The Quiet Death of "Wow": What We Lost When We Stopped Being…

My grandfather used to say "wow" the way other people say "amen." He said it at fireworks, at the Grand Canyon, at a perfect tomato from his own garden. It was a small word doing heavy lifting — gratitude, wonder, and surprise all crammed into three letters. I thought about him last week when my daughter looked up from her tablet at an actual rainbow arching over our street and said, flatly, "That's cool, I guess." Then she went back to scrolling. That's when it hit me: we are living through the quiet death of wow. Not the word itself — you can still find it, stamped on novelty socks and spray-painted on Instagram captions. I mean the actual experience. The full-body jolt of encountering something so strange, so beautiful, or so enormous that your brain briefly stops working. The moment that makes you grab the person next to you and point. We used to have those moments daily. Now we have them on a screen, optimized, filtered, and served to us before we even ask. Consider what we've traded away. A child in 1975 saw maybe a dozen genuinely astonishing things a year — a shooting star, a whale breaching, the first snow. A child today can summon a thousand wonders before breakfast, each one more spectacular than the last. And yet study after study shows we're less moved, less curious, less likely to describe anything as truly amazing. The word "wow" has been devalued like a currency nobody trusts anymore. When everything is "wow," nothing is. I see it in my own life. I've gasped at drone footage of volcanoes and felt nothing standing at the edge of an actual canyon. I've watched a thousand sunsets on a phone and missed the one happening outside my kitchen window. The algorithm learned what amazed me and then, slowly, made sure nothing ever did again. This isn't just nostalgia talking. There's a real cost to living in a world where surprise has been engineered out. Wonder is what pulls us out of ourselves — it's the raw material of gratitude, of art, of faith, of falling in love. Strip it away and you get something worse than boredom. You get a kind of low-grade numbness that we've started calling normal. The sociologists have a term for it: hedonic adaptation. The philosophers call it ennui. My grandfather would have called it a damn shame. So here's my modest proposal, and I offer it as someone who is as guilty as anyone. Once a week, go find something that makes you say the word out loud. Not on a screen. Not through a lens. Stand in front of it, whatever it is — a storm, a newborn, a night sky without a single notification — and let yourself be small. Let yourself be stunned. Say the word like you mean it. Because a society that has forgotten how to be amazed is a society that has stopped paying attention. And a society that has stopped paying attention will believe almost anything, buy almost anything, and settle for almost nothing. Wow isn't just a word. It's a muscle. And ours are wasting away.