Every decade looked different than the last. Passenger jets, interstate highways, TVs, microwaves, Apollo missions... New stuff was coming out all the time. Literal moonshots.
We have focused on software innovation and optimization rather than real-world, physical innovation. That's why everything more or less looks the same... We all have faster phones, but they are the same phone (and have been the same phone for nearly 20 years). The cars all look the same. The interstate those cars drive on is still the same. Passenger jets are more or less the same. Everything... for the most part is the same. You could take someone from the 1980s and drop them in 2026 and they would wonder why we were all carrying phones, but other than that, the world would look the same.
Today, most of the “progress” we celebrate is digital: software updates, apps, features, and AI that does whatever it does. That stuff isn’t necessarily unimportant (my livelihood depends on it), but it is sure a lot narrower than the visions our grandparents once had of the future. They were building interstates and rockets... we're building PowerPoint presentations.
HAS SOFTWARE MADE US SOFT?
Whether we want to admit it or not, we have retreated from the big, bold world-altering innovation into ideas that make consumer life slightly better... as I call it, the Door Dashification of innovation™
Is it nice to get Jersey Mike's delivered to my door? Yes. But these types of advancements, I believe, come at a cost that we have not yet recognized.
What happened to flying cars?
My hypothesis? WE STOPPED SMOKING CIGARETTES. There are other social and institutional factors, too, of course (regulatory barriers, risk-averse culture, overbureaucratized science, and a lack of high-risk, high-reward ventures that tackle physical challenges). Buuuuuut I think a far more interesting argument is that nicotine is what was actually fueling our incredible progress.
If we step back and look at the timing, we will notice that the period in which technological ambition began to narrow, productivity growth softened, and large-scale physical innovation declined overlaps closely with another major social transformation: the rapid disappearance of cigarettes from American professional life. Beginning in the late 1960s and accelerating through the 1980s, smoking moved from being a normalized feature of offices, factories, laboratories, and even NASA Mission Control(!) to a stigmatized and restricted behavior.
This shift is celebrated as a public health triumph (lung cancer is obviously bad). But it also represents the removal of a pervasive, low-cost cognitive stimulant from everyday work environments. Nicotine’s effects on attention, vigilance, and mental endurance are well documented at the individual level, but their population-level implications have received little serious examination. As smoking vanished, no equivalent stimulant culture emerged to replace it. We gave up Nicotine and got Slack instead.
Where am I going with this? I am not sure. But I would argue that the benefits of nicotine and the cognitive consequences of our cultural transition away from nicotine remain poorly understood, and that some of the functional benefits once embedded in mid-century work life may have been lost along with the ashtrays.
The Benefits of Transdermal Nicotine and Long COVID
It should also be noted that I am currently microdosing nicotine right now in the form of a patch. I am not a smoker. But one of our naturepathic doctors shared a recent 2023 case series where several individuals with Long COVID whose symptoms improved significantly after applying nicotine patches. Emerging case data and biological hypotheses suggest that transdermal nicotine may interact with cholinergic and inflammatory pathways implicated in Long COVID, potentially alleviating symptoms such as cognitive impairment and fatigue in individual cases. However, this evidence is preliminary, anecdotal, and not yet supported by rigorous clinical trials.