Media
There Will Never Be Another "Tom Sawyer"
Personal Perspective: As we gain access to everything, we share less. We are losing our glue.
Updated June 20, 2026 Reviewed by Michelle Quirk
Key points
- Mass communication created a brief window when humanity could share the same songs, films, and icons.
- Infinite digital choice has fragmented us into isolated bubbles without common culture.
- Because the old unity was accidental, rebuilding connection now requires that we choose it deliberately.
I was watching a YouTube video the other night, Drumeo's "The Genius of Rush's Tom Sawyer." The host, Brandon Toews, clearly poured himself into it. He, along with a handful of fellow drummers and musicians, took turns reverently breaking down what Neil Peart, Rush's incomparable drummer, did on that track. The way the song breathes and then detonates. It is a defiant, transcendent anthem of individuality. Watching it, I felt that thing Rush fans know. There's a reason we recognize each other.
We're a particular kind of nerd, if that's even the right word. We appreciate the complexity, the virtuosity, and the crafted brilliance of Geddy Lee, Alex Lifeson, and Neil Peart. Every fan knows the cerebral spirituality of Neil's lyrics. He didn't write fluffy love songs. He wrote about consciousness, time, and free will. He sought deep truths and shared them in mystic rhythms.
Neil was an atheist. He was also one of my greatest spiritual teachers. Rush fans reading this know exactly what I mean.
I have tickets to see Rush in Fort Worth on June 26th with my best buddies. So, fair warning: This isn't neutral. The love of Rush, for me, is closer to the heart.
But sitting there watching that Drumeo video, something hit me that goes way past Rush. Brandon was gushing about what a classic "Tom Sawyer" is, and it triggered a thought that landed with a force of clarity. We will never have another song like this. We will never have another band like this. And it isn't because the talent is gone. It's because the conditions are gone. The window has closed.
The Shared Culture Curve
Let me back up. Way up.
For most of human existence, we lived in small hunter-gatherer tribes of 50 to 150 people. For the most part, our tribes existed separately from one another. We were nomads with different valleys, gods, songs, and stories. We were all the same but sitting around different fires.
Eventually, civilization began with the agricultural revolution, and the industrial revolution gave us mass communication. The printing press spread words through books and newspapers. Then we learned to transmit them electronically: telegraph, telephone, radio, film, television, the internet. For the first time in 300,000 years, we could share stories at scale, in the blink of an eye.
Here's the part nobody talks about. There was a window where we had enough bandwidth to share and not yet enough options to fragment. A supply-and-demand sweet spot. We had television and then cable, but still limited options. We had top-40 radio and MTV, when they still played music.
In that window, shared culture exploded with shared icons: Elvis, the Beatles, Michael Jackson, Madonna, U2, "Star Wars," "Raiders of the Lost Ark," and so on. In a sense, they were pioneers, our shared archetypes.
They weren't just talented people and great works of art. They emerged from a synchronicity of conditions, a moment when humanity needed someone to fill the archetype, with the channels to broadcast them to all of us at once. We knew them together. We loved them together. We mourned them together. The shared songs and stories not only made us—they connected us. The icons became a stadium we all walked into together.
We didn't have access to everything, everywhere, all at once. We forgot the cautionary tale: Be careful what you wish for. Our "Monkey's Paw" wish came true. We should have known that what makes something precious isn't abundance. It's scarcity. We've fragmented into division without the shared songs and stories to hold us together.
The Other Side of the Curve
We all carry smartphones with access to essentially infinite content, curated for us by algorithms owned by Big Money. Every one of us in our own personalized bubble, recommended our own micro-icons that come and go. The same technology that finally let us share everything has fractured us into tiny shards of glass.
When was the last time a song came out that everyone learned the words to? Not just "everyone in your feed," but nearly everyone. Who's the last musician both your grandmother and your teenage nephew could sing along to?
Here's the part that struck me hardest. It's not just that we don't have new icons. It's that we can't have new icons of that magnitude, because the archetypes have all been claimed.
Imagine a rock band pioneering a new genre without being compared to something else. It would be like trying to invent a completely new style of painting. The low-hanging fruit has all been picked. Neil Armstrong wasn't the completely unique in courage or skill. He was simply the first to set foot on the moon. There's only one first. There will be no second "first man on the moon." We can't break ground a second time.
That's where we are with shared culture. There will be no second Beatles. There will be no second "Tom Sawyer." (And yes, luck and timing always mattered. As Malcolm Gladwell argued in Outliers, the icons we got were never the only ones who could have filled those slots. But now the window itself has closed.)
Exhibit A: DeWayne and Me
Let me make this concrete. One of my best friends since we were six years old is named DeWayne. Coincidentally, we became friends about the same time Rush formed as a band. We grew up together in the suburbs of Houston. We loved Rush’s song “Subdivisions” because we lived it.
