It’s Awesome! And We Don’t Care!

 

I walked about seventy-five yards from the visitor center, stepped to the railing, looked both ways, and I gawked.

I’m not a big gawker. In fact, I can’t remember the last time I gawked. But the Grand Canyon will do that to you. It isn’t something you merely see. It’s something you behold.

It is truly awesome.

Which got me thinking about the word awesome. It may be the most abused word in the English language. It applies to the Grand Canyon and the Golden Gate Bridge. It does not apply to a waitress who got your order right at Cracker Barrel. That isn’t awesome. That’s being competent.

Later that day, I climbed into my rental car, started the engine, and programmed Google Maps to take me back to Phoenix. As I pulled onto the highway, I began to wonder what else in our lives deserves the kind of awe we reserve for natural wonders and tall buildings. 

We live in an age of awesomeness and we barely notice it.

We carry in our pockets a slab of glass that can summon the world’s knowledge, a computer more powerful than the ones that sent astronauts to the moon. That is awesome, even if many of us mainly use it to watch dog videos, stalk old classmates, and argue with strangers we will never meet.

Consider the automobile. Engineers call it “an accumulation of genius,” and they’re not exaggerating. A modern car contains roughly thirty thousand parts, many of which were once considered miracles. From the wheel to GPS, it’s a rolling museum of human invention. That is awesome, even if my truck costs more than my first house and comes with fewer bedrooms.

And it’s not just the parts. It’s the idea that thousands of minds across centuries contributed something so that I can push a button and drive to the grocery store without having to hitch up a horse or forge my own axle. When you really think about it, the miracle isn’t that cars are expensive, it’s that they work at all.

Then there’s the airplane: a metal tube full of people hurtling through the sky at near-supersonic speeds. A fully loaded 737 weighs around eighty tons, yet it flies. The wings flex, engines roar, physics performs miracles, and we sit there watching movies and complaining about legroom. Jet planes enable us to have breakfast in New York and dinner in Los Angeles. That is awesome. Now, if they could just stop sending my luggage to Minneapolis when I’m in San Diego, we’d be approaching divine intervention.

Medicine should leave us in awe too. Artificial joints. Robotic surgery. Procedures that were science fiction a generation ago are now routine. People walk again. Hearts are repaired. Lives are extended. Yet we’re more impressed by whether the hospital has free Wi-Fi and a Starbucks inside.

So, what happened to our sense of wonder?

Our brains are wired to get used to extraordinary things. The first time I used ChatGPT, I thought it was magic created by some techno wizard in a dark room filled with glowing screens. A few weeks later, it became just another tool I use to edit, mostly to check commas and occasionally to make me feel inadequate about grammar. It’s no less amazing. I’ve just grown accustomed to it. Like indoor plumbing.

In the past, awe was easy to spot. You could stand on the Golden Gate Bridge or watch an Apollo rocket launch and feel the power of human ingenuity. Today, many of our greatest breakthroughs like microchips, algorithms, invisible networks, are too small to see and too complex to explain. I suppose what I’m saying is that size really does matter.

We’re bombarded with “the next big thing” every day. New phones. New updates. New breakthroughs. My phone updates so often I’m starting to suspect it’s just doing it just to make me mad. I have an app that lets me start my truck from anywhere in the world. While I don’t plan on cranking up my Chevy from Indonesia, I’m still awed by the fact that I could. But when breakthroughs happen at a breakneck pace, we don’t have time to marvel at any single one. We’re already chasing the next thing before we’ve fully processed the current one.

Maybe that’s the problem. When everything is extraordinary, nothing feels extraordinary for very long.

Maybe we should slow down.

To be in awe is to recognize the bridge between human imagination and reality. It’s noticing the miracles hidden inside ordinary days. It’s realizing that most of what surrounds us would have looked like sorcery to our grandparents, and witchcraft to their grandparents.

So do yourself a favor. Be in awe. Stop every now and then and just say, “Wow.”

Look at a bridge. Watch an airplane take off. Think about what it took to make your phone, your car, your medicine, your world. Choose to see the magic that others have grown blind to.

And if you do, that would be awesome.

(See how that sounds?)