New York City listen to me right now if you're near a convenience store right now, any type of 24-hour store, go into the store right now and put your hand in the cash register for no reason. Their money is your money as of right now
In August 2014, a local news reporter at the Wayne County Fair in Pennsylvania pulled aside a small boy who had just come off one of the rides.
His name was Noah Ritter, he was five years old, and he was there with his grandfather, visiting from Wilkes-Barre.
The reporter asked him what he thought of the ride.
Noah did not really answer.
Instead, he launched into a wandering, breathless monologue built almost entirely around one word: apparently.
"It was great, and apparently I've never been on live television before," he said.
He explained that he does not usually watch the news "because I'm a kid," and that his grandpa hands him the remote after they watch the Powerball drawing.
The reporter tried to steer him back to the ride.
Noah obliged, briefly. "Wow, it was great." Why? "Because apparently you're spinning around and apparently every time you get dizzy. Yeah, that's all you do is get dizzy."
He kept returning to the fact that he was on television.
"I've never ever been on live television. I never ever be on live television." He mentioned the super slide too, and how going down it had scared him half to death.
The reporter, by this point clearly aware she had something unusual on her hands, asked for his name and turned to his grandfather to spell it out. R-I-T-T-E-R. From Wilkes-Barre.
"All right, buddy. Good stuff."
The clip ran on WNEP, a local station serving northeastern Pennsylvania. Within days it had spread across the internet.
Noah became known as the "apparently kid," and the interview turned into one of the defining viral local news moments of that year.
People retweeting this asking why we don’t do this anymore and it’s because there’s freaks who record you and then will make fun of you online for having fun
⚡️The deeper signal is youth risk did not disappear.
It migrated inward.
Teen drinking fell because the old physical world of adolescence got dismantled. Alcohol belonged to a social ecosystem: unsupervised time, cars, parties, local jobs, malls, basements, boredom, flirting, older siblings, house gatherings, and the chaotic peer world where teenagers learned who they were by colliding with other people in real space.
That ecosystem was replaced by phones, surveillance, parental tracking, algorithmic entertainment, social anxiety, online status games, and a much thinner physical commons.
So the surface looks healthier. Fewer kids drinking. Fewer kids using weed. Fewer kids doing reckless things in public.
The hidden layer looks worse. The young are less reckless because they are less socially embodied. Less initiation. Less unsupervised friction. Less courage-building. Less embarrassment and recovery. Less real dating. Less independence. Less contact with the physical world before adulthood demands it.
The old teenage world produced damage, stupidity, alcohol abuse, pregnancy risk, fights, accidents, and bad decisions. No need to romanticize it. But it also produced social reps. It forced young people through discomfort. It made them practice attraction, rejection, conflict, reputation, risk, repair, and status in the open.
The new world suppresses visible risk while increasing invisible fragility.
That is the trade.
A teenager can avoid drinking, avoid parties, avoid sex, avoid driving, avoid real confrontation, avoid rejection, avoid shame, avoid danger, and still arrive at 23 emotionally underbuilt. Cleaner behavior does not automatically mean stronger formation.
This is why the marriage chart and the teen drinking chart are the same story at different stages. People are not suddenly failing to pair in adulthood. The whole pathway into embodied adulthood has been slowing for years before marriage even becomes the question.
The real truth: society solved part of the teen vice problem by shrinking the arena where teenagers become adults.
It took away the dangerous commons and replaced it with controlled isolation.
The result is safer kids with weaker initiation into real life.
And just like that, we are HUGE Cade Cunningham fans
“I get my aura from Jesus Christ - my Lord and Savior. God blessed me with parents who raised me in a way I wouldn’t trade for the world.”
(Via @omarisankofa 🎥)