Someone told me the other day that the McDonald's near them took out the playground. The tubes, the slides, the ball pit — all of it. Replaced it with a row of screens. Individual stations. Each kid in their own little pod, tapping at their own little app, not looking at the kid next to them.
And I haven't been able to stop thinking about it.
Not because it's surprising. Because it's so perfectly symbolic of everything that's happening right now — the quiet trade we keep making, over and over, without naming it.
We traded the thing that was messy and physical and connective for the thing that's contained and individual and "safe."
Think about what a playground was. A structure — plastic and metal and questionable engineering — where kids learned to negotiate space with their bodies. They climbed. They fell. They figured out who goes first down the slide through some combination of shouting, shoving, and eventual cooperation. They got hurt sometimes. They got scared sometimes. They touched each other constantly — grabbing, pulling, catching, colliding.
That wasn't a design flaw. That was the whole point.
The playground was where you learned that other bodies exist. That your body exists in relation to them. That the world is physical and unpredictable and that navigating it requires something no screen can teach you — the felt sense of another person in your space, the split-second calculation of how fast is she going and where do I need to be, the experience of falling and getting back up with witnesses.
Now there's a screen. And sure — there's less liability. No one breaks a leg. No one gets pushed. No one has to figure out how to share a space with a stranger's kid. The mess is contained. The risk is managed.
But something deeper broke, and it's breaking so quietly most people haven't noticed yet.
We have metrics for broken bones. We have metrics for lawsuits. We have metrics for how long a kid will sit quietly while their parent finishes a meal.
We don't have a metric for what happens when an entire generation learns to play without touching each other.
We don't measure the cost of a childhood where every interaction is mediated by a screen — where the primary relationship is between a child and a device, not between a child and another child. We don't measure what it does to the nervous system to grow up with stimulation but without connection. To be entertained constantly but held rarely. To have your attention captured but your body ignored.
The impact isn't immediate. It's not a broken arm. It's deeper — in the mind, in the heart, in the capacity to be with another human being without a screen between you. And by the time it shows up, we won't trace it back to the moment we replaced the playground with a row of individual pods. We'll call it anxiety. We'll call it social deficit. We'll call it a generation that doesn't know how to connect.
But it started here. It started with the trade.
This isn't just about McDonald's. It's about the cultural direction we're moving in — and the speed at which we're moving there without asking whether we want to arrive.
We went from body-based to mind-stimulating. From hands on the earth and on each other to hands on glass. From connected to contained. And we did it because contained feels safer. Less liability. Less mess. Less of the unpredictable, uncomfortable, beautiful chaos of humans learning to be human together.
I see it in the adults too. People marrying their AI bots. Entrepreneurs who haven't touched grass in months but have optimized every minute of their morning routine. Leaders who can analyze their nervous system in real time but can't actually feel their feet on the ground. The information is there. The embodiment isn't.
And I see the split forming. One camp pulling back to the land, rejecting technology entirely, demonizing everything digital. The other camp leaning so far into it they've lost track of their body, their connections, the physical world.
Both are responding to the same thing. Both feel the ground shifting. But one is running backward and the other is running forward so fast they can't feel their feet.
I'm raising a child on 16 acres in Oregon. She has chickens and gardens and mud. She also has a mother who uses AI as a creative partner and builds websites after bedtime. She will grow up knowing both worlds — the physical one under her feet and the digital one her generation will inherit.
I don't want to protect her from technology. I want to make sure she has a body she trusts before the technology arrives. A nervous system that knows what connection feels like — real connection, the kind you can only learn through touch and mess and proximity. A felt sense strong enough that when the screen is in front of her, she can feel the difference between being engaged and being consumed.
That's not a parenting strategy. That's an orientation. And it starts with what we model — not what we restrict.
The playground didn't need to be replaced. It needed to be kept — alongside everything else. The screen isn't the enemy. The absence of the body is.
The answer was never either/or. It was always both — held together, integrated, with the body leading.
But you can't integrate what you've already removed. And right now, we're removing the body from childhood one quiet trade at a time.
I don't know how to fix that at scale. But I know how to fix it in my kitchen, on my land, with my daughter's hands in the dirt and her mug on the low shelf every morning. I know how to fix it in the way I build, the way I write, the way I refuse to trade the messy, physical, embodied thing for the contained, optimized, "safe" version.
That's not a retreat from the future. It's the only way I know to actually be ready for it.
If something moved while you were reading — there's more where this came from.