A quick note before you dive in.

After writing what follows, someone pointed me toward the work of Joan Didion, who once said she wrote “entirely to find out what she was thinking.” I had never heard of her, but in digging, she’s written some interesting pieces that are worth reading.

Anyway, apparently, that’s what I did here.

This isn’t an essay with a solution. It’s more of a trail of breadcrumbs, starting with a series of crime novels I’ve been listening to lately and wandering through memory, culture, and the strange realization that sometimes the only thing that changes is the person doing the noticing.

It may not answer anything. It may even make me look like a bit of a schmuck for admitting I don’t have the answers.

But I stand by it.

So, I’ve been listening to a series of crime novels written in the 1990s. They were written by Harlan Coben, someone I first discovered through the Netflix mini-series based on his work. I typically enjoy his books. I love a good whodunit and a twist, and Coben still seems able to pull off twists in a way that many authors have lost the ability to convey.

I use the Libby app because it’s free, and I stumbled across a twelve-book series centered on Myron Bolitar, a basketball phenom turned sports agent. They’re fun. Fast-paced. Written in a time full of nostalgia and references that a teen of the 1990s immediately recognizes and understands. Full of sarcastic dialogue and improbable plot twists. The kind of books you listen to while driving, chopping vegetables, or pretending you’re about to clean the house. I often joke that I think I’m getting dumber just by listening to them, yet I don’t stop. I am a sucker for a series, and since the same narrator reads them all, I’ve come to know Myron, Win, and Esperanza by voice and mannerism. It feels comfortable.

Except.

Every once in a while the main character makes a joke or an observation. Usually about a woman. Occasionally about a person of color. It’s the kind of joke that was clearly meant to be harmless. A quick comment about a woman’s body. A cultural stereotype tossed in for flavor. The narrator assures us: don’t worry, he’s one of the good guys. It’s always framed in an “aw shucks” or completely casual context. And because we love Myron and know Myron is one of the good guys, we don’t blink.

Except… in 2026, I do blink.

I find myself thinking, “wow that’s sexist” or “damn, that’s pretty racist”. Not because it’s shocking. Because it’s familiar. Because thirty years ago, I probably wouldn’t have noticed it at all.

And that’s the strange thing about time. The words didn’t change. The book didn’t change. The character didn’t change.

But the world did.

And I guess I did too.

I was born in 1977. It doesn’t sound that bad in my head when I say it. I mean, I’ve been filling out my date of birth on documents since I could write and had to complete forms. To me, 1977 is just a fact. But when I stop and think about it, and when it was recently pointed out to me while reading to a class of kindergarteners, 1977 was indeed a long, long time ago.

I don’t like to think of myself as old, but at 48 I should start accepting that reality. Statistically speaking, I’m probably past the halfway mark now. I am, in point of fact, middle-aged. Possibly even a little beyond.

When I was young, younger than I am now, that is, I remember visiting my dad’s mother and his sister for Thanksgiving and Christmas. There was a strange dynamic there. There still is, honestly, but I won’t go into that now. What I do remember is that every Christmas or Thanksgiving we would brace ourselves for the N-word being dropped at least once in conversation.

Not by me.
Not by my siblings.
Not by my mum or dad.

Despite his upbringing, my dad does not use that word or reference it even casually. I feel it’s important to go on record about that. Which is also why it was so shocking when my paternal grandmother or aunt would drop it casually into otherwise innocuous conversation. One time a discussion about Brazil nuts sent us spiraling. Another time it was about licorice snaps.

My point is simple: my grandmother and aunt were/are racist.

When we were younger, we tried to gloss over it. My parents would talk to us in the car on the way home, explaining why we didn’t say that word and why it was wrong. They would remind us that Grandma was old, that she came from a different time, yada, yada, yada.

As we got older, the conversations shifted. They focused less on excuses and more on the truth. Grandma was racist. You couldn’t fix her. But you didn’t have to accept it. Grandma is gone now. My aunt is still around, but honestly, I haven’t had to hear a racist comment at a Christmas dinner in almost fifteen years.

So I guess… thank God for small favors?

I wish I could tell you exactly where this story is going. But honestly, I’m not entirely sure.

It started by listening to some crime novels written in the 1990s. I noticed a few jokes that made me blink. That blink somehow led me to my grandmother’s kitchen table, sitting through Christmas dinners where words were used that we were taught never to say.

And now here I am in 2026.

A time when race and sexism are still issues. Not always in the same ways, and not always in the same places, but present enough that we can’t pretend otherwise.

Maybe what I’m really trying to understand is the how of it all.

How culture changes. How people change. How some ideas disappear almost completely while others hang around stubbornly like old wallpaper you can’t quite scrape off the wall.

Twenty or twenty-five years ago, a joke in a crime novel didn’t register.
Ten or fifteen years before that, my grandmother could say something casually at the dinner table that made my parents wince.

And yet… here we are.

The books from my past haven’t changed.
The memories haven’t changed.
Honestly, the conversations haven’t changed either. If anything, they feel louder now, more fervent, more pressing.

But something in me has.

Maybe that’s the strange part of getting older. You start to notice the slow drift of culture in ways you never did when you were younger. The jokes that once slid past now snag your attention. Words that once floated casually through a room suddenly feel heavier than they used to. Not because they changed, but because the context around them did.

And yet the strange thing about progress is that it rarely arrives in a straight line. Some things disappear almost completely. Other things hang around stubbornly in the corners of our culture, resurfacing when we least expect them. A joke in a crime novel. A memory from a Christmas dinner. A headline from the news.

I don’t have an answer for this.

I know that I often read headlines or Facebook posts and ask out loud, “How is this still a thing in 2026?” I know T asks the same question, because sometimes he’ll suddenly exclaim from across the room, “Oh my God, how is this still possible in 2026?”

What I do know is that my tolerance for veiled racism or sexism has waned. What used to be uncomfortable silence, a quiet acceptance of a joke, is now much more likely to be a heated response: “Don’t say that.” Sometimes even, “What is wrong with you?”

I spend most of my days around young people. Kids who are growing up in a world that is, in some ways, more aware than the one I grew up in. They ask questions we didn’t ask. They challenge things we accepted without thinking. Sometimes they get it wrong. Sometimes they swing too far the other direction. But they are paying attention in a way my generation didn’t always know how to.

I am proud of their actions and their reactions. I cheer them on as they strive to make this world a better place than the one they were handed. They give me hope, even as I’ve come to understand that change is slow and mechanical, often arriving only as tiny shifts in the cultural current.

And still, hope and reality don’t always sit comfortably beside each other.

Sometimes this world makes me feel hopeless. I rant and rave about it behind closed doors. I cry myself to sleep at night over injustice and hatred that I don’t understand. I get up each morning and go to work and do my job, and I keep telling myself, you’re just one person.

I live and die by that excuse.

I’m just one person. I am doing my best.

But maybe, just maybe, if all of us “just one persons” took a moment to recalibrate and ask questions the way our children do, maybe change wouldn’t be so slow.

I don’t know.
I’m just one person.
And no one really reads this blog anyway.

I keep listening to the Coben books because they’re free and easy and fill a space, a silence in my world when I need a distraction from thoughts like these.

Maybe I’m the problem.

I’m okay with acknowledging that. I’m okay with my flaws. (And that’s progress in its own way, right?)

I just wish I knew what to do.

I know what I should do.
I know what I could do.

Tomorrow I’ll probably press play on the next chapter.

But I’ll still cry myself to sleep.