Our first concert ever was The Police, on the Synchronicity tour. I'm not making that up. Perhaps the universe, or God, winks at us sometimes. Our second was Rush, headlining the Texas Jam at the Astrodome on the Grace Under Pressure tour. We've been to a number of Rush shows together over the decades. DeWayne’s the one who got us the tickets to Ft. Worth.
DeWayne and I are on opposite sides of the political fence, and have been for a while. In the current climate, that should be enough to end a friendship. Our shared love of Rush is part of why it didn't. I love him for who he is, not for who I want him to be. Fifty years of friendship transcends tribalism. Beneath everything that's supposed to divide us is what Neil called the real relation, the underlying theme: our shared love of a band, and of each other, that holds no matter what else is happening in the country.
That's shared culture doing its job. That's what being in the stadium feels like. That's neighbors staying neighbors when politics tries to make us enemies. We’re all in the same stadium - together.
This isn’t theory. It’s needed for our very survival. Despite our differences, DeWayne and I know that we are in the same stadium. Rush reminds us of that.
The Garage
I should tell you why this hits me so hard right now. Neil died in January 2020. The Covid-19 pandemic came two months later. I had to shut down my group psychology practice. The gym is my therapy, and the gyms closed.
What I had left was a small space in a crowded suburban garage: a JBL speaker, a weight set, and a heavy bag. That became my fortress of solitude. What played in it, hour after hour, was Rush. They weren't only my therapy. They were my sanity.
I went through the entire catalog, album by album, building my ultimate Rush playlist and discovering new favorites. The music, and Neil's lyrics, kept me free from the prison of a pandemic. Even alone in that garage, when I felt so small, Rush helped me to dream big. That's what shared culture does at its best: it reminds you that you're not alone.
The Color of Right
For decades I've watched, increasingly alarmed and saddened, as America devolves into hateful political tribalism. Every time I think it can't get any worse, it does. Even a pandemic couldn't unite us.
In that garage, one Rush song in particular became my new favorite. A deep cut from Test for Echo called "The Color of Right." The chorus, and then its variation:
"I am so full of what is right, I can't see what is good."
"I am so full of what is right, I can't see what is true."
I sat with that lyric and felt something about a song I hadn't felt before. Neil had diagnosed what was wrong with our entire world, in a song, in 1996, decades before social media, echo chambers, and filter bubbles. Our certainty about what is right blinds us to what is good and true.
I'm a clinical psychologist. I make diagnoses for a living, and I know one when I see one. What is a diagnosis but the truth of what is wrong?
Why This Is Existential
Here's where I stop being a Rush fan and flip back to being a psychologist. The bell curve of shared culture isn't a music problem. It's an existential one.
Humans are story-making creatures. Shared stories are essential to our survival. We bond through shared narrative: the songs, films, jokes, and references we all get. Shared culture is the connective tissue that lets a species this size cooperate at all. Strip it away and we don't get freedom. We divide into tribalism. Eight billion strangers with no common stories left to remind us we're the same species. Neil saw the danger of carving the world into territories and pulling for our own little tribe. We forget we're all neighbors in an interconnected world.
Look around. We are not replacing shared culture with better shared culture. We are replacing it with tribal identities and disposable micro-icons that flash for thirty-six hours and vanish. We've become a mile wide and an inch deep. We are drowning in the shallows. The shared culture that once helped us bridge our divides is gone, and the arrow only flies forward, at an accelerating rate.
The Truth Tom Sawyer Knew
Here's where replaying Rush endlessly through a pandemic produced an epiphany. Despite hearing "Tom Sawyer" a million times and knowing the lyrics by heart, one line struck me like a thunderbolt. Halfway through the song, Neil writes:
"Changes aren't permanent. But change is."
Read it twice. Give it space to breathe.
What we built - the icons, the achievements, the shared cultural moments - was never permanent. It was a window: the specific shape of connection we had between roughly 1955 and 2005. Nothing gold can stay.
But change itself is permanent. It's the only thing that is. And even change changes. We now have artificial intelligence (AI), and the pace of change is itself accelerating beyond our biological capacity to adapt. Not only can't we go back to simpler times, but the future is also arriving faster than ever.
What Comes Next
The old shared culture happened to us. It was organic and accidental, a gift of timing we didn't engineer and can't reverse-engineer. We can't sit around waiting for the next Beatles to unite us by accident, because the conditions that made accidental unity possible are gone.
So if we want connective tissue now, we have to choose it on purpose. The way DeWayne and I choose it, across a canyon that's supposed to make us enemies. That kind of connection used to be handed to us by the culture. Now we build it ourselves, one person at a time. That isn't a downgrade. It might be the most important thing we ever learn to do.
To keep change from tearing us apart, we have to choose. Fittingly, Neil wrote about that too. "I will choose a path that's clear," he sang. "I will choose free will"
How do we use our free will? How about we choose to remember that we’re all neighbors in the same stadium?
Dedication: Neil Peart said he never wanted to be famous. He only wanted to be great at something he loved and to inspire others. Professor, you did. Not only is this post proof, but also my entire life is better because of Rush.
