Life has officially gotten ridiculous.

I say this as someone who generally rolls with the punches, believes reality is fluid, and accepts that nothing ever goes exactly as planned. But even I had to pause this week and reread a headline that felt less like news and more like rejected satire.

Three kids, ages 11, 12, and 8, led police on a chase in a stolen car.
An 11-year-old was driving. They learned how to hot-wire the car from YouTube. Using a USB device.

Let’s all sit with that for a moment.

Because when I was 11, the height of my criminal mastermind era was staying home alone and burning a grilled cheese. Which, culturally speaking, we celebrated. We literally made a movie about it.

Remember Home Alone? Kevin McCallister. Age 8. Left behind. Outsmarts burglars. We cheered. We laughed. We rooted for him like, Yes! Protect your house with ingenuity and holiday cheer!

But Kevin set traps with paint cans and micro machines. These kids are out here cracking steering columns.

How old was Kevin again?
Eight.

EIGHT.

And we thought that was unrealistic.

Somewhere along the way, “home alone” stopped meaning microwave macaroni and started meaning grand theft auto: middle school edition.*l

This is not a judgment on the kids. Let me be clear. If anything, I’m impressed and deeply concerned at the same time. That is a complicated emotional cocktail.

Because on one hand. The world is cuckoo.  Childhood has sped up at an alarming rate. The internet is a wild, unsupervised university. On the other hand. If an 11-year-old can reverse-engineer a car ignition system from YouTube, maybe we don’t ground them forever. Maybe we enroll them in an accelerated engineering program and gently redirect the skill set.

“Sweetie, crime is not the pathway but MIT might be.” Just saying. 

This is where I land these days.
Life is louder. Faster. Stranger.
The line between precocious and problematic is razor thin. And the version of childhood we nostalgically clutch no longer exists.

We grew up cheering for clever kids with BB guns and booby traps.
Today’s kids are watching tutorials.

Same ingenuity. Different stakes.

And maybe that’s the part that’s exhausting; not just that life is ridiculous, but that the rules keep changing mid-scene. The movie we thought we were watching is now a reboot we didn’t ask for.

Still, I can’t help but think. If Kevin McCallister were 11 today, he’d have a USB drive, a ring light,
and a channel with 3 million subscribers titled “You Won’t BELIEVE What I Did With This Minivan.”

We wouldn’t even blink.

And that, is how you know we’re living in strange, strange times.