Every generation has its own uniquely terrifying metaphor. For Boomers it was the Bomb—fallout shelters, duck-and-cover drills, and the resultant mutant monsters that visited their radioactive wrath upon them at the movies.

For Gen X, it was the cockroach: that indestructible, allegedly nuke-proof pest that can survive anything. And like everything we learned as feral children of the ’70s and ’80s, it was both true and entirely the wrong lesson.

When I think about my life and career—from a teen publishing poetry pamphlets to an alt-weekly editor staring down AI while juggling nascent forays into radio and indie film—that cockroach mythos keeps waving its wiry antenna at me. It’s emblematic of a common fantasy: If I can just survive the next big disruption, I’ll be fine.

We cling to that mythology as industries collapse and technologies leap over us. They say the internet killed print, the algorithm killed the internet, that AI will kill us all. And what do we do? Nothing. In the ’80s, video killed the radio star—and no one did a damn thing about it.

We’re in survival mode. But our ability to survive is the least interesting thing about us.

What’s keeping us cockroaches in the game is our ability to adapt.

It’s hard to see because adaptation is incremental—the slow accretion of tools and experience. The cockroach is a case study in subtle refinements. We have skills, secrets, plans. When the world moves, we move with it—and sometimes before it.

Sure, Kafka’s Gregor Samsa turned into a bug overnight but it was the result of a slow and systematic process that was only recognized when it was too late.

Adaptation is how culture moves forward. It’s how artists survive collapsing industries. It’s how strange new forms emerge when the old ones fail.

We don’t just outlast the future. Eventually, we learn how to build it.

Rise, my fellow bug people—the kitchen lights flickering on!