There was a time when leaving the house meant being genuinely unreachable.

You told your parents you were going to a friend's house, and maybe you actually went there. Maybe five minutes later somebody showed up on a BMX bike and the entire plan changed.

There was no group text announcing the change.

No Find My Friends.

No “share your location.”

You just went.

If somebody needed you, they could call your friend's house and hope you were still there, and that the line wasn’t busy. Otherwise, they'd have to wait until you came home.

And in one way or another, we coordinated entire weekends this way.

You'd make plans Friday afternoon at school:

“Meet at the mall Saturday at noon.”

That was it.

If somebody was 20 minutes late, you didn't send six increasingly irritated texts. You stood near Orange Julius or the arcade wondering whether they'd been grounded.

There were obvious disadvantages to being unreachable. Getting stranded somewhere wasn't nearly as amusing as nostalgia makes it sound.

But we also had something that's increasingly difficult to find today:

Nobody expected immediate access to us.

Leaving the house created a natural boundary between wherever you were going and everything you were leaving behind.

Maybe we don't need to throw our phones into the ocean, but occasionally putting one in another room, or even out of reach, isn't the worst idea.

Depending on whom you listen to, artificial intelligence is either going to solve every problem humanity has ever had or turn us all into unemployed servants of our robot overlords.

There's probably some room between those two possibilities.

The useful question isn't “Is AI going to change the world?”

It's:

“Can this thing save me 20 minutes today?”

That's where AI becomes considerably more interesting.

Give it a confusing letter and ask it to explain the terminology in plain English. Have it compare two products without opening 27 browser tabs. Give it the ingredients sitting in your refrigerator and ask what you can make for dinner. Use it to build an itinerary, troubleshoot something around the house, organize notes, summarize a long document, or help you formulate questions before calling a contractor.

The trick is treating AI less like an all-knowing oracle and more like a very fast assistant whose work you still need to check.

It can be confidently wrong. Don't outsource important medical, legal or financial decisions to a chatbot and head off to lunch.

But for everyday research, brainstorming, organizing and explaining?

That's where the technology is already genuinely useful.

Three AI Prompts Actually Worth Trying

EXPLAIN THIS

“Explain this to me in plain English. Tell me what actually matters, what I can ignore, and what questions I should ask: [paste text]”

HELP ME DECIDE

“I'm choosing between [Option A] and [Option B]. Ask me five questions that would help determine which is better for me. Then compare them based on my answers.”

SAVE ME TWO HOURS

“I need to understand [topic]. Give me the 20% of information that will help me understand 80% of it. Flag anything people commonly get wrong and tell me what I should verify independently.”

Don't worry about learning the perfect way to “prompt” AI.

Talk to it normally. Ask follow-up questions. Tell it when an answer isn't useful. Tell it what it misunderstood.

If you could explain the problem to a reasonably intelligent coworker, you can explain it to AI.

You get a text:

Your package couldn't be delivered.

There's a problem with your address. You need to update your information. Just tap the link.

And conveniently, you actually are waiting for a package.

That's exactly why this scam works.

Fake delivery messages impersonating USPS, UPS, FedEx and other delivery services are designed to send you to convincing look-alike websites where scammers can try to collect personal or payment information.

And these aren't obscure scams. FTC data found that fake package-delivery messages were the most commonly reported type of text-message scam in 2024.

The easiest defense is also the least exciting:

Don't use the link in the text.

If you're expecting a package, open the retailer's or carrier's website or app yourself and check the tracking information there.

Suspicious texts can also be reported through your messaging app or forwarded to 7726 (SPAM).

Remember when the biggest package-delivery problem was finding the UPS box sitting in the rain on your porch?

Progress.

Learn more: FTC — How to recognize and report text scams

For our first stop, we're going to Idaho.

And no, potatoes aren't involved.

Craters of the Moon National Monument and Preserve is a vast landscape of black lava fields, volcanic craters, cinder cones and underground lava tubes that looks considerably more like another planet than southern Idaho.

The landscape was created by eruptions along a 52-mile crack in the Earth's crust called the Great Rift. Eight major eruptive periods occurred over roughly the past 15,000 years, with the most recent lava flows only about 2,000 years old.

And you don't just stare at it from a visitor center.

There's a 7-mile Loop Road providing access to trails and overlooks, where you can climb volcanic cones and walk through lava fields. There are also lava-tube caves you can explore with a free cave permit.

One of the coolest is Indian Tunnel, an approximately 800-foot-long lava tube you can actually walk through.

Stick around after dark and it gets even better. Craters of the Moon is also an International Dark Sky Park, so once the sun disappears, the whole other-planet effect gets turned up a few notches.

Would I make a special trip?

Absolutely, especially as part of a western road trip.

This is exactly the sort of place that makes you look at a photograph and say:

“Wait...that's Idaho?”

Plan a visit — National Park Service

On August 1, 1981, MTV went on the air.

After footage of the Apollo 11 launch and the now-famous MTV flag on the moon, a new tv channel introduced itself with the words:

“Ladies and gentlemen, rock and roll.”

Then came the first music video.

Appropriately enough, it was The Buggles - “Video Killed the Radio Star.”

Pat Benatar's “You Better Run” followed.

If you haven't watched the original MTV launch in decades, or you've never seen it at all, go back and watch a few minutes if you dare.

What's surprising isn't just the music, it's how disorganized the whole thing looks now.

The graphics, the awkward pauses, the VJs and the transitions. There’s this feeling that everyone involved was figuring this thing out as they went along.

And remember: there was once an entire television network built around the radical concept of...drum roll…

Playing Music Videos.

Crazy idea!

And that, my fellow Gen Xers, is Issue #001.

Gen No Net will be back next Saturday with more useful finds, smart tips, worthy escapes, and just enough nostalgia.

Until then, get out and go enjoy Mother Nature’s gifts.

Gen No Net

Know another Gen Xer who'd enjoy this? Feel free to forward it to them. 🤙