I just came in from the garden.
Hands dirty. Back worked. The gazebo is coming along the way things come along when you do them yourself — one day at a time, one board at a time, no app telling you how.
And I’ve been thinking about something while I work out there. Something I’ve been watching build for a while now like a slow weather system coming in from the west.
The young people are waking up.
What They’re Seeing
They’re mad. I want to say that plainly and without condescension because the anger is earned and I respect earned anger a lot more than comfortable silence.
They were handed a world that was pre-packaged, pre-approved, and pre-owned by people who had already taken what they needed and pulled the ladder up behind them. They were told to go to school, take on the debt, follow the path, and the path would deliver. They did what they were told. The path didn’t deliver.
The corporate machinery that ran that operation knew exactly what it was doing. Keep them dependent. Keep them consuming. Keep them looking to the system for every need — their food, their entertainment, their identity, their sense of purpose. A dependent population is a controllable population. That is not conspiracy thinking. That is just how control works when you’re patient enough to build it slowly.
And it worked. For a long time it worked beautifully.
Until it didn’t.
The Crack in the Wall
Something shifted. I’ve watched it happen and I couldn’t tell you exactly when the turn came but I know it came because I can see it in the faces and I can read it in what they’re saying now.
They’re looking at men my age — men who grew up with their hands on things, who learned to fix what broke and build what they needed and solve problems without a subscription service — and there’s something in that look I recognize.
It’s envy. But not the petty kind. The honest kind. The kind that comes from genuinely wanting what someone else has and knowing you were denied the chance to get it the normal way.
They weren’t taught these things. That wasn’t an accident. A generation raised with hands-on skills is a generation that doesn’t need to be sold solutions to every problem. The system understood that. The system made its choice.
Now they’re making theirs.
What the Boomer Generation Actually Had
I want to be careful here because I’m not interested in generational chest-beating. That’s not what this is.
But I’ll tell you what we had that was real.
We had fathers and grandfathers who put tools in our hands before we were ten years old. We had the dignity of being trusted to do something hard and the experience of failing at it and trying again. We had the understanding — built into us before we could articulate it — that the world responds to effort and that your hands are the most reliable technology you will ever own.
Nobody gave us that as a gift. It was just the way life worked. You learned because learning was survival. You built because building was how things got built. You fixed because calling someone else to fix it wasn’t always an option and sometimes wasn’t even a thought.
That foundation doesn’t leave you. Sixty years later I’m still out in the garden. Still building the gazebo. Still feeding the birds with feed I sourced myself and delivered myself and will scatter myself at first light.
That’s not nostalgia. That’s just what a life built on your own two hands looks like when you get old.
The Hand Reaching Out
Here’s what I want the young people who are waking up right now to hear from me directly.
You’re right to be angry. The anger means you’re paying attention. The anger means you haven’t given up on the idea that things could be different. Hold onto that. Anger that turns into action is one of the most powerful forces a human being can generate.
And the skills you envy? They’re learnable. Every one of them. You are not too old, you are not too far behind, and you are not too damaged by the years of dependency to start building a different relationship with your own hands and your own judgment.
Start small. Fix something instead of replacing it. Grow something even if it’s just one pot on a balcony. Learn one thing this month that doesn’t require a screen or a subscription or someone else doing it for you.
The old man who just came in from the garden isn’t holding these things over your head. He’s holding the door open.
If you want what we had — the confidence, the competence, the deep satisfaction of a thing done by your own hand — it’s still available. It was never taken from you permanently. It was just never offered.
Come get it.
The work is worth it. I promise you that from seventy-one years of living it.
A New Category: “AI Baseline Governance”
“Intelligent People Assume Nothing” | Michael S Faust Sr. | Substack
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