The Inner Monologue

Alan Kay once quipped that “Technology is anything that was invented after you were born; everything else is just stuff.”
It’s one of those deceptively simple ideas that everyone nods at without really unpacking. Most people interpret it as a commentary on generational perception—the old see new inventions as strange, while the young see them as natural. That’s true, but incomplete. Kay’s insight goes deeper. It’s not just about age—it’s about proportion.

Every person lives inside a shifting ratio: the balance between what has always existed in their memory and what has arrived since. When you’re a child, nearly everything is new—your world expands daily with inventions, discoveries, and explanations. As you grow, the curve flattens. New things still appear, but you begin to recognize their lineage: smartphones descend from cell phones, which descended from landlines. You start to see continuity instead of magic.

But as decades pass, the proportion begins to invert. What was once new becomes the baseline, and what emerges next feels alien. The “Kay Ratio” shifts. At some threshold—different for everyone—the world begins to feel too modern. The inventions come faster than your capacity to assimilate them into your personal sense of normalcy. That’s when people start saying things like, “It’s all moving too fast.”

This is not nostalgia so much as cognitive economics. The brain keeps a finite library of “accepted reality.” When the influx of novelty exceeds your ability to shelve and catalog it, you declare overload. The sentimentality that follows—longing for the “good old days”—is not really about time. It’s about ratio collapse. The familiar shrinks. The new dominates. The balance tips, and you begin to live in someone else’s future rather than your own present.

Every generation experiences this moment. It’s not unique to Boomers, Gen X, or Gen Z. It’s a universal human rhythm, baked into perception itself. Each of us stands somewhere on that continuum between stuff and technology.

The irony, of course, is that as soon as you call something “too new,” it’s already becoming ordinary for someone else. The ratio resets every birth, every invention, every moment. And so civilization doesn’t really march forward in a straight line—it oscillates through billions of personal tipping points, each person reconciling their internal world with the external pace of change.

Maybe that’s why humanity survives its own innovation. We adapt, one ratio at a time.