A Different Ache

Between the algorithm and the ache,

Before the moment finds a shape,

I sought for patterns I assumed were there.

What I found was a different ache.

Poetry is one of the most human expressions I know. I am no poet though I enjoy reading and writing it. Poetry can use 27 words to say more than a novella.

Those four lines are close to the heart of why Between Silicon and Soul exists.

For years, I kept a notebook. I took notes in meetings, notes while working and notes when going to bed at night or waking up. Over the years those notes ranged from highly technical details of the software I was working on to doodles to small things I picked up on in conversations with people. And, in recent years I began to notice that the notes I took were changing from technical to people-focused. Small details about body language and word choices people used when they were speaking received more space on the page than data diagrams or system designs.

I have spent twenty-four years inside a market research firm, working in insights technology alongside researchers, clients, and the people who help organizations understand other people. I love research. I love technology. I love the strange, disciplined work of trying to make sense of human behavior without sanding the humanity off of it.

The notebook was where I kept the pieces that did not fit neatly.

A couple of years ago, my wife and I had lunch with our adult middle daughter and one of her closest friends. This young woman is effectively part of our family now. She comes to family events. She knows our door codes. She has done laundry at our house and slept on our couch when she needed somewhere safe to land.

Over lunch at Cracker Barrel two years ago she told us pieces of her life I had not known. She had grown up in a home no child should have to grow up in. There had been seasons when food was uncertain. There had been housing that was not really housing. She had worked more than one job to get out of that instability and still could only afford to live by sharing tight space with several other young adults. She wants to build a life in health care, but the path has been blocked by paperwork, family complications, and systems that do not bend easily for people already carrying too much. She has built more out of less than most people I know, and some of what she has experienced is truly heart breaking.

There is much more to her than I can write to preserve her own privacy, yet that Cracker Barrel experience focused my attention on a nagging sense I had been dealing with for some time. The world my kids live in – the world of the GenZ adult – feels weird to me, a 50 year old GenXer. 

It still does, but over the past two years I have been pursuing knowledge to better understand why it feels so weird. Is GenZ really different than GenX was to Boomers? Or Boomers to their parents? In most ways, no. Yet, as with market research, it is the nuance that reveals the insight.

Modern technology has changed the way we can access and assess our world so I set out to gather knowledge and a notebook was not enough. The Between Silicon and Soul website was created to be a place I can organize and share what I have learned, what I have researched and what I believe is key to helping me and others ensure that the dignity that is central to everyone of us is not lost in an age of technology.

At first, I framed the question the way many Gen X parents probably do. I thought Gen Z was weird. Their world felt weird. Their dating norms, work expectations, housing realities, political instincts, digital fluency, nostalgia, food choices, language, humor, everything seemed slightly off from the map I carried in my head. I can’t imagine dating now and fortunately am very happily married. I can’t imagine starting over and facing the social media onslaught that GenZ navigates with seeming ease. 

At the beginning the thesis was “Why GenZ is different.” What happened as I researched, studied, spoke to our family friend and others, is that I discovered that was the wrong question entirely and missed the point I was feeling when I started, a feeling I did not have the words for at the time, but the word became ‘dignity’ and is the central thesis now.

So the question became sharper.

Is Gen Z uniquely different, or are they simply young adults walking through a world that has changed faster than our old explanations can keep up with?

The deeper I went, the more skeptical I became of the easy headlines.

“Gen Z is anxious.”

“Gen Z does not want to work.”

“Gen Z will never buy homes.”

“Gen Z is killing this industry or reviving that one.”

Some of those claims contain pieces of truth. Most of them, upon investigation, are far too easy and surface level to reveal much depth of truth. The variation inside Gen Z is enormous. The same is true of Gen X, Millennials, Boomers, and every other cohort we package into convenient labels. Generations matter, but they are not magic keys.

Housing math that does not pencil out. Dating reorganized around apps. College priced like a luxury purchase while its payoff grows less certain. Phones in hand since childhood. AI arriving at the exact moment many are trying to form careers. Faith, family, work, attention, identity, and purpose all being renegotiated at once.

Drop almost anyone into that terrain at twenty-two and some of the “weirdness” starts to look less like a generational defect and more like a reasonable response to the ground under their feet.

That is one of the questions Between Silicon and Soul exists to take seriously.

But the site is not only about Gen Z, or any generation in particular. It is not about AI. It is not only about work, or faith, or family, or technology, or mental health, or the future of commerce. It is about people and what I believe is often lost in research, lost in media and lost in our interactions – a fundamental, deep seated soulful need for dignity.

People trying to make rent. People doing fine on paper and quietly wondering why success feels thin. People losing faith, finding faith, avoiding faith, or rebuilding it in unexpected places. People caring for aging parents while trying to launch their own children. People in trades, offices, classrooms, clinics, churches, warehouses, and group chats. People who are tired of being reduced to a cohort, a consumer segment, a productivity problem, or a use case. People who are homeless and suffering, and people who have capacity to make a difference.

AI is everywhere right now. I use it heavily. I use it as a thinking partner, a sparring partner, and a way to explore more widely than I could on my own. Without it, this site could not exist. But I do not use it to insulate myself from the world. I use it, at its best, to help me look harder, ask better questions, and relate more carefully to the people in front of me.

That distinction matters.

Between Silicon and Soul is where the notebook lives now. It is where I try to work through the patterns without pretending the patterns are the people. It is where I write about the gap between what people say and what they do, because that gap is often where the most honest story lives. It is where I follow threads that seem disconnected until they are not: side hustles, loneliness, housing, food, family formation, spiritual drift, attention, AI, analog rebellion, and the stubborn human need for dignity.

The world is not broken. At least, that is not the only claim I want to make.

The world is stranger than I realized. My window was smaller than I knew. There were rooms in the same house I had barely entered.

This site is my attempt to enter more of them with care.

Just to keep looking.

And to invite others who still care about people more than the noise around them to look with me.