Have We Lost Ourselves?

A thought on why the "magic" of life seems muted

Hi Book Family,

Another month is here, and I’m happy to just be here, too. The instant all the cold snaps are gone, summer comes in Georgia. Even after all my years here, I am still not entirely happy with the oppressive, humid summers. But I am enjoying them a little more this year, since I was finally able to start my family’s small garden areas in my yard.

After all the hassle of moving last year, we have been able to settle into the new house, and while there are somethings I am still not as used to (such as the longer drive to church, and how even though I am only one town over, I’m still a 40 minute drive from my closest family members), there are a lot of things for which I am constantly and amazingly thankful for.

The quiet mornings, our friendly neighbors, the full-sun hours of our yard, how I don’t feel as awkward taking a walk down our street, the shorter amount of time it takes me to clean everything, the privacy of my deck in the back of my house, where I can freely type this out … yes, there is a lot here to be overwhelmingly grateful for.

I think the quiet is letting me be a little more contemplative, but it also lets me talk to my mom a little more, which we both like, and today as I was walking and talking with her on the phone, we talked about movies some. The topic came about in the usual way, where I was telling her how Phobos had found a patch of clay and she’d made her own plate out of it (you can just pull it out and let it bake here in GA, apparently … ) but it’s GA red clay so it’s horribly messy and I told her the sidewalk looked like an ad for Clayface, which is that Batman villain movie (my mom didn’t know) that’s supposed to come out after James Gunn’s Supergirl.

My mom didn’t know who Clayface was, and I only really know peripherally, so I was explaining it was a Batman kind of villain movie, and we both agreed we don’t pay much attention to movies these days, and it made me a little sad, because I still like a lot of movies, and when I started writing my books, I dearly wished I would eventually be famous enough to get my books made into movies. Nowadays I look at movies and wince more than wonder; the 2026 Animal Farm movie with Seth Rogan in it actively makes me want to throw up, since the book remains one of my favorite satires. The idea that the Russian Revolution and resulting decades of political turmoil was replaced by a strawman of Elon Musk speckled with fart jokes is just pure downright demoralizing.

BTW — This is a good time to remind you to get paperback and/or hardback editions of all your favorite books. From Disney “remakes” to classical “updates,” modern media creators are not making solid replacements to the originals!

There are a lot of reasons for movies (and TV shows) to be less magical than when I was younger (let alone my parents — my dad loves watching Tubi with my kids since they’ll watch “The Lone Ranger” and “Gilligan’s Island” with him), but while I was talking to my mom, it really hit me why they’re not as attractive these days.

First, let me say I have been a writer now for almost 15 years, mostly part-time through my attempts to be a teacher, a salesman, an office manager, an educational director, and a marketer, not to mention a wife, mother, and daughter who is now attempting to spend more time with my aging parents. My first title as C. S. Johnson, Slumbering, is almost 15 years old. The Moonlight Pegasus, under my maiden name, is about 20 years old this year. I have written over 50 books, over 100 works. I have pitched to agents, publishers, even a few Hollywood directors. I have been here since the beginning of the Kindle revolution, and now I’m living through the Kindle de-evolution as they let AI summarize and spoil books’ stories and they sunset my original 2012 Kindle support team (yes, really, I had the first verison. It was $200 off ebay, and I originally didn’t win it, and I was terribly confused when my sister told me my “kindle” had come in the mail, and I thought she’d said “candle.”)

I started writing fiction years before this; I have several of my notebooks saved and I can safely say I will burn them before attempting to let others read them. I loved books as a kid and I have kept many of my books from original book collection I had as a child for my kids to read.

This is to say, I’m an ideal reader AND a dinosaur writer.

And yet … I’m not reading as much, and I’m not watching as much.

I tell my kids to read now more than I do (Phobos is still reading through John Carter, which I will support, and Deimos is starting to read The Green Book after I recommended it to him). And I tell them it’s good to read.

And it is. It is good, especially since I pick out and approve good books for them, and we can talk about the ones they’re interested in and what they’re ready. My kids are young and they have all of the rest of their lives laid before them, and it’s good for them to read to get an idea of the things they like, the things they’ll fight for, the things that they’ll remember when they need to be inspired or encouraged. A lot of the reason I enjoy my writing is knowing my kids will be able to keep a piece of my voice after I pass on, and I usually make sure I write things down now since I have seen how often I have had to repeat things lol 😂 .

Back when I started more seriously marketing, I had a “welcome newsletter” thread where one of the things I’d mention is that it’s good to read, because it’s good to “lose yourself to find yourself.”

That is what I encourage my kids, once they are done working with their school and chores and other responsibilities. It’s a good way for them to relax before bed, and it’ll let them slip into dreams more easily.

Today I’ve noticed that it’s gotten a little harder to leave the “real world” behind. I put the quotes in because social media is not real life, and most websites aren’t full of real life things, either. One of my X-friends keeps a running tab of all the media hoaxes and deceptions that have come out over the years, and I have to respect him for his dedication to following up on a lot of them. It’s easy to get caught up in the news cycle and, in the face of all the terrifying and awful things being thrown our way today, all the different terrifying and awful things that were thrown at us yesterday are likely still going on.

Technology has made my life so much easier, but it’s also made it so much easier for me to obsess over my life—and in some ways, it cheapens it. And that is me, my old-lady-millennial self. That’s likely nothing next to the upcoming Gen Zers and the lonely and aging Boomers.

I started writing believing that reading was the best way to “lose yourself to find yourself,” but I don’t know anymore if people have enough “self” to lose today.

When I think of this, I think of how I have cut back on technology and social media and I have been trying to be more present for my kids, families, and community, I think back to this line from The Fellowship of the Ring, back when movies truly spoke to us:

I think the whole “mile-wide, inch deep” feeling of techno-connectivity has left a lot of us “stretched too thin.” We don’t have enough time to drill down further and responsibly play with the thoughts we push away while we’re busy during the day. Flannery O’Connor had a quote about how she didn’t know how she felt about something until she was able to write about it, and I think about this often as we live and walk in this world today.

But it still has to be good, thoughtful, organized writing. In an age when we have a lot of writers and a lot more writers able to publish than ever, it makes sense that we don’t have a lot of the same inspirational, aspirational kind of gut-punching going on in our writing. As much as I appreciated it when I was starting out, AI has made a lot of the “outline and structure” of writing easier for beginners, and we’ve traded a lot of unique takes for “safe” and “money-making” options.

I think we can see that more easily with movies than books, since books require more on our input to imagine.

Any movie or book or anything else I consume is competing with everything else that’s going on in my own little movie-world where I am the star. If I am not careful, I can get caught up in the hype I’m allowing myself to reinforce.

I need something truly real and thoughtful and timeless to break me out of it.

This is part of the reason I try to write timely and timeless books. I want my books to make people feel better about life in many ways, but I want my books to help people be better people in their lives, too.

On a similar note, Phobos and I listened to Weird Al’s Stop Forwarding That Crap to Me together and she thought it was about AI at first.

So it’s great to see how well some things hold up—let’s hope you and I can keep ourselves alive and well, too.

Let me know if you think I missed something or if you’d like to add to the ideas here. ❤️❤️❤️❤️

That’s all for now!