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I write this from my desk in downtown Durham, sitting steps away from the American Tobacco Campus, once the epicenter of one of the largest cigarette-producing regions in the country. The old brick facades still stand. Even the conference rooms in my office space are named after historic tobacco companies with early 1900s pictures of tobacco plants and product artifacts as the Durham-themed decor. 

Tobacco use was a cultural staple, until it wasn't. 

In 1964, U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Luther Terry released a landmark report linking cigarette smoking to lung cancer. By 1965, Congress required warning labels. By 1971, cigarette ads were banned from television. It took decades of research to challenge something so culturally embedded, something marketed as freedom, sophistication, even health.

Coincidently, around that same exact time, in 1965, a young lawyer named Ralph Nader published a book, Unsafe at Any Speed, exposing how American automakers resisted safety features that could save lives. In 1966, the National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act passed. Seatbelts, once optional, even controversial, became standard.

It’s an interesting clustering. Mid-1960s America didn’t suddenly become cautious. It became reflective. Innovation had raced ahead. Regulation scrambled to catch up.

We’ve seen this movie before. It's the essence of the Generational Pendulum of experiencing something, challenging it, over-correcting, and ultimately recalibrating. 

We find ourselves again at a seatbelt and cigarette moment. It's the space between something becoming standardized and normalized, and then society challenging it, over-correcting it, and ultimately recalibrating to a new normal. 

This is what I call the Velocity Gap.

The most recent Velocity Gap that is still unfolding is the impact and implications of both smartphones and social media on young minds.

Smartphones entered mainstream life in 2007. Social media scaled globally in less than a decade. By the early 2010s, researchers began documenting a sharp rise in teen anxiety, depression, and self-harm. Haidt (2024) argues that the shift from a "play-based" childhood to a "phone-based" childhood played a meaningful role. 

Plus, as I’ve written about before, the CDC’s national trend line is hard to ignore. Suicide rates among people ages 10 - 24 were stable through 2007, then increased 62% through 2021 (Curtin & Heron, 2023).

Technology moved faster than the guardrails. And unfortunately, it cost too many lives and took too long to address. 

But the silver lining is that we are recalibrating. Most recently, Australia has implemented phone restrictions across its schools, and in the U.S., a growing number of states are moving to restrict or regulate student phone use in schools (Education Week, 2024).

It took time. It took research. It took cultural friction. But recalibration is happening.

With cigarettes, we didn’t fully understand the long-term health consequences at first. 

With cars, we underestimated the risks. 

With smartphones, we didn’t understand the psychological implications until we were already living inside them.

But with artificial intelligence, the Velocity Gap is different because we already see the costs coming, both the hard ones and the soft ones.

We can see the hard costs in our infrastructure. The International Energy Agency (2024) estimates data centers could reach more than 1,000 terawatt-hours this year, with AI among the key drivers. To put that in perspective, that's enough to power nearly every house in America for an entire year.

More specifically, we are trading our watersheds for word counts. Research from the University of California, Riverside, shows that a standard conversation of 10 to 50 prompts with a high-end AI model "drinks" a 500ml bottle of fresh water for server cooling (Li et al., 2024).

Every time we ask an AI to summarize a meeting, a plastic bottle's worth of water evaporates into a cooling tower.

We can see the economic costs, the job disruption. AI will displace certain roles while creating new ones. That’s how technological advancement has always worked. The difference is the speed and scale of the transition.

And we can see the psychological and sociological costs forming in real time: a noisier information environment, more synthetic media, more "AI slop," and fewer shared sources of truth. Not to mention the "brain rot" occurring by our brains outsourcing even the most simple of cognitive tasks.

We’re not fully aware of every implication, but it doesn’t take a futurist to predict where this goes. 

This time, we are not unaware.  We see the energy curve. We see the labor disruption. We see the cognitive shifts.

And we are accelerating anyway.

Now let’s layer in the generational tension which makes this Velocity Gap even more unusual.

