Toy Story 5 is about to come out in the cinema.

This is significant because I remember the first one, but that was 31 years ago. Things have changed massively in popular culture since then.

Tim Allen (voice of Buzz Lightyear) recently told a story about taking his teenage daughter to the cinema.

She watched a few minutes, clocked the story arc, and checked out. All before things had even started. “I get it,” she said. “He’s going to be the villain and they’re going to do this…”

Allen’s instinct as a parent was frustration and anger, with her lack of patience and appreciation. But then he caught himself, because he remembered his parents being the same. Not about movies. About music.

Once FM radio came, then cheap vinyl/cassettes/CDs, pop music took hold. We listened to music all the time. The words mattered less than the vibe. Parents felt kids were losing appreciation of music, and had no taste in what they consumed.

Then TV. Then whatever came next.

Every generation inherits a version of this argument. And every generation loses it – because you cannot ask the next one to forgo something genuinely fun and fulfilling to them just because you’re worried about the impact.

Especially when you already had your version of the same thing.

Here’s what actually changes though: the stakes.

Music was passive, you listened.

TV demanded your eyes.

The internet demanded your attention.

Social media demanded your identity.

Each shift asks more of you than the last. More time, more data, more of yourself fed into the machine.

So the panic isn’t wrong. It’s just aimed at the wrong question.

The question was never “are we losing something with this new medium?”. It never is. That ship sails whether you’re on it or not. The question is always “how can we use this more intentionally?”

That’s harder than banning it. It requires actually thinking about what you’re trading and whether the trade is worth it. It requires being honest that you’d have fought your parents to keep your music too.

Allen’s daughter wasn’t wrong about the film. She just hadn’t learned yet that the point isn’t always to just consume something, or get to the ending fastest and move on to the next.

But then neither had he, once.

It takes intention and awareness to feed less of ourselves into the machine.