The Trailhead #14
Time Traveling Back to the Authentic
I’ve been reflecting lately on authenticity and what it means in a world increasingly shaped by instant AI-generated content, synthetic media, algorithmic entertainment, and endless digital noise. Yet at the same time, I’ve noticed something fascinating happening around me: younger generations seem to be time traveling backward in search of something real.
On May 31, my son’s rock band, Dread Ledger, played a neighborhood picnic celebrating the end of the school year. There were hot dogs, tubs of potato salad, cold drinks, and a group of teenagers playing 1990s hard rock and grunge music at deafening volume. Their soundcheck alone could reportedly be heard three streets over.
Since then, the band has exploded on social media, pulling in nearly 200,000 Instagram views and more than 23,000 likes with their blistering cover of Tool’s "Sober" from the band’s 1993 album Undertow.
That detail matters: 1993! Not five years ago. Not ten. More than thirty years ago. And what struck me most was that their entire setlist came from that era. Alice In Chains. Stone Temple Pilots. Tool. Mad Season. Jerry Cantrell. Music rooted in vulnerability, imperfection, pain, anger, addiction, longing, and raw emotional honesty.
These kids aren’t chasing polished nostalgia, they’re searching for authenticity. A publicist I’ve worked with in the past, Michael Levine of Boundless Media, recently noted that younger listeners are increasingly gravitating toward older music. As of 2025, the share of 1990s music being consumed by listeners aged 13–24 had risen to 24%, up from 18% just four years earlier. I suspect that number has only continued to climb.
Why? I have a theory. People want authenticity, and younger listeners know it when they hear it. My son and his bandmates have moved beyond simply listening to this music. They’re learning it, performing it, and immersing themselves in it. When you hear Layne Staley’s naked admissions of addiction layered over sludgy riffs, pounding basslines, and thunderous drums, you can feel that the music emerged from lived experience. It’s raw, direct, and unafraid to venture into difficult places.
The same is true of Tool’s "Sober," which forces listeners to confront our endless pursuit of things that numb us, elevate us, and ultimately pull us down. The honesty is uncomfortable, which is precisely why it resonates. Once you’ve experienced art that refuses to hide behind polish or pretense, it becomes difficult to settle for something less.
This desire for authenticity extends far beyond music. You can see it in film, where audiences seem increasingly weary of endless reboots, formulas, and attempts to manufacture cultural moments. I know I am. Watching the reaction to Project Hail Mary recently brought that feeling into sharp focus for me.
What struck me wasn't the visual effects or the scale of the story. It was the sincerity. At its core, the story is about survival, curiosity, sacrifice, friendship, fear, and hope—and it closely honors Weir’s book, which I loved. It trusts those ideas to carry the emotional weight without constantly signaling to the audience how they should feel or what conclusions they should draw. It simply invites viewers into an experience and allows the humanity (or “eridianity”) of its characters to speak for itself.
I think people are hungry for that again. Not stories devoid of perspective or diverse voices—those matter tremendously, and storytelling becomes richer when it reflects the breadth of human experience. But audiences can sense when characters, themes, or decisions emerge naturally from the story itself versus when they exist primarily to satisfy some external expectation. When that happens, we stop disappearing into the story and start noticing the machinery around it. It’s one why an author can dump a cold bucket of water onto their readers when they attempt to inject their own biases, leanings, or perspectives into a story that can (and should) stand on its own without such heavy-handedness. Afterall, the “hand” of the author should feel as invisible as possible.
Moreover, the stories that stay with us are usually the ones that feel lived in rather than assembled. That idea feels especially important now because we're entering an era where it’s becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish between what’s deeply human and what’s synthetically generated. AI can already produce competent prose, convincing imagery, and emotionally adjacent dialogue with startling speed. It can imitate structure, style, and tone. Heck, it can create compelling music and video to boot.
But the reason audiences still respond so strongly to deeply human stories is because they carry something harder to fabricate:
· Lived experience
· Grief
· Longing
· Contradiction
· Memory
· Imperfection
Those things leave fingerprints A machine can imitate the shape of a story and it can approximate emotion. But there’s still something profoundly different about a story forged through experience, reflection, failure, love, heartbreak, and perseverance. Readers know it, listeners know it, and viewers know it. Maybe that's why so many people seem to be time traveling backward right now.
Not because the past was perfect or because nostalgia is inherently comforting. But because they're searching for artifacts of authenticity—music, books, films, and stories that feel emotionally honest in a world that increasingly rewards optimization, performance, and prediction.
In a cultural moment dominated by outrage cycles, synthetic media, and endless attempts to predict what audiences "should" want, I think many people are longing for stories, music, and art that trusts them again. They want things that move us not because they’re engineered to satisfy every possible expectation, but because they understand something truthful about being alive, whether it’s fear, loss, or fragile determination.
Perhaps that’s what readers, listeners, and viewers are really searching for now: not perfection, not spectacle for its own sake, but recognition. The feeling that somewhere inside the art is a reflection of something real.
Authenticity still matters. And maybe now, more than ever, we need reminders that there’s still something uniquely human about sitting quietly with art and experiencing a part of ourselves reflected back.
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