The Christopher Columbus Generation

A young theater student recently posted online asking what musicals they “should know” as a theater major. The list they provided wasn’t bad. In fact, a lot of it was genuinely good. Hamilton. Wicked. Dear Evan Hansen. Hadestown. Natasha, Pierre & The Great Comet of 1812. Modern shows. Emotionally immediate shows. Shows written for their generation.

But staring at that list felt a little like walking into a library where someone had ripped out the first hundred years.

No Oklahoma!.
No Show Boat.
No Company.
No Cabaret.
No West Side Story beyond a passing mention.
No Stephen Sondheim.
No Cole Porter.
No Noël Coward.
No Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II.

It wasn’t ignorance in a malicious sense. It was something stranger.

It was as if history had simply ceased to exist before they arrived.

And honestly? I think we’re watching an entire generation slowly lose the idea of foundations.

The Christopher Columbus Generation

I’ve started privately calling this the Christopher Columbus Generation.

Not because they’re evil. Not because they’re stupid.

Because they keep “discovering” things that have already existed forever.

A girl on TikTok proudly announced she invented the “flat taco.”
Baby, that’s a tostada.

Another guy made a solemn fifteen-minute video explaining how to make grilled cheese like he’d unearthed a sacred culinary text hidden beneath the Vatican.

At first I thought it was satire. It wasn’t.

Everything is treated like a revelation because nobody studies lineage anymore. Nobody asks:

Where did this come from?
Who built this first?
What inspired it?
What existed before me?

And that loss matters more than people realize.

Because when you lose historical context, you also lose humility.

Every Art Form Is a Conversation Across Time

Musical theater is one giant relay race.

Without Show Boat challenging what a musical could emotionally tackle, you don’t get Oklahoma! integrating story and song. Without that integration, you don’t get West Side Story using dance as violence and social tension. Without that, maybe you don’t get Rent. Without Rent, maybe no Spring Awakening. Without Stephen Sondheim exploding structure and internal psychology, you absolutely don’t get the DNA of Hadestown or Natasha, Pierre & The Great Comet of 1812.

Nothing appears out of thin air.

Every “new” thing is standing on the shoulders of old ghosts.

That’s what makes learning history exciting. You start seeing the hidden wiring.

You hear a chord progression and suddenly recognize where it came from.
You hear a lyric trick and realize somebody borrowed it from Porter.
You watch staging choices and see echoes of Bob Fosse fifty years later.

That’s not old people nostalgia.

That’s literacy.

The Death of Curiosity

And this is where I start sounding like somebody yelling at clouds while naked on a patio with iced tea, but stay with me.

A lot of younger people today aren’t being taught curiosity. They’re being taught consumption.

Scroll. React. Perform. Post. Move on.

Travel used to mean something different. You went somewhere because you wanted to understand it. You wanted to smell history on the walls. You wanted to know why the buildings leaned that way, why the food tasted like that, why people fought wars over that river or worshipped in that church or built statues of that saint.

Now a shocking amount of travel is just:
“Where’s the Instagram wall?”

They don’t want Rome.
They want proof they were in Rome.

And before anybody starts sharpening pitchforks, this isn’t every young person. Some are deeply curious and wonderful and intellectually hungry. But culturally? We are rewarding performance over depth at an alarming rate.

The algorithm doesn’t care if you understand history.

It cares if you point at it dramatically for nine seconds.

Nudism Has This Problem Too

And yes, our own community does this constantly.

Every few months somebody “discovers” social nudity and immediately behaves like they invented body freedom.

They make three TikToks after their first nude beach visit and suddenly position themselves as prophets of liberation.

Meanwhile there are generations of nudists who quietly built this culture long before social media existed.

Men who risked arrests.
Men who lost jobs.
Men who fought zoning laws.
Men who created private campgrounds when public nudity could destroy your life.
Men who mimeographed newsletters and mailed them in plain brown envelopes because being openly nude-positive could get you ostracized.

That history matters.

The modern nudist movement didn’t magically appear because somebody posted a thirst trap beside a pool in Palm Springs.

There were foundations.

Organizations.
Advocates.
Publishers.
Photographers.
Quiet rebels.
Gay men especially, frankly, who carved out spaces where vulnerability and body acceptance could survive when the larger culture treated male intimacy as dangerous.

And now younger guys walk into these spaces sometimes acting like they’ve discovered Atlantis because they got naked at a campground once.

Again:
Not malicious.
Just historically disconnected.

Foundations Make You Better at Everything

Here’s the irony.

Learning the past doesn’t trap you there.

It actually makes you more original.

When you understand foundations, you stop accidentally reinventing the wheel while acting like a genius. You stop mistaking novelty for innovation. You stop confusing visibility with wisdom.

A young theater major who studies Gypsy, Pippin, Follies, A Chorus Line, and Sunday in the Park with George isn’t becoming outdated.

They’re building artistic muscle memory.

A nudist who learns the history of social nudity, physique culture, gay liberation, communal living, censorship laws, AIDS-era body shame, and the evolution of men’s spaces develops a much deeper understanding of why these communities matter today.

Without foundations, culture becomes disposable.

And disposable cultures don’t survive very long.

The Joy of Looking Backward

One of the great pleasures of aging is realizing how interconnected everything is.

I still get ridiculous delight from etymology. Learning a word’s root feels like finding hidden treasure buried inside language itself. Suddenly a phrase opens up like a flower and you understand why it evolved the way it did.

The same thing happens with theater. With nudism. With art. With culture.

You realize humans have always been humans.

We’ve always searched for freedom.
For expression.
For community.
For beauty.
For permission to exist honestly inside our bodies.

The details change.

The apps change.
The hashtags change.
The orchestration changes.

But the heartbeat underneath it all?

That part is ancient.

And maybe that’s what I wish younger people understood most.

You don’t become smaller by learning what came before you.

You become part of something bigger.