The More Artificial the World Gets, the More People Crave Something Real

The older I get and the longer I spend inside the News-Press, the more I realize the thing we were actually producing all these years was never just a newspaper. What we were really creating was connection. Real human connection in a world that increasingly feels artificial, rushed and disconnected from itself.

Where else can you sit down at lunch and end up talking with the sheriff, the city treasurer, local business owners and city employees all at the same table arguing about development, taxes, schools or whatever issue is consuming Falls Church that week? Where else does the mayor casually walk through the front door unannounced while somebody else is complaining about a zoning issue and another person is dropping off a photo of their dog for Critter Corner?

For years I probably misunderstood those moments. I’d be buried in deadlines, trying to finish layouts, answering emails, chasing ads, fixing graphics, dealing with production disasters and internally thinking, “I don’t have time for this right now. I have actual work to do.”

But somewhere along the line I started realizing those interruptions were the work.

That’s the community.

That’s the pulse of a town.

That’s the stuff no algorithm can recreate no matter how advanced artificial intelligence becomes.

After twenty years here, Falls Church doesn’t feel like some random city I cover anymore. It feels like a second home. I joke all the time that I can probably tell you almost everything happening inside Falls Church — who’s opening a business, who’s fighting with city hall, which project people are angry about, what restaurant everybody suddenly loves — yet outside of softball fields I can barely tell you anything about Ashburn where I actually live.

And that’s because my weekends there revolve around one thing: my daughter playing softball. That’s my connection to Ashburn. A couple fields, some backstops and long weekends watching games.

So people naturally ask the obvious question: if you care this much about Falls Church, why not live there?

Because the reality is somebody working in journalism or local media can’t afford a home in the City of Falls Church anymore. And honestly neither can a lot of the teachers, city employees, restaurant workers and people providing the everyday services residents depend on. That’s one of the strange contradictions modern towns now face. The people helping hold communities together increasingly can’t afford to actually live inside them.

And maybe that’s why I keep wondering whether Falls Church is one of the last truly functioning small cities left around here without even realizing what it still has. Or maybe it eventually turns into another version of Herndon, which is the town I grew up with before the tech boom swallowed Northern Virginia whole.

I remember the old Herndon. One hotel. Maybe half a dozen restaurants. The Herndon Festival actually feeling like the biggest event in the world when you were a kid. It felt like a real town where people knew each other and where you dreamed about one day bringing your own family back to experience the same traditions you grew up with.

Then tech exploded through Northern Virginia and everything changed. Development accelerated. Politics changed. Traffic exploded. The local newspaper disappeared. The town got wealthier and bigger but somehow also felt less personal at the exact same time. The name stayed the same but the identity underneath it slowly drifted away.

And honestly I think about that a lot when I look at Falls Church now.

Because once a town loses its memory, once it loses the people documenting the small everyday moments that give a place identity, things start changing faster than people realize. Local newspapers were never just about headlines. They were emotional archives for communities. Critter Corner mattered because people saw their lives reflected in it. Obituaries mattered because they preserved family history. Local sports mattered because parents kept those clippings for decades.

None of that was really about “content.”

It was about permanence.

And now we’re entering this AI-driven world where everything increasingly feels temporary, synthetic and engineered for engagement instead of meaning. People don’t even fully experience moments anymore before posting them online. Sometimes it honestly feels like society has been programmed to publicly perform life instead of privately living it.

Maybe it’s easier to upload the video of your kid hitting a home run than actually calling your uncle to tell him about it. Maybe it’s easier to post vacation photos online than sit around somebody’s kitchen table talking for hours about the trip like people used to do. Social media replaced a lot more than newspapers. It replaced actual human rituals.

And while artificial intelligence can now generate articles, organize information and imitate human conversation at frightening speed, it still cannot genuinely understand what it feels like to be part of a place. It cannot sit with a grieving family writing an obituary and understand why certain words suddenly become difficult to say out loud. It cannot walk into a crowded restaurant during somebody’s 100th birthday celebration and feel decades of history packed into one room.

That’s why I still believe local journalism matters even now.

Not because I’m nostalgic for the past.

Not because I’m blind to technology.

But because the more artificial the world becomes, the more valuable authentic human experiences become.

And maybe the biggest lie ever sold to society was that the internet destroyed newspapers because it was better. In reality the internet largely won because it was cheaper. Producing a physical newspaper costs a fortune. Paper costs money. Ink costs money. Printing costs money. Delivery costs money. Everything about producing something tangible costs money while digital platforms scale infinitely with almost no physical overhead.

But cheaper and better are not always the same thing.

Now people are exhausted by screens, exhausted by algorithms, exhausted by outrage cycles and exhausted by fake personalities flooding every platform online. You can already feel society starting to push back against it. Parents want kids reading books again. Schools debate banning devices. Politicians scream about screen addiction. People are rediscovering physical media, printed books and real-world experiences because human beings still crave things that feel tangible and honest.

And maybe that’s where all of this eventually circles back around.

Because while Silicon Valley races to automate communication itself, what people may ultimately end up valuing most is the one thing machines still cannot truly replicate:

Real human connection.