Nobody’s Born a Cover Song
Somewhere along the way we left the front door open, and the noise walked in, wiped its feet, and made itself the man of the house.
When was the last time you had a thought of your own?
Not one GenAI fed you. Not one a podcast handed you on the drive in. Not one you scrolled past and absorbed without noticing.
Just an old-fashioned thought that came out of the blue while you were walking, or sitting still, with no one watching.
If you have to reach for it, you're not alone. That's rather the point.
The world is loud, and it is a problem … but it’s not the whole problem. The whole problem is that we're accomplices in our own murder. We pulled up the chair and asked, “Sugar?”
A 24-hour news cycle. Spotify, YouTube, Instagram, TikTok. Each one quietly stripping people of their ability to think freely. And now a fresh wave coming up the rear, promising to think for you, write for you, answer for you.
Where's the You in any of it?
We keep chasing the same answer down different prompts, passing one secondhand opinion around the circle till it's worn smooth. Nobody sitting still long enough to trace a thread back to where it started.
That's the game … a thousand small hands in your pockets, every one after the same thing: to coax you out of yourself and, slow and quiet but sure, leave a stranger in your place.
Buy this. Watch that. Be more like him. Sound more like her.
The house is still yours. The door's just been open a while.
…
Eric Church Pulling on the Heart Strings
I teared up watching Eric Church's UNC commencement speech the other day. Maybe because I've fallen off track myself, and a thing like that finds the soft spot.
Damn, I wish I'd had a send-off like that at twenty-two, and the sense to take it to heart.
He took a guitar and made it stand in for life. Six strings, six things that hold a person up. A pillar on each one, none of them you can afford to lose sight of.
- Faith, thick as the low E, for when the weight comes.
- Family for rhythm, so you're never playing alone.
- A partner on the next string up, tuned to bring out the truest note in you.
- Ambition and grit twisted into one, for getting back up after the fall.
- Community, plain and low, for the people you show up for when no one's watching.
Every string was real. Every string struck something.
And the last string, the high one, the one he stood on a while, is … you.
…
The Part That's Nobody Else's
We're all born originals, Church told the UNC grads, and then we spend the rest of our days turning ourselves into copies.
Straining to fit in, to sound like the next guy.
The world, he said, needs more originals and fewer covers.
That one hit me square between the ears. And the kids, a stadium full of Gen Zers, rose to their feet for it.
Maybe they're waking up, I thought.
And maybe the rest of us could stand to. Because it's easy to point at that generation … raised always-on, smartphones in the crib, social media in reach before they could spell it.
We can see what it did. The inner voice … muddled. Wild-and-free traded for … anxious-and-watching. More nerves, less running barefoot.
And I'm not sure they're a different breed so much as the first ones who took the full dose. The current that's pulling them out to sea is the same one tugging at all of us.
I may have had a few more years on shore before it reached my ankles, but I've sold pieces of myself for cheap. I've pulled up the chair and asked the noise if it took sugar.
Anybody honest has.
Some mornings I still catch myself reaching for my phone before I've had a single thought I could call my own. I'll feel the little voice trying to say something and step right on past it, off to all the important consumption the day's got in store. Better start early … I know better. I do it anyway.
So if you're sitting there thinking that's me … yeah. Me too.
And here's the quiet mercy in what Church was getting at: if we drifted into copies, we can drift back.
...
On Any Ordinary Morning
Nobody's born a cover song. On any ordinary morning, you or I could pen an original.
Because we were each thrown into this pot to add one flavor nobody else carries … and the world's a thinner soup for every one of us that boils down to bland.
That's the thing worth getting back to: who we were made to be, before we were ever told to have and consume.
It starts with one decision. To quit tuning out our own little voice, and actually hear it out.
To make the room, on purpose. To listen, then act.
Each time we do, it gets louder.
So slow down. Turn off the noise. Learn to say no (the most underrated skill there is). And … the misplaced slivers of you start surfacing, one by one, finding each other again.
The small, free, plain-as-day moments. Your own actual interests, the ones that were yours before anyone suggested otherwise.
None of it is on the other side of a screen. It's “out there”. In the real world, in the gloriously imperfect business of living in the first person.
So take the walk. Sit in the coffee shop. Show up. To the gym, the class, the long-winded dinner, the volunteer shift. For the community with a face on it, and the people who'll come to matter before you've even met them.
Get out of your own head, and your spirit finally gets room to breathe.
The little voice gets a word in. The thoughts that come are yours again.
In a world of cover songs, your original rings truer and carries further.
Nobody else was issued your exact set of strings.
So play them.