1950s were about structure, routine, and faith in institutions—families, corporations, government. Even under the shadow of the atomic bomb, there was comfort in predictability.

Then came the cracks.

The 1960s brought civil rights, unrest, and rebellion—not because people wanted chaos, but because the old order no longer made moral sense. Music became protest. Rituals became marches. Authenticity replaced conformity.

The 1970s were different. Vietnam, Watergate, and economic stagnation drained belief. Idealism collapsed. Culture turned toward survival and escape—disco, nightlife, movement. Staying alive wasn’t a metaphor; it was a posture.

The 1980s layered performance on top of that survival. Image, consumption, and status filled the meaning vacuum.

The loop kept turning.

What makes the early 2020s feel different isn’t the presence of crisis. It’s the absence of resolution.

Institutions don’t collapse. They persist. Rituals don’t disappear. They perform. Traditions don’t die. But they seem more like old silly rewinds than anything meaningful. My experience even with young adults is that old is old and they want new.

The pressure today isn’t merely physical danger. It’s cognitive saturation. Endless information. Endless judgment. Endless reaction. The street isn’t hostile—the feed is.

That’s why we don’t have shared anthems anymore. We have playlists. Vibes. Moments that burn bright and disappear. The loop has sped up.

So when a show like Fallout resonates, it’s not because I want the past back. It’s because it admits something we’re all quietly noticing:

That we are living inside systems that still function but no longer fully explain themselves.

The anachronism isn’t confusion—it’s honesty. It reflects a world where old stories are still playing on the speakers, but no one quite believes the lyrics anymore.

Here’s the surprising part.

After a few weeks of turning this over—college football, Fallout, Saturday Night Fever, music, rituals—it started to feel less like isolated observations and more like a pattern.

Once you see the loops, the complexity becomes less frightening.

Order gives way to rebellion. Rebellion gives way to disillusionment. Disillusionment gives way to survival. Survival gives way to performance. Performance eventually collapses under its own emptiness. And then—quietly—people start rebuilding meaning again, usually smaller, more local, more embodied. Maybe even a hunger for God, the only One big enough to make sense of it all.

We’ve been here before.

What changes are the technologies, the aesthetics, the speed.

What doesn’t change is the human need for: Belonging over time (relationships) Ritual that costs something (worship) Traditions that ask us to carry them forward (discipleship).

The older I get, the more complicated it feels—not because the world is unprecedented, but because I can finally see the layers at once.

So where are we now?

We seem to be at the late stage of the loop: after belief has thinned, after performance has replaced meaning, and before anything solid has been rebuilt. Traditions still exist, but they feel negotiated. Rituals still happen, but they’re often detached from obligation. Pop culture reaches backward not out of laziness, but because older aesthetics still know how to tell the truth.

Where are we trending?

Historically, moments like this don’t resolve through bigger spectacles or louder anthems. They resolve quietly. Meaning rebuilds at smaller scales—local, embodied, intentional. New rituals emerge that ask more of us, not less. Traditions return, but stripped of illusion.

And once you see the loops, you realize this moment isn’t the end of meaning.

It’s the part of the cycle where meaning has to be rebuilt—again.

And he said, “Go out and stand on the mount before the LORD.” And behold, the LORD passed by, and a great and strong wind tore the mountains and broke in pieces the rocks before the LORD, but the LORD was not in the wind. And after the wind an earthquake, but the LORD was not in the earthquake. [12] And after the earthquake a fire, but the LORD was not in the fire. And after the fire the sound of a low whisper. (1 Kings 19:11–12 ESV)

Song Link: Low Whisper