Against the Natural Order

Douglas Adams had this bit about technology, from The Salmon of Doubt. Something like: anything that exists when you're born is just normal, part of the furniture. Anything invented while you're between 15 and 35 is exciting, new, you could probably build a career on it.

I've been chewing on that one for a while now, mostly because of AI.

Thirty Years and No Real Flinch

I've done web work for 30 plus years at this point, so you'd think I'd have hit one of these moments by now. Honestly, not sure I have. Every shift, Flash dying, jQuery giving way to whatever framework of the month, I mostly just rolled with it, curious more than annoyed. Maybe that's luck, maybe it's the job forcing my hand. I dunno.

The closest I can get is AI music. It gives me the cringe, and I can't fully explain why. Which is the exact thing Adams is talking about, except it's not lining up the way his rule predicts.

The Rule Breaks on Its Own Demographic

Turns out I'm not alone, and it's not really an age thing either. A Luminate report tracked listener sentiment toward AI music dropping from -13% to -20% in six months, and the decline was sharpest with Gen Z and Gen Alpha. The exact demographic that's supposed to be in the "new and exciting" bracket is the one recoiling hardest.

So maybe the 35 rule isn't really about age at all. Maybe it's about whether a thing feels earned or not.

Where the Rule Does Land

Where I do see the rule playing out, clear as day, is other people around me. Not naming names, just watching the reactions. Someone hears "AI agent" and their whole posture changes, like the natural order got violated.

And look, the data backs up that something real is shifting under everyone's feet. Cloudflare's CEO said back in June that automated web traffic passed human traffic for the first time, 57.5% bot versus 42.5% human, a milestone he'd predicted for 2027 that showed up a year and a half early. An AI agent doing an errand hits hundreds or thousands of pages where a person would visit five. That's not a vibe, that's just math.

And the job fear is real too, not fringe internet anxiety. Reuters and Ipsos found 53% of Americans worry AI could cost someone in their household a job. Mercer's global survey found 40% of workers fear their job going obsolete, up from 28% just two years back. That's a fast climb for a sentiment number.

Discomfort Isn't a Verdict

So where's that leave me. I think Adams was being a little wry about all this, not laying down an actual law, more poking at how people justify their own reactions to new stuff. Which means the useful move isn't asking "am I past my 35 threshold on this" and either feeling smug or panicked about the answer. It's asking whether the discomfort is about the thing itself or just about it being unfamiliar. Sometimes those aren't the same question, even when they feel like it in the moment.

Still working that one out, honestly.