A Pew Research Center study found that 32% of Gen Z adults engaged in at least one climate-related action in the prior year (Pew Research Center, 2021). Deloitte (2023) reports that over 70% are actively trying to reduce their personal environmental impact. Gen Z clearly has deep moral convictions about their duty to save the planet. 

And yet this same generation is rapidly adopting energy-intensive AI tools.

This mirrors the Baby Boomer generation of the 1960s. When the external world felt like a crumbling, uncontrollable chaos, with the Cold War, Vietnam, and nuclear threats, the Boomers turned "inward" to fix things on American soil, leading to the Civil Rights movement and the Sexual Revolution.

Similarly, Gen Z’s "inward turn" is toward digital efficiency. They aren't being careless. They feel they can't afford to fall behind, even if there is a cost. 

They care about the planet, yet they know AI demands energy. 

They want authenticity, yet they know the synthetic flood is rising. 

This is the uniquely sharp edge of this Velocity Gap. We have a generation prioritizing forward momentum over their own convictions because friction is uncomfortable and acceleration is addictive.

Millennials didn’t invent acceleration culture, but they hit the bottom of the J-curve when it started bending hard up and to the right. Contrary to the "lazy" labels placed on them, Millennials were victims of overscheduled childhoods. The average school-aged Millennial spent about 41 hours per week on academics and extracurriculars, and as much as 55 hours total when including part-time work and community activities. 

They were always moving.

That pace followed them into adulthood, but slowing down forces harder decisions. Millennials and Gen Z alike have been labeled with a "slow-life" mentality for delaying milestones like marriage, kids, or even a driver’s license. 

It makes sense through the lens of friction.

Marriage brings friction.
Kids bring friction.
Commitment brings friction.

But, technology removed that friction, and as a society, we are being two-faced. We want to be part of something bigger, but we don't want to put in the effort required to get there.

Friction has been removed as a tool, and that is a catastrophe for the human experience. We see it in "chronic dating," where it’s easier to hop from one person to the next than to endure the friction of commitment. But what is love without friction? 

This was a generational over-correction. Gen X parents, reacting to their own “latchkey” childhoods and a lack of parental oversight, became the primary architects of the frictionless childhood for their Millennial and Gen Z kids. They replaced the "neglect" of their youth with a high-touch buffering, running interference to ensure life stayed smooth. Fewer blisters. Softer hands.

Gen Z inherited that frictionless architecture and scaled it. It’s why they can be both grinding and exhausted; highly conviction-driven and yet deeply friction-averse. It’s easier to cut someone off than work through conflict. This is why estrangement and political polarity make sense. The result is a generation that is deeply fragile because they haven’t been forced to sit with a hard problem. We’ve been eroding hard work for a long time by removing the resistance necessary to build character. It’s not just a tech story; it’s a friction story.

We are building the plane while in the air. We worry about "brain rot," but we should be more worried about the loss of character.

The Velocity Gap has created a culture of "faking it till you make it" because the tools allow us to do so. We can fudge a resume, fake a skill, and speak with the voice of a god through a prompt. We can speak things into existence by creating them through prompts and we're doing it so regularly we feel that that's normal. 

The leadership question becomes: What do we do when we’re leading people who are deeply conviction-driven and yet increasingly resistant to friction? 

Because this gap reveals an uncomfortable truth…conviction alone doesn’t regulate behavior. The system does. 

In a world with infinite convenience, the default setting becomes acceleration, even when our values protest it. 

Leadership in the Velocity Gap isn't about managing output, it's about reclaiming the friction. It’s about looking a team in the eye and admitting that while our tools are ever-changing, our values must remain unchanging. We have to promote a culture where failure is okay, where the hard way is often the right way, and where we remember that we are human beings serving other human beings.

Machines cannot replace the human experience. They are trying, and those who lean too heavily on the machine will have their humanity altered forever. But at the end of the day, a machine is still created by humans, and because humans are flawed, the machine is inevitably flawed.