My daughter said "wow" last Tuesday. Not about a sunset, a newborn cousin, or the Grand Canyon. About a limited-edition flavor of Oreo.
I watched her scroll past war footage, a celebrity meltdown, and a video of a man landing a rocket on a drone ship—all within nine seconds—without a flicker of surprise. Then a cookie with rainbow sprinkles stopped her thumb. "Wow," she whispered. Then she kept scrolling.
This is where we live now: a country where wonder has been strip-mined, packaged, and sold back to us at $4.99 a pack, and even that barely registers.
We used to have a word for the feeling that stops you cold. Awe. The kind that rearranges your insides. The kind that made our grandparents stand on porches and stare at the night sky because there was nothing else to do. Now we carry supercomputers in our pockets and use them to argue with strangers about whether a movie trailer "slaps."
The numbers tell the story. A 2023 study from the University of Chicago found that nearly 70% of Americans report feeling "emotionally numb" at least once a week—up from 40% two decades ago. We are not sadder, researchers say. We are flatter. The highs have been flattened. The lows get scrolled past. And the middle? That's where "wow" used to live.
What killed it? We did. We built an economy that monetizes astonishment. Every sunrise is a filter. Every miracle is a meme. Every tragedy is a hashtag with a donate button. When everything is designed to make you go "wow," nothing does. The brain, God bless it, adapts. It has to. Otherwise we'd walk around in a permanent state of cardiac arrest.
So we've traded awe for irony. We've traded wonder for wit. We've traded "look at that" for "I've seen better." And we call it sophistication.
I see it in my own house. My son watched the Perseverance rover land on Mars—the actual, literal landing on another planet—and said, "Cool." Then he asked if he could have screen time. I wanted to shake him. But then I remembered the last time I stood in a national park and felt that old, chest-tightening awe. I took a photo. I posted it. I checked the likes. The feeling was gone before I pocketed the phone.
That's the trade. We don't lose wonder because we're bad people. We lose it because we're busy. Busy documenting the moment instead of living inside it. Busy comparing our ordinary Tuesday to someone else's highlight reel. Busy being entertained instead of amazed.
The sociologists have a name for it: "anhedonia of the sublime." The inability to feel pleasure from the things that used to make us feel small. It's not depression. It's worse. It's a kind of spiritual cataracts. We can still see, but everything looks gray.
And here's the kicker: we're passing it to our kids. A 2024 survey by the Pew Research Center found that only 22% of teenagers say they "often feel awe or wonder." The rest say they "sometimes" or "rarely" do. They're not broken. They're just full. Full of content, full of noise, full of other people's curated lives. There's no room left for the real thing.
So what do we do? We can't unplug the world. But we can reclaim the small, stupid, unshareable moments. The first sip of coffee before anyone else wakes up. The way light hits the kitchen floor in October. The sound of a friend's real laugh, not the texted "lol." These aren't viral. They're better. They're ours.
Last night I put my phone in a drawer and sat on the back steps. A storm was rolling in. The sky turned that bruised purple that used to scare me as a kid. And for about ninety seconds, I felt it. That old, chest-tightening thing. I didn't take a picture. I didn't tell anyone. I just sat there and let it be enough