What My Eight-Year-Old Grandson Expects That You Don't

Published: July 16, 2026 | By Jim Hutcherson

My grandson is eight. Last week he asked the little speaker on the counter a question, and when the answer took about two seconds, he sighed. An actual sigh. The kind you give a slow elevator.

Two seconds. The machine reached across the internet, found the answer, and spoke it back in the time it takes to blink twice, and my grandson was disappointed.

I laughed. Then I sat with it for a minute, because there is something in that sigh worth understanding.

He has no memory of slow

To him, that speaker has always answered. Screens have always been in his hand. A show has always started the instant he thought of it. He has never waited a week for photos to come back from the drugstore. He has never heard a modem screech, or looked something up in a book with a spine, or stood at a phone bolted to a kitchen wall while the cord stretched around the corner.

He is not spoiled. He is calibrated. Fast is not impressive to him because he has nothing slow to compare it to. This speed is just his normal day.

I have the opposite problem. I remember slow in my bones. I grew up when a long distance call cost real money and you kept it short. I waited for things constantly, and I did not think of it as waiting, because that was simply how long things took.

So when the world speeds up, he does not feel it. I do. Same world, two very different nervous systems.

The comparison you are not noticing

Here is the part that took me a while to see clearly.

When you feel like everything is coming at you too fast, some of that is real. Things genuinely are moving quicker than they used to. Some of it, though, is not about the speed at all. It is about the ruler you are using to measure it.

You are comparing today to a version of yesterday that you still carry around. My grandson is not. He walked in at full speed and never knew anything else. That does not make him smarter than you. It means he is not dragging a slower baseline behind him, so nothing feels like acceleration to him. It just feels like the world.

I catch myself doing it all the time. I look at some new tool and my first instinct is to size it up against what used to be possible. That instinct is not wrong, exactly. It just quietly tells me the change is bigger and scarier than it might actually be, because I am measuring the gap from way back where I started.

Why this matters more than it sounds

You have probably felt a low hum of being behind lately. A sense that the ground is moving and everyone younger is somehow keeping up better.

Sit with my grandson for a second before you believe that story about yourself. He is not keeping up. There is nothing to keep up with for him, because he never fell behind a starting line he remembers. His real advantage is that he is not comparing.

That is oddly good news. If part of your overwhelm comes from the ruler and not the race, then the ruler is something you can set down.

I am not going to pretend you can wipe out forty years of memory and become eight again. You cannot, and you would not want to. What you can do is notice the comparison while it is happening. Catch yourself measuring the new thing against 1995 and just say, quietly, that is an old ruler. Then look at the thing on its own terms, the way a kid would, with curiosity instead of dread.

Baselines move. Mine has moved more times than I can count. The phone that terrified my mother became the thing she played on every single day. She did not get younger. Her baseline just shifted, one ordinary use at a time, until the new normal was simply normal.

The speed is not the enemy

Let me be honest about the other half of this, because I do not believe in pretending.

The pace is real, and it is not slowing down. My grandson’s sigh at a two second answer is a preview. Whatever feels fast to you now will look leisurely to him when he is my age. That can sound like a threat. I have decided to read it as a fact instead, and facts are easier to work with than threats.

Because the truth underneath the sigh is not that the machine is smart and you are slow. It is that you and I have lived through more change than that eight-year-old can imagine, and we are still here, still working, still learning the next thing. That is not nothing. That is the whole point.

What I would leave you with

Next time that feeling of falling behind creeps in, try one small experiment.

Notice what you are comparing the moment to. Almost always it is some earlier, slower version of the world that lives only in your head now. Set that ruler down for a second and meet the new thing the way my grandson meets everything, like it is just how the world works, no big deal, worth a poke to see what it does.

You will be surprised how much of the fear was in the measuring, not the thing.

My grandson sighed at two seconds and went back to his game. He was not afraid. He was just a little bored. Somewhere in that is a lesson I keep relearning, from an eight-year-old who has no idea he is teaching it.

This is one of the small ideas that grew into my book, Hard to Replace. How to Stay Relevant in an Age of AI, coming December 2026. It is not about keeping up with kids. It is about seeing the change clearly enough to stop being afraid of it.